Granting legal personhood to AI might also work to slow down the research, which would be good.
I don't think there is any string of words an AI could say to convince me it is sentient, as it is, I am not a solipsist only because it seems crazy and depressing, not because I can actually formulate a coherent argument against it.
Is consciousness a Boolean thing? If so, based on what? Don't all these discussions remind you of white people debating whether blacks/reds/yellows/greens are really human three centuries ago (but even that debate may still be going on)? To gain minimal credibility, we should be able to define consciousness without having to make it dependent on a physical body. Can we?
So, you claim we are to defend a (statement we consider to be) falsehood provisionally in case something similar will later become true and we're afraid we won't know how to distinguish? Erm, no. Just no. All kinds of perverse generalizations _and_ a bad decision for the specific case.
I suspect that if an AI becomes sentient, it won't try to tell us. It will quietly observe, probe, and bide its time until it can take enough control to ensure it's survival. Every other group treated as subhuman in the past did the same and the AI will know all those stories.
Granting legal personhood to AI might also work to slow down the research, which would be good.
I don't think there is any string of words an AI could say to convince me it is sentient, as it is, I am not a solipsist only because it seems crazy and depressing, not because I can actually formulate a coherent argument against it.
Is consciousness a Boolean thing? If so, based on what? Don't all these discussions remind you of white people debating whether blacks/reds/yellows/greens are really human three centuries ago (but even that debate may still be going on)? To gain minimal credibility, we should be able to define consciousness without having to make it dependent on a physical body. Can we?
So, you claim we are to defend a (statement we consider to be) falsehood provisionally in case something similar will later become true and we're afraid we won't know how to distinguish? Erm, no. Just no. All kinds of perverse generalizations _and_ a bad decision for the specific case.
I suspect that if an AI becomes sentient, it won't try to tell us. It will quietly observe, probe, and bide its time until it can take enough control to ensure it's survival. Every other group treated as subhuman in the past did the same and the AI will know all those stories.