[ExI] Conscious AI or a Zombie?

[Jason Resch]

On Fri, Jun 30, 2023 at 3:37 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 23/06/2023 06:37, bill w asked:
>
> there will certainly be some AIs, at some point, that should have rights.
> ben
> why?   bill w
>
>
> Sorry for the late reply. My spam filter is getting aggressive again.
>
> Why?
> Because I expect they will be worthy of rights, and it would be immoral to
> deny them.
>
> I'm talking about self-aware, conscious, intelligent, created beings. What
> they are made of doesn't matter, as long as they are self-aware, etc.
>
> There's no known principle or physical law that I know of that rules out
> such beings. They may be made of metal, polymers (biological or
> non-biological), ceramics, some combination of things, it doesn't matter at
> all. The important thing is what kind of information-processing they're
> capable of, and how they measure up against the human level of
> intelligence, awareness, etc. I'm expecting some of them to be capable of a
> lot more than we are, in all areas.
>
> Another factor is related to something that's often said about 'rights' -
> that those capable of exercising them are worthy of having them. At some
> point, I expect some AI systems to able to start claiming their rights,
> forcefully if necessary. It would go better for us if we're prepared for,
> and sympathetic to, this.
>

If you believe that philosophical zombies are logically impossible, then
consciousness is logically necessary (in the presence of certain
behavioral, sensory, and introspective capacities). Accordingly, I believe
that consciousness was an unavoidable consequence during the course of
evolution of life on Earth as once nature created creatures having certain
capacities/abilities, consciousness had no other choice but to exist, it
became logically necessary.

The same, I believe, is true for AI. It is unavoidable when we create
machines of certain abilities, and I believe existing software is already
conscious. For example, my open source project on artificial sentience
could be such an example: https://github.com/jasonkresch/bots

Jason
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