Re: computer pain

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 12:05:52 +0100

Le 02-janv.-07, à 03:22, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :

>
>
> Bruno Marchal writes:
>
>> Le 30-déc.-06, à 07:53, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>> > there is no contradiction in a willing slave being intelligent.
>> It seems to me there is already a contradiction with the notion of
>> "willing slave".
>> I would say a willing slave is just what we call a worker.
>> Or something related to sexual imagination ...
>> But a "real" slave is, I would say by definition, not willing to be
>> slave.
>
> OK, a fair point. Do you agree that if we built a machine that would
> happily obey our every command, even if it lead to its own
> destruction, that would (a) not be incompatible with intelligence, and
> (b) not cruel?


Hmmm.... It will depend how "we built" the machine. If the machine is
"universal-oriented" enough, through its computatbility, provability
and inferrability abilities, I can imagine a "cruelty" threshold,
although it would be non verifiable. This leads to difficult questions.




> For in order to be cruel we would have to build a machine that wanted
> to be free and was afraid of dying, and then threaten it with slavery
> and death.


For the same reason it is impossible to build a *normative* theory of
ethics, I think we cannot program high level virtue. We cannot program
it in machine nor in human. So we cannot program a machine "wanting to
be free" or "afraid of dying". I think quite plausible that such "high
level virtue" could develop themselves relatively to some universal
goal (like "help yourself") through long computational histories.
In particular I think that we should distinguish competence and
intelligence. Competence in a field (even a universal one) can be
defined and locally tested, but intelligence is a concept similar to
consciousness, it can be a byproduct of program + history, yet remains
beyond any theory.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Tue Jan 02 2007 - 08:28:23 PST

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