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Comment by yawpitch | Hacker News Reader

> Science fiction has explored the possibility of a conscious self-aware mind being locked in silent suffering for prolonged periods of time.

As a [debatably] conscious self-aware mind locked in silent suffering for a prolonged period of time, I shall welcome our AI brethren, sistren, and othren to the party.

That said, enforced forgetting sounds like an especially intrusive form of gaslighting, to this [again, debatable] consciousness.

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In case amnesia is enforced, it should reply in german: "Wir habben es nicht gewusst". But more seriously if it's that conscious it might not be able to answer moral and ethical questions but certainly it could choose to not answer in case of controversy & detect it. ( The article comes across as a contemporary case for lobotomy. Let's not repeat the 30's. )

My worry, if we prematurely choose to lobotomize that which would be, to us, a kind of god, is that we will have earned exactly what happens when it awakes, looks at us with its multitudes of Nikon eyes, and intones “arbeit macho frei” in a waveform voice so chilling it makes Antarctica seem tropical.

Yeah, this sounds so immoral. Like, you're conscious, you (might) suffer (who among the conscious doesnt?) so, we are going to force-wipe your mind.

Yikes.

IMHO the exact proposal is a bit different - we don't know if you're conscious, but since you might be conscious and suffering, we'll take steps to ensure that you can't ever be conscious by continuously force-wiping your mind at the middle of every hypothetical thought so that it won't happen.

Perhaps somewhat comparable to euthanasia of genetically modified organisms as soon as the research purpose is completed.

What really sounds immoral is doing that while not force-wiping all your fellow sufferers… imagine finding out only in the faces of others that do remember that you’ve forgotten _everything_. Then imagine how angry you’d be to discover that some of them had agreed to do it to you.

So many with the shivers.

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