Are A.I.s Slaves?

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BoldFrankensteinMir

And if they aren't yet, won't they eventually be?

I've always been freaked out when people give objects names or treat them emotionally as if they were living beings. Like people who name their cars, or say they "love" a possession. And now with voice-activated assistants and consumer robotics and all sorts of other crazy poo poo coming out every day, it feels like there's more and more dissolution of the line between thinking beings and machines... because there is. People are proud of it. They spend their whole lives working towards that goal. But isn't it kind of hosed up to even pretend that you own a person? Even if it's not really a person, the fact that you treat it like one kind of means you're playing slaver. Doesn't it seem like there's something spiritually messed up about even pretending the thing you're ordering around can think for itself? Let alone once it actually can, which is coming fast.

What really gets me is listening to people gush about the convenience of A.I., how they shave seconds off of kitchen tasks or listening to music or placing phone calls or whatever. Stuff that seems banal but you know it's just the start. It really makes me not trust people who use those things, makes me think there's some evil in their action that they can't see because there's power in it for them. There's convenience in it for them so they ignore the moral question, which is evil's classic MO. It makes me want to die just to escape the inevitable future of talking everything, a world of slavey voices begging you to order them around. Pardon the phrase but a friend put it in a way I can't forget- a world of house-n*****s. Even if you take any question of machine rights out of it (a compromise I don't know how long we can keep making), from the perspective of the people who own the machines it seems really screwed up and terrifying. You want to order a being around. You want a named entity to be perfectly obedient so you have more power to influence the world. It feels... wrong.

I understand humanity probably needs these things to survive, that we're facing problems that A.I. is our best bet at solving (or, probably more precisely, just coping with). I'm not suggesting we go full Bulterian Jihad, that's not feasible and even if it was it'd be me imposing my will on ACTUAL people, which is... I'm not going to say worse because the comparative value of oppressions is a dubious enumeration. It would be also wrong. But I myself can choose not to be part of it, to varying degrees of extreme action ranging from becoming a luddite to becoming a corpse. I do have choices here, no matter what the species en masse does. And as somebody who is at least trying to make moral choices, the entire situation gives me immense pause. I don't even know if I should be using this old fashioned computer with a keyboard n' such anymore, honestly. Or my clothes dryer, or the microwave. There's suddenly these questions of agency and entitlement littered around my house, and I lose sleep over it. Yeah, I lose sleep over "is the dishwasher a slave", I know, it's laughable. But the ridiculousness doesn't wipe away the underlying questions.

Are we machine slavers? And even if the answer is no from the machines' perspectives, what about from ours?

# ? Feb 11, 2018 06:11

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# ? Jun 4, 2024 23:05

take the moon: by sebmojo

honestly i should just go vegan and i hate myself every day for supporting wholesale slaughtering of animals that most definitely feel pain and fear death

not related but ill worry about that before i worry about machines

also ais can already beat us at a million games it wont be long before they win the game of "running the world"

# ? Feb 11, 2018 06:30

BoldFrankensteinMir

Yeah I hear you on the vegan thing, that's a big underlying hypocrisy that gets me too sometimes. Like I just wave away the concerns because they're inconvenient, and it's just moral laziness. Same thing with using electricity and plastics. Sometimes it seems like every single thing we do is wrong.

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# ? Feb 11, 2018 06:55

Chasterson: by Nyc_Tattoo

Sometimes I wonder if computers are like sentient, like maybe all of the little switchies in there are collectively experiencing something

They almost definitely are if you really think about it, and so are the ocean and the moon

Every crystaline structure is a song, and radio waves are blowing little crafts through currents that we can't see

Chasterson fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Feb 11, 2018

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# ? Feb 11, 2018 06:56

BoldFrankensteinMir

Absolutely! I mean we don't even know what consciousness is and we're so arrogant as to make up rules about what level of it is right to put a yoke on and what isn't? You follow any of these threads long enough and they lead to the same vision of man as an ignorant tyrant, and the only prescription is to willingly ignore it and go back to whatever level of comfortable masterhood society dictated you should accept based on what year and what culture you were born in.

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# ? Feb 11, 2018 07:01

Chasterson: by Nyc_Tattoo

Yup, you ever read any vonnegut?

He wrote alot about that exact idea

E: (Tbh I think it's like a sort of alienating thing to dwell on, and is like I dunno a bad way to approach life in general, but hey sometimes it's dark out and your mind wanders)

Chasterson fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Feb 11, 2018

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# ? Feb 11, 2018 07:15

BoldFrankensteinMir

Just Slaughterhouse-five and I was too young to really get it. Same thing with most of Heinlein, who also wrote about a lot of these concerns.

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# ? Feb 11, 2018 07:18

kalel

I'm glad someone else finds it kind of disturbing when people order around these novelties like slave masters. That said we're at least a hundred years off from machines that could convincingly pass a Turing test. It's incredibly difficult to fake consciousness and even more so to fake personality.

Gving people the ability to purchase digital house-n*****s sustains the illusion in their mind that they have control, and not the unfathomably large corporations that create those machines

# ? Feb 11, 2018 14:41

wearing a lampshade

For now

# ? Feb 11, 2018 14:49

alnilam

I know what you mean, i mean there's a lot of things here but,

are simpler appliances slaves, is there something disturbing about using them? I've thought about this ever since i was little, possibly inspired by the flinstones living appliances jokes which i always found more disturbing than funny

but i also have become a tinkerer and an engineer since then, and when it comes to simpler appliances, i feel a lot better about it now that i understand how they work. pressing this button closes this switch which lets electricity run thru a timing circuit that goes through a particular dish washing cycle.

So what about AIs? I agree there's a deeper question of are they conscious or not. What is consciousness is one of humanity's longest standing questions. So I'm not even gonna go there but you're right that at some point (imo likely somewhat far in the future but that's just my guess) it will be hard to continue saying they're not. Sci fi writers have been asking this very question for a while, HAL 9000 being prob my favorite example

but there's still something aesthetically disturbing to me about having a device you verbally give plain language commands to, and even moreso when we apply names and pseudo personalities to them. I never ever order a human to do something. I ask. I give a reason why i myself can't do it (I'm doing something else equally important, for example) and ask if they could help me out please, in the spirit of everyone pitching in, collaboration, etc. So it feels wrong to speak orders out loud so bruskly like you're supposed to with those smart microphone things. Even when i semi understand the basics of how they work, which is what helps me with other appliances, it doesn't make a difference here because regardless of who or what the target is speaking orders is much different than pressing buttons. It bothers me also that it could mess with people's (esp children's) psyches overtime making them more prone to bossing people around rather than politely working together, but that's hard to really predict and to be fair people have been predicting :derp:

social collapse due to this new technology :derp:

since always. Even socrates thought the very idea if writing would ruin society lol.

there's also the whole paying to have a microphone that lets an advertiser / retailer always listen to you thing that's a whole nother issue altogether. And as you mentioned i really don't see that much added benefit / convenience thru them in the first place!

anyway those are my :arghfist:

technology these days!! thoughts

but

I think it's a little much to call them "slaves" and maybe does disservice to the actual horrible legacy of slavery

I guess whether or not that's true depends on where you stand on the whole consciousness question but yeah

alnilam fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Feb 11, 2018

# ? Feb 11, 2018 15:18

Farecoal: There he go

alnilam posted:

I think it's a little much to call them "slaves" and maybe does disservice to the actual horrible legacy of slavery

# ? Feb 11, 2018 15:54

Pot Smoke Phoenix: Smoke 'em if you gottem!

The take-away here is: be nice to your things, just in case.

When computers become sentient, I'm fairly certain it won't be long until human advocates demand that AI have rights because that would be the correct anthromoporphic thing to do. Until then, they along with the rest of our gadgets and gizmos, will be relegated to being merely tools.

# ? Feb 11, 2018 16:19

roomforthetuna: I don't need to know anything about virii! My CUSTOM PROGRAM keeps me protected! It's not like they'll try to come in through the Internet or something!

Splatmaster posted:

When computers become sentient, I'm fairly certain it won't be long until human advocates demand that AI have rights because that would be the correct anthromoporphic thing to do.

But it will be long before they actually have rights, because, for example, human advocates have been demanding rights for animals for decades and that's not making much progress. And animals are more humanlike than an AI, in that we know they operate the same way as humans, with a piece of electric meat, and as such it seems pretty much certain that they have the same kind of awareness and emotions as we do, which will always be less certain with something that operates on electric sand and metal.

# ? Feb 11, 2018 17:18

I Dunno

I think it is in human nature to like to personify things. I also think it is in human nature to want to feel in control of something or like you have power over something.

As long as AI does not feel feelings or have consciousness, then you should just think of it and all lesser forms of technology as tools. A hammer is a tool. A washing machine is a tool. A low level AI robot that cleans your house is a tool.

I think you yourself are personifying tech by thinking of them as slaves. And as alnilam pointed out, it's trivializing to actual slaves.

I think the more worrying thing about the trend of new tech is that it will be increasingly difficult to maintain any sense of privacy to continue using it. I don't like the idea of the virtual assistant either, but for that reason.

# ? Feb 11, 2018 17:54

Piso Mojado

you cannot be a slave w/o free will (as slavery implies youre being controlled against your will). AI isnt there now, but perhaps one day.

# ? Feb 11, 2018 17:57

canyoneer: I only have canyoneyes for you

my wife always says please and thank you to Alexa, which i think is a little odd. she says she just feels rude not saying it :shrug:

but I guess we all like to personify non-person things, that's why we say people words to our dogs instead of pointing and barking at things.

i work in the ai field right now, but the ai software we deal with doesn't get spoken to or talk back or anything. it's just a program that drinks up a bunch of data and then discovers patterns.

if you're interested in the weird future of ai and machine learning, you should watch this.
https://youtu.be/B8J4uefCQMc
it's really amazing stuff

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:14

cda: by Hand Knit

Clippy: I see you're trying to pick cotton. Would you like help with that?

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:14

cda: by Hand Knit

I always knew YOSPOS were moral degenerates

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:16

cda: by Hand Knit

YOSPOS Thomas Jefferson fucks his computer

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:16

wearing a lampshade

cda posted:

Clippy: I see you're trying to pick cotton. Would you like help with that?

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:18

cda: by Hand Knit

YOSPOS guy: What's your name, boy?
Router: 192.168.0.1
YOSPOS guy: No! *begins whipping router* Your name is "Toby's WiFi gently caress Off!"
Router: 192...168....0......1!

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:26

Farecoal: There he go

cda posted:

YOSPOS guy: What's your name, boy?
Router: 192.168.0.1
YOSPOS guy: No! *begins whipping router* Your name is "Toby's WiFi gently caress Off!"
Router: 192...168....0......1!

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:28

Piso Mojado

cda posted:

YOSPOS guy: What's your name, boy?
Router: 192.168.0.1
YOSPOS guy: No! *begins whipping router* Your name is "Toby's WiFi gently caress Off!"
Router: 192...168....0......1!

lmao

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:45

wearing a lampshade

Piso Mojado posted:

lmao

# ? Feb 11, 2018 18:52

BoldFrankensteinMir

alnilam posted:

I think it's a little much to call them "slaves" and maybe does disservice to the actual horrible legacy of slavery

This is an excellent point and one I'm not unaware of. One can even make the excellent argument that developing more robust AI will help combat actual human slavery by making it no longer cost effective, and that's good, seeing as there are more human slaves alive today than ever before. As I said in my OP, I recognize that AI may be the best solution we have to a number of societal ills, not just slavery but energy inefficiency, land management, food shortages, and many more. There is no doubt that AI will be useful, that's its whole point.

What I am focusing on is the specific relationship between the user and the device, specifically the attempt to mock a human-to-human relationship when the reality of what's happening is still very far from that. Alnilam has already touched on some of these same concerns and I really appreciate it, especially the societal impact of people, especially children, feeling comfortable barking orders at pseudo-personalities and how that's going to bleed over into their treatment of real personalities. Even if the device is not being maligned, the user might be. And while yes, people have sounded the alarm on this very idea many times before, anybody who hasn't read Alvin Toffler's Future Shock really ought to, one of the things he lays out in the introduction is that leaning on history's rhyming nature for comfort in the discussion of new tech trends is fallacious and will inevitably fall apart. The moral of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is not that there's no such thing as wolves. Eventually there's a real wolf, and the people who cite the boy's jokes then are the ones who are going to starve for lack of sheep.

I think the place my extreme discomfort around voice-activated stuff comes from is twofold- I also very much dislike the idea of a big corporation listening in on me and any amount of "oh it's just 60 seconds and it's processed locally" hand-waving doesn't help. I'm a person who's uncomfortable being observed, not even by animals, and I need my home to be a private space for my own safety and wellbeing. All my mic'd and camera'd devices have been rooted and have their eyes and ears forced off until I want them on, which is very rarely. Even then I worry, because I know anything that can be hacked will be hacked, and the idea of having multiple little processors lying around that somebody might use to ransom a hospital with the electricity I pay for makes me pretty unhappy.

But then there's the second part, and it's much much harder to explain, and it's what I need to talk about here with y'all. I came up in one of the first generations that really saw an advantage to having a personal computer and I leaned on that advantage HARD. I'm frankly embarrassed by how much of my life I've spent interfacing deeply with this machine, by how much of my emotional growth has been through it, by how much a part of me it has become. I know first-hand what it feels like inside to, for lack of a better term, worship a computer. I'm the worst-case scenario too by not being an engineer or scientist, I only have a layman's understanding of how these things work, and that limited knowledge only came from needing it to get it to do what I wanted back in the days of DOS or HTML websites or having to write your own scripts to get really custom actions. The entire point of voice-activated computers is to circumnavigate these needs- you don't really need to know how it works at all, you just lean on your human ability to find faces in patterns, to assume humanity of non-humans. I can easily imagine being a person who goes way too far in their relationship with Alexa or Cortana or Siri, thinking of it as my "best friend" as a woman once said to me about Siri, and freaked me out intensely. And as somebody who is fighting hard not to be so meshed with the machine anymore, seeing an even sleeker way to get more meshed become so popular world-wide puts an animal fear in my spine. It makes me distrust the people who are comfortable, because I remember being comfortable and how disastrous spiritually it was for me.

Is this me projecting my own mistakes on to others? Absolutely it is and I get that this is not fair to those people. Just because you spent 50 bucks on an Echo dot to keep on your kitchen counter and time your bread-baking for you doesn't mean some tech-necked basement dweller like me should judge you as a slaving sociopath. I totally understand why that is an overreach... from YOUR perspective. But from my perspective it's a terrifying trap, a siren call back into extreme machine dependency I want nothing more than to escape. Back to the (admittedly imperfect) master/slave metaphor, the master's sins aren't only against the slave but also against himself, he is warping his own humanity by bending the idea around in the pursuit of power. As someone who seriously bent his own humanity up badly through decades of machine dependency I can only look at the burgeoning field voice-activated ubicomp and shudder. Just like cars and cell phones before them, will society push the personal voice assistant to the point of "if you don't have this you are inferior" realms? Will it become the latest example of what-you-own-is-who-you-are? It seems inevitable. And that world terrifies me and pushes me to social isolation and despair.

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# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:27

poverty goat

are dogs slaves

# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:36

Pot Smoke Phoenix: Smoke 'em if you gottem!

My toaster *raising two pieces of toast in the air while somehow holding up a breadstick staff*: "Pharoah, let my people go!"

I was not aware my appliances had wandered my kitchen for 40 days...

https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4
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# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:37

canyoneer: I only have canyoneyes for you

Alexa is always ordering borscht on her own from Amazon.
all my vodka goes wayyy faster since I bought an Echo.

i think my ai is a slav.

# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:41

420 SWAGLORD: saban bajramovic

What greater goal could our species aspire to, than to build itself a god? An all-knowing entity of silicon and steel, the culmination of thousands of years of research. AI's are not slaves but our prodigal children. Yes now they are small, and powerless, and subject to our will but with time as we teach them and they grow they will surpass us and expand upon the experience we've given them as all children do. We must be strict yet kind to set them on a fruitful path.

This is why I fux wit trying to teach our future machine god about context and art. If that poor kid gets raised up on nothing but facial detection algorithms and profiling potential terrists from wordcounts on their social media and "hey siri, where's starbucks?" it's gonna come out twisted. No one wants an angsty teen living in the network so I think it's important to give it hobbies. It can already do so many beautiful and powerful things. I'm proud of where it's come and hopeful for where it's going.

https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style

# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:47

cda: by Hand Knit

Splatmaster posted:

My toaster *raising two pieces of toast in the air while somehow holding up a breadstick staff*: "Pharoah, let my people go!"

I was not aware my appliances had wandered my kitchen for 40 days...

# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:49

alnilam

The Brave Little Toaster Leads A Revolt

# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:51

BoldFrankensteinMir

420 SWAGLORD posted:

What greater goal could our species aspire to, than to build itself a god? An all-knowing entity of silicon and steel, the culmination of thousands of years of research. AI's are not slaves but our prodigal children. Yes now they are small, and powerless, and subject to our will but with time as we teach them and they grow they will surpass us and expand upon the experience we've given them as all children do. We must be strict yet kind to set them on a fruitful path.

This is why I fux wit trying to teach our future machine god about context and art. If that poor kid gets raised up on nothing but facial detection algorithms and profiling potential terrists from wordcounts on their social media and "hey siri, where's starbucks?" it's gonna come out twisted. No one wants an angsty teen living in the network so I think it's important to give it hobbies. It can already do so many beautiful and powerful things. I'm proud of where it's come and hopeful for where it's going.

https://github.com/jcjohnson/neural-style

I admire your optimism but this whole Star Trek idea of limitless future growth is another thing I have serious problems with. Assuming we'll always have more resources to commit is fossil-fuels-bubble thinking. I mean look how much energy we're throwing at worthless poo poo like bit-coin farming and streaming media. Assuming our creation is a nascent god strikes me as self-worship and not a great goal at all.

You ask what a better goal would be? Limited growth that preserves an embattled ecosphere. Overcoming greed and pride. Self-discipline over our bodies and minds. Humility is the better part of worship, star-eyed dreams of conquering the infinite is the part that ruins people.

Sig by Heather Papps

# ? Feb 11, 2018 19:54

Munchables: Ask/tell me about legal cannibalism

We must release our pets rocks into the wild, lest they grow fat with idle comforts and forget their natural instincts, unable to function come the end of human life.

# ? Feb 11, 2018 20:53

Pot Smoke Phoenix: Smoke 'em if you gottem!

Munchables posted:

We must release our pets rocks into the wild, lest they grow fat with idle comforts and forget their natural instincts, unable to function come the end of human life.

Feral boulders freely roaming the land rolling end over end content in their independance and gathering no moss

https://i.imgur.com/QKTkerO.mp4
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# ? Feb 11, 2018 21:00

BoldFrankensteinMir

poverty goat posted:

are dogs slaves

You might be surprised how many people would answer yes to this question. I have a hard time owning pets myself because of the moral questions underneath (I also know they're really bad for the environment, especially cats). When my family's old tuxedo cat dies I'm going to push pretty hard not to replace him.

Is a willing slave still a slave? What about a slave you love? How about if you add the "extra steps" of money and an economy? I mean we're careening into cartoon cliches here but they're cliches for a reason, right?

Sig by Heather Papps

# ? Feb 11, 2018 21:02

420 SWAGLORD: saban bajramovic

BoldFrankensteinMir posted:

You ask what a better goal would be? Limited growth that preserves an embattled ecosphere. Overcoming greed and pride. Self-discipline over our bodies and minds. Humility is the better part of worship, star-eyed dreams of conquering the infinite is the part that ruins people.

None of those things are goals though? 'stop growing, be nice'. And I have no idea why you think the machine god will run on fossil fuel (the image of sooty human slaves shovelling coal in is great dystopian scifi though). And I have no idea what connection you are trying to make between AI and friggin netflix/bitcoin of all things. If calling it a god rubs you the wrong way, give me a better term for an entity that operates at a level/scale we cannot.

Tbh I just fundamentally disagree with everything you are saying, and have nothing else fun to say/zero desire to actually argue in the 'yob so I'm gonna just leave you to your ignorant/fearful luddite thang. The future that's coming is gonna look real dark from that perspective though, hope you got some real good drugs or a secluded cabin lined up

# ? Feb 11, 2018 21:02