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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 15, 2018 4:56:04 GMT
Decades ago I plotted but never wrote a story about a woman who was trapped inside a computer program when she was a small child (presumably for her own protection). Naturally she got lonely inside so she created a pixel family for herself and pixel friends and neighbors. When she entered puberty she created herself the perfect boyfriend and went on to marry him and have a baby with him. She never told him what she was or what he was or where they were. He just thought he was a boy/man who lived in a town and met a pretty girl and fell in love with her.
Number one: he wasn't actually given a choice to love her or not - he was programmed, too.
Number two: he didn't know she was basically his creator and that he maybe wasn't even a real person, depending on whether he ever achieved consciousness or not. (In the story this doesn't happen until after their child gets kidnapped to force the woman to return to her world. At which point he learns the truth about everything and is given a robot body to allow him to enter her world and experience it.)
When I plotted it back in 2010 consent issues weren't even on my radar, especially when a man was on the other end. I think the question brings up a lot of other good questions, such as do you need consent to fuck robots/pixel people? If you are like a deity and you actually created the person, do you need their consent to use their bodies, lives, hearts, and minds as you choose? Or do you still need consent?
I guess it's sort of like WestWorld or Dollhouse. The guests think they're just playing with dolls, that they're not real, so they can do with them as they please. In the story, pre-awakening, the man never felt any pain, and was very happy, but he also wasn't given full autonomy. The woman wasn't trying to be evil or hurt him. She was just very lonely. But still .... What do you think?
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 16, 2018 1:18:32 GMT
If he was never intended to have free will, then consent wouldn't be required in a legal sense, I don't think. Whether it is moral or ethical to create someone who won't have it is another issue.
Your story is a little like the Garden of Eden myth (I don't mean to insult anyone's religion by calling it a myth; I'm not using it in the "something fake" sense, but in a the sense of trying to examine it objectively) in that he was innocent and happy, but ignorant and not self-aware, like Adam and Eve. Because of this unawareness, they didn't have full agency. They didn't really even understand that they had the capability of not obeying God. But like Adam and Eve had their moment of crisis when the Serpent put the idea into their heads that they could disobey, could become more worldly and knowledgeable, he had his moment of crisis when he was awakened. For your character, and Adam and Eve, although they had been happy and content in their ignorance/innocence/unawareness, their world expanded (sometimes in a painful way) when their eyes were opened and they were awakened to all their shortcomings and all the sorrows the world could hold.
Have you ever watched the series "Misfits"? There is a female character who falls in love with a woman and then discovers that she is the woman's invisible friend. It kind of ruins the relationship, because as the one woman says, "going down on the woman whose mind created me is a bit like going down on my mother or something," lol.
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 16, 2018 2:28:06 GMT
I have not seen misfits, but that sounds hilarious!
And yeah, I guess it is sort of like Adam & Eve. If Eve were the Mother Goddess. It's Also like God and Mary. If Mary was a bloke. Put the two together and what do you got? I dunno, a scintillating conversation?
Ooh, what's your stance on whether it is moral or ethical to create someone without free will then force them, by not letting them know they have any other choice and programming them to love you, to marry you?
Bonus points: What is love? If it's more than a feeling and requires freewill and choice, which I think it does, then it ain't love in this case, only lust.
I think it's immoral but in the story case I think she can be forgiven, if she learns and grows to accept that. Deities don't learn easily though.
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 16, 2018 5:36:02 GMT
Oh, Misfits is hysterical; I've actually hurt myself laughing at some of the episodes. One character develops the ability to remove superpowers from people by having sex with them, so when the team wants to de-power a bad guy, it leads to some really strange situations, lol.
I personally would find it unethical to force an AI to love me if the AI was sufficiently advanced for them to reason. The level of AI out there right now is just machine-learning, mostly; trying out different algorithms until one solves the problem. Once they make the jump to abstract reasoning, not letting them have free will would be sort of like lobotomizing someone at birth. But I confess, I anthropomorphize my machines. I try not to work them too hard, and I turn them off so they can "rest". I don't like the idea of even a dumb machine being mistreated.
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Post by corabuhlert on Sept 16, 2018 23:36:15 GMT
Just wanted to second that Misfits is hilarious, though not for the faint of heart.
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 19, 2018 2:32:13 GMT
There's probably something wrong with me. I would create an AI pixel boyfriend in that situation in a heartbeat if I could and we would live happily ever after with him doing all the laundry and cleaning the house and keeping up the yard, and he would be programmed to love it and probably even to get a little turned on by it, because why not? I mean, if he ever reached consciousness and wanted to leave, I wouldn't strap him down and force him to stay. That's about the only moral obligation I would feel about that. Oh yeah, I agree. He wouldn't have to be full AI/Free-Will Capable for me to love him. All he'd have to do is be able to give a good foot massage, have a gigantic database he can quote from to woo me with useless data, trivia, and sexy statistics, and just maybe, fix me some of that salted caramel ice cream, and he'd be Mr. Perfect. Especially if he had Tom Hardy lips. And I'd make sure his hydraulic fluids were topped up, and his firmware, err, stayed firm, I guess, and make sure the UPS stayed charged. Is that a HEA just waiting to be written or what? |
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 19, 2018 3:05:13 GMT
@lynn I love your thoughts and speculations. I'm on the side of expecting emergent super AI evolution to happen any day now. It seems inevitable to me. I have a ton of story ideas based around those concepts, too. But I need a writing partner if I'm ever going to get them out. I have too many loose connections in my brain and I can't stick to any longterm plan no matter how much I care about it, on my own. I need someone else to stay the path and continue to care when I'm glitching.
In this particular story, the child is fully "real" because the main character is a deity, so she can do that. She couldn't make her pixel husband real because it's way complicated and she wouldn't have to birth him and raise him first and that would have been weird. Plus, she didn't know what she was cos her memory was erased, and when it came back she pushed it down and refused to comprehend the truth because she was happy. But from a consciousness perspective the pixel husband is totally real, too, just not in a physical sense. And once he wakes up he grows and learns how to be himself.
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 19, 2018 4:08:46 GMT
Just use the @ symbol before someone's name to tag them, @lynn . Sometimes the tag won't work, but most of the time it does. If I figure out how to write it. I will.  |
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Post by davidvandyke on Sept 20, 2018 18:47:45 GMT
This issue has been debated endlessly in theological and philosophical circles--the problem of agency (free will, consciousness, responsibility for sin, etc), including moral agency. It ultimately doesn't matter if you approach it from a religious or areligious perspective--though I would argue that approaching it from a religious perspective, even hypothetically, provides the value of adding some absolutes into the mix for the sake of argument. I.e., its' easier to say "If God created people, then..." than to say "suppose there were an all-powerful being who created some kind of people, then..." as many of these thoughts have already been thought and written down by great theologians wrestling with the problems and paradoxes created by their religions as they understood them.
Note that if you google "problem of agency" you will get a lot of articles about economic or contractual agency first (things like conflict of interest). You'll have to qualify it with some extra terms like "philosophy" or "moral" or "free will."
The big problem facing us in the real world as we moved toward AI is, at what point does a simulation or emulation become the real thing, if there's no way to prove any underlying difference? A high-order Turing test, in other words. At what point does a thing become a person?
There is also a separate line of debate regarding the consciousness of animals. At what point does it become immoral to kill animals, and why? Is consciousness a point, a singularity, an awakening--or a spectrum? What rights, responsibilities and privileges does consciousness bring?
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Post by possiblyderanged on Sept 25, 2018 11:57:55 GMT
This is the biggest moral and ethical question we're going to face going into the future. When is AI a person? When is it aware? When is it allowed to control its own destiny? SF writers have touched on this before (Asimov, most especially), and it's a real concern since we can make machines that look like us, act like us and to some extent think like us.
It wasn't all that long ago that people made laws that were different for black people, in that it wasn't believed they were the same as whites, mentally or morally. In effect, they had to be "saved" from themselves by their betters. It wasn't much different for women over the past few thousand years.
I think it's a great topic for writing, and in the case of a "child" growing up basically as a program, it can lead to a lot of speculation and great story telling.
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 26, 2018 1:09:54 GMT
This is the biggest moral and ethical question we're going to face going into the future. When is AI a person? When is it aware? When is it allowed to control its own destiny? SF writers have touched on this before (Asimov, most especially), and it's a real concern since we can make machines that look like us, act like us and to some extent think like us. It wasn't all that long ago that people made laws that were different for black people, in that it wasn't believed they were the same as whites, mentally or morally. In effect, they had to be "saved" from themselves by their betters. It wasn't much different for women over the past few thousand years. I think it's a great topic for writing, and in the case of a "child" growing up basically as a program, it can lead to a lot of speculation and great story telling. They did a survey of Roomba owners some years ago, and I think a large percentage, maybe even the majority, cleaned their floors for the Roomba and made decorating choices based on what would be more convenient for it. So this is a machine that doesn't even pretend to be AI doing work that seems semi-autonomous, and humans are treating it with the same sort of consideration they would have for a human. I thought that was interesting. I know when I watch the Boston Dynamics videos where they have people push, shove, or knock down their robots as part of the testing, it always makes me angry that they're being such jerks, lol. It's like my brain knows better, but my heart just can't get past it. |
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Post by K'Sennia Visitor on Sept 26, 2018 1:34:50 GMT
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 26, 2018 2:10:29 GMT
Cool site, they had several interesting videos.
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Post by corabuhlert on Sept 27, 2018 2:05:29 GMT
This is the biggest moral and ethical question we're going to face going into the future. When is AI a person? When is it aware? When is it allowed to control its own destiny? SF writers have touched on this before (Asimov, most especially), and it's a real concern since we can make machines that look like us, act like us and to some extent think like us. It wasn't all that long ago that people made laws that were different for black people, in that it wasn't believed they were the same as whites, mentally or morally. In effect, they had to be "saved" from themselves by their betters. It wasn't much different for women over the past few thousand years. I think it's a great topic for writing, and in the case of a "child" growing up basically as a program, it can lead to a lot of speculation and great story telling. They did a survey of Roomba owners some years ago, and I think a large percentage, maybe even the majority, cleaned their floors for the Roomba and made decorating choices based on what would be more convenient for it. So this is a machine that doesn't even pretend to be AI doing work that seems semi-autonomous, and humans are treating it with the same sort of consideration they would have for a human. I thought that was interesting. I know when I watch the Boston Dynamics videos where they have people push, shove, or knock down their robots as part of the testing, it always makes me angry that they're being such jerks, lol. It's like my brain knows better, but my heart just can't get past it. My Roomba is called Robby and I sometimes talk to it, when it does its thing. I also move obstacles like shoes, etc... out of the way, when it's cleaning and put out those boundary markers, because otherwise it tends to get stuck underneath the radiator. |
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 27, 2018 2:26:35 GMT
They did a survey of Roomba owners some years ago, and I think a large percentage, maybe even the majority, cleaned their floors for the Roomba and made decorating choices based on what would be more convenient for it. So this is a machine that doesn't even pretend to be AI doing work that seems semi-autonomous, and humans are treating it with the same sort of consideration they would have for a human. I thought that was interesting. I know when I watch the Boston Dynamics videos where they have people push, shove, or knock down their robots as part of the testing, it always makes me angry that they're being such jerks, lol. It's like my brain knows better, but my heart just can't get past it. My Roomba is called Robby and I sometimes talk to it, when it does its thing. I also move obstacles like shoes, etc... out of the way, when it's cleaning and put out those boundary markers, because otherwise it tends to get stuck underneath the radiator. Did you name him after Robby the Robot? |
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Post by corabuhlert on Sept 29, 2018 2:53:39 GMT
Actually, I named him after another robot named Robby from the German children's TV series Robby, Toby und das Fliewatüt. If I ever buy a drone, it will be called Fliewatüt. But I wouldn't be surprised if Toby's Robby was named after Forbidden Planet's.
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Post by Jeff Tanyard on Sept 29, 2018 7:47:19 GMT
My Roomba is called Robby and I sometimes talk to it, when it does its thing. I also move obstacles like shoes, etc... out of the way, when it's cleaning and put out those boundary markers, because otherwise it tends to get stuck underneath the radiator. Did you name him after Robby the Robot?
That robot was creepy. I don't know if that's what the film intended or not. And it was weird seeing Leslie Nielsen in a non-comedic role. I'd only ever seen him in comedies.
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DD
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Post by DD on Sept 29, 2018 17:16:08 GMT
Did you name him after Robby the Robot?
That robot was creepy. I don't know if that's what the film intended or not. And it was weird seeing Leslie Nielsen in a non-comedic role. I'd only ever seen him in comedies.
Have you seen him in "Day of the Animals"? Talk about playing against type! It's a horribly cheesy movie, but I was about 11 or so when I saw it, so it seemed more exciting back then. |
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Post by Jeff Tanyard on Sept 29, 2018 19:02:12 GMT
That robot was creepy. I don't know if that's what the film intended or not. And it was weird seeing Leslie Nielsen in a non-comedic role. I'd only ever seen him in comedies.
Have you seen him in "Day of the Animals"? Talk about playing against type! It's a horribly cheesy movie, but I was about 11 or so when I saw it, so it seemed more exciting back then.
No, I don't think I've even heard of it. I haven't seen the vast majority of his films. He's got a huge list at IMDB, most of which I've never heard of.
I love Airplane, though.  |
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Post by possiblyderanged on Sept 30, 2018 16:51:43 GMT
Leslie Nielsen was a hottie! Even as he got older. Man. Where was I? Oh, yeah. My favorite thing from Airport, which is actually hard to pick, was the line "And don't call me Shirley!" Since people often called me Shirley (my name is actually Sheila, so you can see why :/), I always shouted that line in my head. Gave me a laugh.
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Post by davidvandyke on Sept 30, 2018 21:47:49 GMT
I (likely a little older than you) had the opposite experience. I'd only ever seen him in serious roles--lots of things in shows from the 50s and 60s. Then came Airplane and all his comedies afterward. He was actually funnier, I think, precisely because a lot of the audience thought of him as a "serious" actor. That was also the beginning of the turning point in our culture, where serious actors began to do a little comedy and vice-versa. Before, comedic actors weren't often considered "real" actors--they got typecast into comedies. People like Robin Williams and Michael Keaton broke that mold. Apologies, off the top of my head I can't think of any equivalent women, but I'm sure they existed. |
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Post by Jeff Tanyard on Sept 30, 2018 22:22:41 GMT
I (likely a little older than you) had the opposite experience. I'd only ever seen him in serious roles--lots of things in shows from the 50s and 60s. Then came Airplane and all his comedies afterward. He was actually funnier, I think, precisely because a lot of the audience thought of him as a "serious" actor. That was also the beginning of the turning point in our culture, where serious actors began to do a little comedy and vice-versa. Before, comedic actors weren't often considered "real" actors--they got typecast into comedies. People like Robin Williams and Michael Keaton broke that mold. Apologies, off the top of my head I can't think of any equivalent women, but I'm sure they existed.
Yeah, I'm in my forties, and most of the movies I saw as a kid in the eighties were on Ted Turner's Superstation. We occasionally went to the theater, but only rarely. And we were late getting cable. So I basically grew up with what Ted happened to like. lol
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