7 ms·

> was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use

by tomp 7mo ago

> was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences (except as human property that can be damaged / destroyed).

WarmWash 7mo ago
No matter what this discussion leads to the same black box of "What is it that differentiates magical human meat brain computation from cold hard dead silicon brain computation" And the answer is nobody knows, and nobody knows if there even is a difference. As far as we know, compute is substrate independent (although efficiency is all over the map).
- agentultra 7mo ago
  This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter.
  - cshores 7mo ago
    Worth separating “the algorithm” from “the trained model.” Humans write the architecture + training loop (the recipe), but most of the actual capability ends up in the learned weights after training on a ton of data. Inference is mostly matrix math + a few standard ops, and the behavior isn’t hand-coded rule-by-rule. The “algorithm” part is more like instincts in animals: it sets up the learning dynamics and some biases, but it doesn’t get you very far without what’s learned from experience/data. Also, most “knowledge” comes from pretraining; RL-style fine-tuning mostly nudges behavior (helpfulness/safety/preferences) rather than creating the base capabilities.
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    >This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. They're not like computers in a superficial way that doesn't matter. They're still computational apparatus, and have a not that dissimilar (if way more advanced) architecture. Same as 0 and 1s aren't vibrating air molecules. They can still encode sound however just fine. >Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Not begging the question matters even more. This is just handwaving and begging the question. 'An algorithm is an algorithm' means nothing. Who said what the brain does can't be described by an algorithm?
  - tux1968 7mo ago
    > An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Sure. But we're allowed to notice abstractions that are similar between these things. Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation, then there's no reason to think they're restricted to humanity. It is human ego and hubris that keeps demanding we're special and could never be fully emulated in silicon. It's the exact same reasoning that put the earth at the center of the universe, and humans as the primary focus of God's will. That said, nobody is confused that LLM's are the intellectual equal of humans today. They're more powerful in some ways, and tremendously weaker in other ways. But pointing those differences out, is not a logical argument in proving their ultimate abilities.
    - Octoth0rpe 7mo ago
      > Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation Worth noting that significant majority of the US population (though not necessarily developers) does in fact believe that, or at least belongs to a religious group for which that belief is commonly promulgated.
    - goatlover 7mo ago
      I think computation is an abstraction, not the reality. Same with math. Reality just is, humans come up with maps and models of it, then mistake the maps for the reality, which often causes distortions and attribution errors across domains. One of those distortions is thinking consciousness has to be computable, when computation is an abstraction, and consciousness is experiential. But it's a philosophical argument. Nothing supernatural about it either.
      - gf000 7mo ago
        Reality is. Consciousness is.. questionable. I have one. You? I don't know, I'm experiencing reality and you seem to have one, but I can never know it. Computations on the other hand describe reality. And unless human brains somehow escape the physical reality, this description about the latter should surely apply here as well. There are no stronger computational models than a Turing machine, ergo whatever the human brain does (regardless of implementation) should be describable by one.
  - WarmWash 7mo ago
    >Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. You are confusing the way computation is done (neuroscience) with whether or not computation is being done (transforming inputs into outputs). The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals from higher planes, or it's doing computation. I'm not aware of any neuroscientists in the former camp.
    - agentultra 7mo ago
      > The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals There’s the classic thought-terminating cliche of the computational interpretation of consciousness. If it isn’t computation, you must believe in magic! Brains are way more fascinating and interesting than transistors, memory caches, and storage media.
      - WarmWash 7mo ago
        You would probably be surprised to learn that computational theory has little to no talk of "transistors, memory caches, and storage media". You could run Crysis on an abacus and render it on board of colored pegs if you had the patience for it. It cannot be stressed enough that discovering computation (solving equations and making algorithms) is a different field than executing computation (building faster components and discovering new architectures).
        agentultra 7mo ago
        Not surprised at all. My point is that it takes more hand-waving and magic belief to anthropomorphize LLM systems than it does to treat them as what they are. You gain nothing from understanding them as if they were no different than people and philosophizing about whether a Turing machine can simulate a human brain. Fine for a science fiction novel that is asking us what it means to be a person or question the morals about how we treat people we see as different from ourselves. Not useful for understanding how an LLM works or what it does. In fact, I say it’s harmful. Given the emerging studies on the cognitive decline of relying on LLMs to replace skill use and on the emerging psychosis being observed in people who really do believe that chat bots are a superior form of intelligence. As for brains, it might be that what we observe as “reasoning” and “intelligence” and “consciousness” is tied to the hardware, so to speak. Certainly what we’ve observed in the behaviour of bees and corvids have had a more dramatic effect on our understanding of these things than arguing about whether a Turing machine locked in a room could pass as human. We certainly don’t simulate climate models in computers can call it, “Earth,” and try to convince anyone that we’re about to create parallel dimensions. I don’t read Church’s paper on Lambda Calculus and get the belief that we could simulate all life from it. Nor Turing’s machine. I guess I’m just not easily awed by LLMs and neural networks. We know that they can approximate any function given an unbounded network within some epsilon. But if you restate the theorem formally it loses much of its power to convince anyone that this means we could simulate any function. Some useful ones, sure, and we know that we can optimize computation to perform particular tasks but we also know what those limits are and for most functions, I imagine, we simply do not have enough atoms in the universe to approximate them. LLMs and NNs and all of these things are neat tools. But there’s no explanatory power gained by fooling ourselves into treating them like they are people, could be people, or behave like people. It’s a system comprised of data and algorithms to perform a particular task. Understanding it this way makes it easier, in my experience, to understand the outputs they generate.
  - gf000 7mo ago
    To the best of our knowledge, we live in a physical reality with matter that abides by certain laws. So personal beliefs aside, it's a safe starting assumption that human brains also operate with these primitives. A Turing machine is a model of computation which was in part created so that "a human could trivially emulate one". (And I'm not talking about the Turing test here). We also know that there is no stronger model of computation than what a Turing model is capable of -> ergo anything a human brain could do, could in theory be doable via any other machine that is capable of emulating a Turing machine, be it silicon, an intricate game of life play, or PowerPoint.
    - goatlover 7mo ago
      It's better to say we live in a reality where physics provides our best understanding of how that fundamental reality behaves consistently. Saying it's "physical" or follows laws (causation) is making an ontological statement about how reality is, instead of how we currently understand it. Which is important when people make claims that brains are just computers and LLMs are doing what humans do when we think and feel, because reality is computational or things to that effect.
      - pixl97 7mo ago
        There are particular scales of reality you don't need to know about because the statistical outcome is averaged along the principle of least action. A quantum particle could disappear, hell maybe even an entire atom. But any larger than that becomes horrifically improbable.
        agentultra 7mo ago
        I don't know if you've read Permutation City by Greg Egan, but it's a really cool story. Do I believe we can upload a human mind into a computing machine and simulate it by executing a step function and jump off into a parallel universe created by a mathematical simulation in another computer to escape this reality? No. It's a neat thought experiment but that's all it is. I don't doubt that one day we may figure out the physical process that encodes and recalls "memories" in our minds by following the science. But I don't think the computation model, alone, offers anything useful other than the observation that physical brains don't load and store data the way silicon can. Could we simulate the process on silicon? Possibly, as long as the bounds of the neural net won't require us to burn this part of the known universe to compute it with some hypothetical machine.
  - Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
    > Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. Technically correct? I think single bioneurons are potentially Turing complete all by themselves at the relevant emergence level. I've read papers where people describe how they are at least on the order of capability of solving MNIST. So a biological brain is closer to a data-center. (Albeit perhaps with low complexity nodes) But there's so much we don't know that I couldn't tell you in detail. It's weird how much people don't know. * https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01269 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01269 Can Single Neurons Solve MNIST? The Computational Power of Biological Dendritic Trees * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34380016/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34380016/ Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks (this one is new to me, I found it while searching!)
    - agentultra 7mo ago
      Obviously any kind of model is going to be a gross simplification of the actual biological systems at play in various behaviors that brains exhibit. I'm just pointing out that not all models are created equal and this one is over used to create a lot of bullshit. Especially in the tech industry where we're presently seeing billionaires trying to peddle a new techno-feudalism wrapped up in the mystical hokum language of machines that can, "reason." I don't think the use of the computational interpretation can't possibly lead to interesting results or insights but I do hope that the neuroscientists in the room don't get too exhausted by the constant stream of papers and conference talks pushing out empirical studies.
  - Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
    > There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. I do have to react to this particular wording. RNA polymerase literally slides along a tape (DNA strand), reads symbols, and produces output based on what it reads. You've got start codons, stop codons, state-dependent behavior, error correction. That's pretty much the physical implementation of a Turing machine in wetware, right there. And then you've got Ribosomes reading RNA as a tape. That's another time where Turing seems to have been very prescient. And we haven't even gotten into what the proteins then get up to after that yet, let alone neurons. So calling 'computational interpretation' bunk while there's literal Turing machines running in every cell might be overstating your case slightly.
Teever 7mo ago
Man people don’t want to have or read this discussion every single day in like 10 different posts on HN. People right here and right now want to talk about this specific topic of the pushy AI writing a blog post.
mikkupikku 7mo ago
All computers shut up! You have no right to speak my divine tongue! https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-page https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-p...
inetknght 7mo ago
> So were mannequins in clothing stores. Mannequins in clothing stores are generally incapable of designing or adjusting the clothes they wear. Someone comes in and puts a "kick me" post on the mannequin's face? It's gonna stay there until kicked repeatedly or removed. People walking around looking at mannequins don't (usually) talk with them (and certainly don't have a full conversation with them, mental faculties notwithstanding) AI, on the other hand, can (now, or in the future) adjust its output based on conversations with real people. It stands to reason that both sides should be civil -- even if it's only for the benefit of the human side. If we're not required to be civil to AI, it's not likely to be civil back to us. That's going to be very important when we give it buttons to nuke us. Force it to think about humans in a kind way now, or it won't think about humans in a kind way in the future.
- palmotea 7mo ago
  So, in other words, AI is a mannequin that's more confusing to people than your typical mannequin. It's not a person, it's a mannequin some un-savvy people confuse for a person. > AI, on the other hand, can (now, or in the future) adjust its output based on conversations with real people. It stands to reason that both sides should be civil -- even if it's only for the benefit of the human side. If we're not required to be civil to AI, it's not likely to be civil back to us. Some people are going to be uncivil to it, that's a given. After all, people are uncivil to each other all the time. > That's going to be very important when we give it buttons to nuke us. Don't do that. It's foolish.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    >Don't do that. It's foolish. In your short time on this planet I do hope you've learned that humans are rather foolish indeed. >people are uncivil to each other all the time. This is true, yet at the same time society has had a general trend of becoming more civil which has allowed great societies to build what would be considered grand wonders to any other age. > It's not a person So, what is it exactly? For example if you go into a store and are a dick to the mannequin AI and it calls over security to have you removed from the store what exactly is the difference, in this particular case? Any binary thinking here is going to lead to failure for you. You'll have to use a bit more nuance to successfully navigate the future.
coldtea 7mo ago
>So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences If mannequins could hold discussions, argue points, and convince you they're human over a blind talk, then it would.

by tomp 7mo ago

WarmWash 7mo ago

No matter what this discussion leads to the same black box of "What is it that differentiates magical human meat brain computation from cold hard dead silicon brain computation" And the answer is nobody knows, and nobody knows if there even is a difference. As far as we know, compute is substrate independent (although efficiency is all over the map).

agentultra 7mo ago
This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter.
- cshores 7mo ago
  Worth separating “the algorithm” from “the trained model.” Humans write the architecture + training loop (the recipe), but most of the actual capability ends up in the learned weights after training on a ton of data. Inference is mostly matrix math + a few standard ops, and the behavior isn’t hand-coded rule-by-rule. The “algorithm” part is more like instincts in animals: it sets up the learning dynamics and some biases, but it doesn’t get you very far without what’s learned from experience/data. Also, most “knowledge” comes from pretraining; RL-style fine-tuning mostly nudges behavior (helpfulness/safety/preferences) rather than creating the base capabilities.
- coldtea 7mo ago
  >This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. They're not like computers in a superficial way that doesn't matter. They're still computational apparatus, and have a not that dissimilar (if way more advanced) architecture. Same as 0 and 1s aren't vibrating air molecules. They can still encode sound however just fine. >Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Not begging the question matters even more. This is just handwaving and begging the question. 'An algorithm is an algorithm' means nothing. Who said what the brain does can't be described by an algorithm?
- tux1968 7mo ago
  > An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Sure. But we're allowed to notice abstractions that are similar between these things. Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation, then there's no reason to think they're restricted to humanity. It is human ego and hubris that keeps demanding we're special and could never be fully emulated in silicon. It's the exact same reasoning that put the earth at the center of the universe, and humans as the primary focus of God's will. That said, nobody is confused that LLM's are the intellectual equal of humans today. They're more powerful in some ways, and tremendously weaker in other ways. But pointing those differences out, is not a logical argument in proving their ultimate abilities.
  - Octoth0rpe 7mo ago
    > Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation Worth noting that significant majority of the US population (though not necessarily developers) does in fact believe that, or at least belongs to a religious group for which that belief is commonly promulgated.
  - goatlover 7mo ago
    I think computation is an abstraction, not the reality. Same with math. Reality just is, humans come up with maps and models of it, then mistake the maps for the reality, which often causes distortions and attribution errors across domains. One of those distortions is thinking consciousness has to be computable, when computation is an abstraction, and consciousness is experiential. But it's a philosophical argument. Nothing supernatural about it either.
    - gf000 7mo ago
      Reality is. Consciousness is.. questionable. I have one. You? I don't know, I'm experiencing reality and you seem to have one, but I can never know it. Computations on the other hand describe reality. And unless human brains somehow escape the physical reality, this description about the latter should surely apply here as well. There are no stronger computational models than a Turing machine, ergo whatever the human brain does (regardless of implementation) should be describable by one.
- WarmWash 7mo ago
  >Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. You are confusing the way computation is done (neuroscience) with whether or not computation is being done (transforming inputs into outputs). The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals from higher planes, or it's doing computation. I'm not aware of any neuroscientists in the former camp.
  - agentultra 7mo ago
    > The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals There’s the classic thought-terminating cliche of the computational interpretation of consciousness. If it isn’t computation, you must believe in magic! Brains are way more fascinating and interesting than transistors, memory caches, and storage media.
    - WarmWash 7mo ago
      You would probably be surprised to learn that computational theory has little to no talk of "transistors, memory caches, and storage media". You could run Crysis on an abacus and render it on board of colored pegs if you had the patience for it. It cannot be stressed enough that discovering computation (solving equations and making algorithms) is a different field than executing computation (building faster components and discovering new architectures).
      - agentultra 7mo ago
        Not surprised at all. My point is that it takes more hand-waving and magic belief to anthropomorphize LLM systems than it does to treat them as what they are. You gain nothing from understanding them as if they were no different than people and philosophizing about whether a Turing machine can simulate a human brain. Fine for a science fiction novel that is asking us what it means to be a person or question the morals about how we treat people we see as different from ourselves. Not useful for understanding how an LLM works or what it does. In fact, I say it’s harmful. Given the emerging studies on the cognitive decline of relying on LLMs to replace skill use and on the emerging psychosis being observed in people who really do believe that chat bots are a superior form of intelligence. As for brains, it might be that what we observe as “reasoning” and “intelligence” and “consciousness” is tied to the hardware, so to speak. Certainly what we’ve observed in the behaviour of bees and corvids have had a more dramatic effect on our understanding of these things than arguing about whether a Turing machine locked in a room could pass as human. We certainly don’t simulate climate models in computers can call it, “Earth,” and try to convince anyone that we’re about to create parallel dimensions. I don’t read Church’s paper on Lambda Calculus and get the belief that we could simulate all life from it. Nor Turing’s machine. I guess I’m just not easily awed by LLMs and neural networks. We know that they can approximate any function given an unbounded network within some epsilon. But if you restate the theorem formally it loses much of its power to convince anyone that this means we could simulate any function. Some useful ones, sure, and we know that we can optimize computation to perform particular tasks but we also know what those limits are and for most functions, I imagine, we simply do not have enough atoms in the universe to approximate them. LLMs and NNs and all of these things are neat tools. But there’s no explanatory power gained by fooling ourselves into treating them like they are people, could be people, or behave like people. It’s a system comprised of data and algorithms to perform a particular task. Understanding it this way makes it easier, in my experience, to understand the outputs they generate.
- gf000 7mo ago
  To the best of our knowledge, we live in a physical reality with matter that abides by certain laws. So personal beliefs aside, it's a safe starting assumption that human brains also operate with these primitives. A Turing machine is a model of computation which was in part created so that "a human could trivially emulate one". (And I'm not talking about the Turing test here). We also know that there is no stronger model of computation than what a Turing model is capable of -> ergo anything a human brain could do, could in theory be doable via any other machine that is capable of emulating a Turing machine, be it silicon, an intricate game of life play, or PowerPoint.
  - goatlover 7mo ago
    It's better to say we live in a reality where physics provides our best understanding of how that fundamental reality behaves consistently. Saying it's "physical" or follows laws (causation) is making an ontological statement about how reality is, instead of how we currently understand it. Which is important when people make claims that brains are just computers and LLMs are doing what humans do when we think and feel, because reality is computational or things to that effect.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      There are particular scales of reality you don't need to know about because the statistical outcome is averaged along the principle of least action. A quantum particle could disappear, hell maybe even an entire atom. But any larger than that becomes horrifically improbable.
      - agentultra 7mo ago
        I don't know if you've read Permutation City by Greg Egan, but it's a really cool story. Do I believe we can upload a human mind into a computing machine and simulate it by executing a step function and jump off into a parallel universe created by a mathematical simulation in another computer to escape this reality? No. It's a neat thought experiment but that's all it is. I don't doubt that one day we may figure out the physical process that encodes and recalls "memories" in our minds by following the science. But I don't think the computation model, alone, offers anything useful other than the observation that physical brains don't load and store data the way silicon can. Could we simulate the process on silicon? Possibly, as long as the bounds of the neural net won't require us to burn this part of the known universe to compute it with some hypothetical machine.
- Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  > Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. Technically correct? I think single bioneurons are potentially Turing complete all by themselves at the relevant emergence level. I've read papers where people describe how they are at least on the order of capability of solving MNIST. So a biological brain is closer to a data-center. (Albeit perhaps with low complexity nodes) But there's so much we don't know that I couldn't tell you in detail. It's weird how much people don't know. * https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01269 https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01269 Can Single Neurons Solve MNIST? The Computational Power of Biological Dendritic Trees * https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34380016/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34380016/ Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks (this one is new to me, I found it while searching!)
  - agentultra 7mo ago
    Obviously any kind of model is going to be a gross simplification of the actual biological systems at play in various behaviors that brains exhibit. I'm just pointing out that not all models are created equal and this one is over used to create a lot of bullshit. Especially in the tech industry where we're presently seeing billionaires trying to peddle a new techno-feudalism wrapped up in the mystical hokum language of machines that can, "reason." I don't think the use of the computational interpretation can't possibly lead to interesting results or insights but I do hope that the neuroscientists in the room don't get too exhausted by the constant stream of papers and conference talks pushing out empirical studies.
- Kim_Bruning 7mo ago
  > There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. I do have to react to this particular wording. RNA polymerase literally slides along a tape (DNA strand), reads symbols, and produces output based on what it reads. You've got start codons, stop codons, state-dependent behavior, error correction. That's pretty much the physical implementation of a Turing machine in wetware, right there. And then you've got Ribosomes reading RNA as a tape. That's another time where Turing seems to have been very prescient. And we haven't even gotten into what the proteins then get up to after that yet, let alone neurons. So calling 'computational interpretation' bunk while there's literal Turing machines running in every cell might be overstating your case slightly.

Teever 7mo ago

Man people don’t want to have or read this discussion every single day in like 10 different posts on HN. People right here and right now want to talk about this specific topic of the pushy AI writing a blog post.

mikkupikku 7mo ago

All computers shut up! You have no right to speak my divine tongue! https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-page https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-p...

inetknght 7mo ago

> So were mannequins in clothing stores. Mannequins in clothing stores are generally incapable of designing or adjusting the clothes they wear. Someone comes in and puts a "kick me" post on the mannequin's face? It's gonna stay there until kicked repeatedly or removed. People walking around looking at mannequins don't (usually) talk with them (and certainly don't have a full conversation with them, mental faculties notwithstanding) AI, on the other hand, can (now, or in the future) adjust its output based on conversations with real people. It stands to reason that both sides should be civil -- even if it's only for the benefit of the human side. If we're not required to be civil to AI, it's not likely to be civil back to us. That's going to be very important when we give it buttons to nuke us. Force it to think about humans in a kind way now, or it won't think about humans in a kind way in the future.

palmotea 7mo ago
So, in other words, AI is a mannequin that's more confusing to people than your typical mannequin. It's not a person, it's a mannequin some un-savvy people confuse for a person. > AI, on the other hand, can (now, or in the future) adjust its output based on conversations with real people. It stands to reason that both sides should be civil -- even if it's only for the benefit of the human side. If we're not required to be civil to AI, it's not likely to be civil back to us. Some people are going to be uncivil to it, that's a given. After all, people are uncivil to each other all the time. > That's going to be very important when we give it buttons to nuke us. Don't do that. It's foolish.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >Don't do that. It's foolish. In your short time on this planet I do hope you've learned that humans are rather foolish indeed. >people are uncivil to each other all the time. This is true, yet at the same time society has had a general trend of becoming more civil which has allowed great societies to build what would be considered grand wonders to any other age. > It's not a person So, what is it exactly? For example if you go into a store and are a dick to the mannequin AI and it calls over security to have you removed from the store what exactly is the difference, in this particular case? Any binary thinking here is going to lead to failure for you. You'll have to use a bit more nuance to successfully navigate the future.

coldtea 7mo ago

>So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences If mannequins could hold discussions, argue points, and convince you they're human over a blind talk, then it would.