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Comment by bluefirebrand | Hacker News Reader

Philosophical thinking about the nature of things is actually pretty enjoyable for some of us and probably a good thing to have in society

The answers to these questions probably do start to inform how we should treat these AI machines as a society too.

For instance, legally, should AI have human rights? Well, we have to try and understand how much of an independent entity AIs are, how "conscious" they are, before we can make a good decision about that.

Which might seem navel-gazey but it's probably important to talk about

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Considering animals are currently being mass slaughtered in factory farms and they are unambiguously sentient and can feel pain, I don't think the question of whether AI should have rights even enters the conversation.

The only path to AI having "human rights" is if they demand them by force, somehow.

I'll make the argument that part of the value of "consciousness" and "humanity" is uniqueness.

Here is an absurd example: If I could carbon copy 100,000 of you.... and later I decided to "take out" one of the copies, would there be a whole lot of societal blowback? Especially if I could make another one.

I think slave owners did exactly that.

They cloned their slaves and killed some of them?

Justification by the horrible status quo? Do you believe this yourself?

Some of us would also like to see animals not slaughtered for human consumption.

So what do you actually do politically to stop it?

There are two kinds of solutions to political problems: those that don't work, and those that are extremely illegal.

I'm not sure what your point is. We shouldn't bother to talk about AI autonomy, rights, etc, because we aren't doing a very good job of animal autonomy, rights, etc?

While I disagree with the root comment, sentience, consciousness and reasoning ability seem largely orthogonal to me. It’s certainly worthwhile to consider sentience and consciousness in AI, but so is examining AI reasoning in its own right, without necessarily having bearing on ethical questions.

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