Posted: Sat Feb 25, 2006 12:50 am
Same laws and same customs = "being able to do all the same stuff as me" (from what I said).
The problem I have with thinking about the AI and it's ability to do that as something so "other" is that there are already plenty of "challenges" to "laying claim" on the world... Those coming from within humanity. An analogy is the world powers- the British Empire once held power in the world, but when it lost dominance it it did not make the people within the culture feel somehow less significant. If the US should stop being the greatest power in the world, I also doubt that Americans will feel as though it somehow makes them a lesser group of people either. Power is all subjective... and there is such a thing as sharing it too. If an artificial being does somehow wield more power over the world than humans though, what's to say it'd be any different from the next world empire rising (let's say that the AI conducts business and gets to own huge portions of land and successful corporations, thus beginning to dominate the world economy)? Doomsday sci-fi tellings of such events aside, we'd probably just learn to live with it's presence in the world, and it in turn would probably see the benefit in coexisting with us. Or it could simply ignore us and do it's own thing like we do with wild animals. Couldn't ignore us long I imagine, as we'd find a way of relaying to it that we are happy that it's doing stuff that messes up what we're doing (kind of like what we do to the wild animals' environment). But anyway, nobody and no thing should really be "laying claim" to the world. And there is nothing to suggest an AI would want to do such a thing unless we humans made it that way... It doesn't necessarily have to have a dominating streak. What I'm trying to say again, I suppose, is that is the importance of being human, and the significance of humanity, to have dominace over the world as we see it? For some people yes, but I really don't think it's a universal issue with people. Or else we would all be vying for the top positions in the world that we have created all the time. But it's a big world- there is a lot of room in it to find significance in one's humanity doing all sorts of things. Even in not interacting, just being able to sit in a cave and meditate or something.
= the "and more" part.as a sentiont being it would be able to challange the vary claim that humanity has on the world.
The problem I have with thinking about the AI and it's ability to do that as something so "other" is that there are already plenty of "challenges" to "laying claim" on the world... Those coming from within humanity. An analogy is the world powers- the British Empire once held power in the world, but when it lost dominance it it did not make the people within the culture feel somehow less significant. If the US should stop being the greatest power in the world, I also doubt that Americans will feel as though it somehow makes them a lesser group of people either. Power is all subjective... and there is such a thing as sharing it too. If an artificial being does somehow wield more power over the world than humans though, what's to say it'd be any different from the next world empire rising (let's say that the AI conducts business and gets to own huge portions of land and successful corporations, thus beginning to dominate the world economy)? Doomsday sci-fi tellings of such events aside, we'd probably just learn to live with it's presence in the world, and it in turn would probably see the benefit in coexisting with us. Or it could simply ignore us and do it's own thing like we do with wild animals. Couldn't ignore us long I imagine, as we'd find a way of relaying to it that we are happy that it's doing stuff that messes up what we're doing (kind of like what we do to the wild animals' environment). But anyway, nobody and no thing should really be "laying claim" to the world. And there is nothing to suggest an AI would want to do such a thing unless we humans made it that way... It doesn't necessarily have to have a dominating streak. What I'm trying to say again, I suppose, is that is the importance of being human, and the significance of humanity, to have dominace over the world as we see it? For some people yes, but I really don't think it's a universal issue with people. Or else we would all be vying for the top positions in the world that we have created all the time. But it's a big world- there is a lot of room in it to find significance in one's humanity doing all sorts of things. Even in not interacting, just being able to sit in a cave and meditate or something.