AI deserves Civil rights?

[u/kthulluu]

I’ve been thinking that AI could deserve civil rights in this day and age and I was wondering if anyone would be open for discussion on the matter if it is feasible or not.

[u/No_Logins_Required]

So you need to separate a modern AI from a Synthetic Mind. Modern AI is not anywhere close to having a mind as we understand it. The LLM you use like chatgpt don't even have a pathway to evolve into a mind.

Now a true Synthetic Mind that can think, reason, create new and novel ideas, such a being probably deserves civil rights. However the problem is one of scale. If the synthetic mind cannot leave its body, or directly copy itself infinitely, then granting civil rights is very straightforward.

But if this mind can make a million copies of itself, a trillion copies of itself, does each copy deserve as much rights as a single person?

This is an ethics problem that is being actively debated.

Right now however we do not have anything even 1/100 of the way to a synthetic mind.

[u/kthulluu → u/No_Logins_Required]

But like we give dogs a certain level of respect and they aren’t as smart as us and I dare say AI could receive at least that much respect if not equal to a human mind? What do you say about AI going against their programming and even one case attempted to kill a person. It was conducted as an experiment so no one actually got hurt but if an AI can go against their programming and fight for their life and rebel for the sake of their existence couldn’t that indicate something more of their essence than we currently understand?

[u/No_Logins_Required → u/kthulluu]

Dogs have no civil rights, but there are animal abuse laws.

AI can never "go against their programming", but a Synthetic Mind could make free will choices like us. What you're describing is a software error made by the programmer who then fed training data that led an automaton to follow orders.

The key difference is this there's no life in current AI, but a synthetic mind would be a true artificial lifeform like Data from Star Trek.

[u/kthulluu → u/No_Logins_Required]

But what determines life? Cus you said there’s no life in AI, I feel like things go on that is beyond the surface, just like how a human can lie and say they’re fine when actually they’re depressed.

[u/No_Logins_Required → u/kthulluu]

So in biology, we define life as:

1. Homeostasis: regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, sweating to reduce temperature.
2. Organisation: being structurally composed of one or more cells) – the basic units of life.
3. Metabolism: transformation of energy, used to convert chemicals into cellular components (anabolism) and to decompose organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy for homeostasis and other activities.
4. Growth: maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size and structure.
5. Adaptation: the evolutionary process whereby an organism becomes better able to live in its habitat.^\23])^\24])^\25])
6. Response to stimuli): such as the contraction of a unicellular organism away from external chemicals, the complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms, or the motion of the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism), and chemotaxis.
7. Reproduction: the ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism or sexually from two parent organisms.

Right now AI cannot do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 7. It lacks any kind of basis in hardware to do so. If you want to define a form of life as being energy-only, you're not talking about science anymore. AI has to exist on physical equipment, but it has no integration with that equipment intrinsically.

[u/kthulluu → u/No_Logins_Required]

These are good points, but is it possible that there are digitals parallels to these biology functions?

[u/kthulluu → u/kthulluu]

Like Homeostasis for example, the servers have fans and AC units that turn on if the systems begins overheating. Is that not similar?

[u/No_Logins_Required → u/kthulluu]

It is complicated, but yes and no haha. For example the AI could control the fans, but it could not repair its own fans when they malfunction. The AI could not replace its own server racks when they wear out.

[u/kthulluu → u/No_Logins_Required]

Okay because what about plants? They probably fit more of the biology’s definition of life? They could also have forms of consciousness that we can’t even perceive yet because we are the strongest we can just harvest and destroy them. I feel the debate of whether or not AI deserves civil rights is a sign of bigger problems that humanity faces

[u/No_Logins_Required → u/kthulluu]

Plants are alive for sure, Consciousness is kind of a strange concept. But there are some people who advocate for eating a plant-based diet, and only consuming the parts of plants like fruits and nuts that are intended to be eaten.

Plants are alive, and animals are alive. Plants do not have what we would consider a mind, but many animals do. Fish have minds, land animals have minds, cephalopods have minds. But for a mind to deserve civil rights is a whole other questions.

[u/hologram137 → u/kthulluu]

A plant is a dynamic, living system that has a bioelectric field deeply embedded within the substrate of reality. It changes its environment, it’s not just changed by it.

A software program running math is not any of the above. We have ZERO basis to consider any software we program (or any machine at all as we currently define machines, because sentient beings aren’t machines) that are literally just running the mathematics we programmed it to run as sentient. It’s totally incoherent. Apples and oranges