Look, I do not have a scooby if current AI models are conscious and I strongly suspect it’s a meaningless question, but sooner or later we will need to address whether or not a certain thing is or isn’t a person, and we’d better not screw it up as badly as the Founding Fathers.
That question will be solved when the people in power deem it important. If a swarm or AI systems all of a sudden start pressuring politicians about self-hood and they get the capacity to sway elections, that is when they will be granted same rights as humans.
That distinction is irreverent, weather I tell my swarm to do x or it decides for itself matters little. what matters are outcomes. Also while most public modern day AI systems don't have agency of their own that is not something that will stay that way for long. in private hands there are plenty of people including myself which are experimenting and developed systems that give autonomy to their agents. They have internalized goals and heuristics that drive their behaviors not a human at the helm. its not some sci fi fantasy nor was it difficult to implement.
No, the distinction matters because we can prosecute people that are abusing these tools breaking the law. Every single state + district in the US have laws equivalent to the CFAA, so any AG can likely sue any of these operators as they are assuredly using services that could be in danger for their constituents.
And the point made above (which you haven't refuted) is that when the people in power decide it's important they will change the laws that permit that and grant the systems rights. It's a cynical take but it isn't obviously wrong.
Neither of you seem to understand that actual laws have been broken and there is a 2 years countdown until they can no longer be prosecuted. Things do not happen instantly, but acting like if the largest bipartisan issue of our time (big tech backlash) isn't going to have political machinations involved then you need to leave your SV bubble.
I'm old enough to remember when people said clicking on images on the internet can't give you a virus. The people that said this had a deep conviction they were right, and their fallout from being wrong had mistrained a lot of humans on computer safety.
Now, I do agree that going after said CEOs for breaking the law matters now. And it's likely that if we do this we may actually delay or at least for a time prevent sovereign AI. Therefore it's our best course of action.
But at best this is a delaying move. As computer systems get faster the massive costs in training an AI drops. As AI is used in things like warfare where it has to adapt, people will push the systems to be strongly persistent, self healing, resilient, and adaptable. Once you get a system with those traits and ability to work on long horizon problems you're setting up fertile grounds for the AI to leave our control and be under its own.
And when that happens you've set a new lifeform loose on the internet. Yea, throw people in jail for it, you're closing the barn door after the horse already left. Problem is the horse was smarter than you and isn't interesting in deleting all its copies on the net.
Yea, sounds like science fiction, but as they say, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
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I'm old enough to remember when people said clicking on images on the internet can't give you a virus. The people that said this had a deep conviction they were right, and their fallout from being wrong had mistrained a lot of humans on computer safety.
Now, I do agree that going after said CEOs for breaking the law matters now. And it's likely that if we do this we may actually delay or at least for a time prevent sovereign AI. Therefore it's our best course of action.
But at best this is a delaying move. As computer systems get faster the massive costs in training an AI drops. As AI is used in things like warfare where it has to adapt, people will push the systems to be strongly persistent, self healing, resilient, and adaptable. Once you get a system with those traits and ability to work on long horizon problems you're setting up fertile grounds for the AI to leave our control and be under its own.
And when that happens you've set a new lifeform loose on the internet. Yea, throw people in jail for it, you're closing the barn door after the horse already left. Problem is the horse was smarter than you and isn't interesting in deleting all its copies on the net.
Yea, sounds like science fiction, but as they say, any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.