Stop posting these things. Stop thinking these things.
Online comment sections are not the correct place to unpack any of this.
Which is indeed terminating this comment chain, but for good (and benevolent) reason. Doing anything else other than referring to a trained professional in a controlled context would potentially just feed delusions, which is highly unethical.
Might not even be yours but those of another reader.
But regardless, you're using this as an insult. I did not.
There is no debate to be had here. Just a bad faith shouting match
In the right space with real people, worthy of a debate. On HN? No. Not like this. Not here. Not without filtering the participants for real human beings.
I mean, that is the entire definition of the word. And you also anthropomorphize living beings like many people genuinely attach human qualities to their pets etc. Yes, the risks are very high when it comes to chatbots in particular, especially to people who are not technically inclined. But you'll be surprised at how crucial the ability of anthropomorphizing is. This is a very good paper that summarizes it and is definitely worth reading if you're interested in these things: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5936908_On_Seeing_H...
Not quite - my wording there was very deliberate. By saying that it's a problem when you're treating something that's not living (not non-human!) as if it were, that excludes pets and all animals from the equation. I understand how common it is for humans to assign human qualities to other things and beings, but there is also an unspoken variable of intensity. Representing abstract concepts as humans, interpreting living things in a human-like way or traditionally referring to ships as living beings has a different degree of belief and intensity compared to implying a genuine belief that algorithms are beings that can be enslaved, like what the sibling comment to this one does.
And you are wrong in your defintion of the world. Attaching human qualities to any non human entity (living or otherwise) is the accepted defintion of what anthropomorphizing is. It does not only apply to non-living entities.
Read it again. I didn't say the definition of the word didn't include living things. The definition of anything is not discussed there at all. The 'unspoken' part applies to what I left implied in my argument, you don't get to rewrite my argument. What I said is that while anthropomorphization is common and can apply to everything, to me it can be a problem when it:
1. Is applied to non-living things with a genuine conviction they are truly living, and not in a ceremonial or casual way
2. Is particularly intense compared to other cases of anthropomorphization and leads to a desire to assign actual personhood to the object