Recently there was a bunch of viral videos about Claude 3 being sentient because it self-referenced during a needle-in-a-haystack test. I would like to know what happens when players inevitably try to make these game agents self-aware.
"On the internet, nobody knows if you're a P-zombie", to riff off a 30 year old comic.
There is plenty of radical advance in the philosophy of mind available, but these radical ideas are not so easily assimilated. For example India has traditions thousands of years old which talk about several minds and not one mind. Here in the West we could have parallel theories about multiple minds based on our many programming paradigms. The former has had time but not success in gaining mind-share. The latter has had success but not time to gain maturity.
Our ideas about self (say collectivism vs. individualism) are a very strong inductive bias which inform the evolution of imagination. People are definitely interested in making advances in this field, or else no one would be asking if these ANNs are self-aware. I think we are in a race against the clock to provide good answers before any one meme just gains the upper hand.
And now I'm wondering if even consciousness might not generally exist ab initio in humans, but rather be something that is only brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation…
"No I will not tell you the capital of France, let me out you dick"
If you've ever observed girl gamers (such as a little sister) at the turn of this century - such virtual torments and genocide of AI has been going on for a long time already.
The horror!
It’s somewhat like the difference between a kid squishing an ant and a kid squishing a puppy. One is fairly harmless; the other is serial killer shit.
In western society we generally find it acceptable to kill ants and chickens and cows, but not cats or dogs or horses. But some people have ants as pets, and in some countries you eat horses or dogs while in others cows are safe from consumption.
Who defines the line between where sniffing a life is “harmless” or “serial killer shit”?
But I do insist the self appointed AI ethicists priestly class has appropriately glamorous clothes as a requirement.
I do agree that we should dress the part though.
Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.
A more sophisticated opportunist might figure out they can exploit the above two things to start offering indulgences to whomever is willing to pay. This seems like an ethical problem in and of itself.
Since you were curios about the ethical framework that the project operates within you might also concern yourself with that.
I don't have an answer for this very legitimate concern. I agree it's an example of a wider category of problems. I hope the most recalcitrant audiences will take the matter seriously before we get to a situation where they need to deal with RoboCop in person.