Wednesday, June 09, 2004
Sentience
I got an interesting response from Night (asimov@orkut) on the sentience and Humaneness of Robots, (Slightly modified)
[Most provide arbitrary definitions of what is life or what is human, but that does not concern the question, which was if the robots were PEOPLE. For people, one would take an individual with rights and duties. What is important is if it has "self-awareness", and can recognize itself as being different from the environment and other robots/humans.
If it has more rules to abide to is not relevant either, as each society has it's own rules, and they change over time. What might restrain you from doing something now may have not in the past, and may well not again in the future. So, it doesn't matter the laws are different, neither that they HAVE to abide to them. Because their existence doesn't encompass ONLY the three laws, but in fact they would have "free will" (at least in the same way we have) in any matter that doesn't directly concerns the three laws.
So, for all that I am concerned with, robots COULD be perceived as people, as long as they are autonomous, can form new thoughts and learn, and can bring value to society with their novel ideas. All other issues are circumstantial, not absolute.]
And here is what I felt about the issue. (As posted there.)
[May be we need to differentiate between the term *people* and *Sentient beings*.Self awareness is sufficient to become a sentient being, but it is not sufficient to be included in people. If an alien Intelligence is discovered tomorrow, we probably would have no trouble calling them sentient beings (regardless of whether they were first-born or were created by other beings) but we would definitely have trouble including them under *people*.
I agree that the rules and views of societies change, but I do believe that there is a meta nature to the human society than what is defined by the rules and views alone (essentially because of the nature of beings forming the society).
In 's novels, there is never any question of the immortals not being considered sentient but the question that is asked again and again is whether and how much they are humans.] ¶ 9:07 PM
[Most provide arbitrary definitions of what is life or what is human, but that does not concern the question, which was if the robots were PEOPLE. For people, one would take an individual with rights and duties. What is important is if it has "self-awareness", and can recognize itself as being different from the environment and other robots/humans.
If it has more rules to abide to is not relevant either, as each society has it's own rules, and they change over time. What might restrain you from doing something now may have not in the past, and may well not again in the future. So, it doesn't matter the laws are different, neither that they HAVE to abide to them. Because their existence doesn't encompass ONLY the three laws, but in fact they would have "free will" (at least in the same way we have) in any matter that doesn't directly concerns the three laws.
So, for all that I am concerned with, robots COULD be perceived as people, as long as they are autonomous, can form new thoughts and learn, and can bring value to society with their novel ideas. All other issues are circumstantial, not absolute.]
And here is what I felt about the issue. (As posted there.)
[May be we need to differentiate between the term *people* and *Sentient beings*.Self awareness is sufficient to become a sentient being, but it is not sufficient to be included in people. If an alien Intelligence is discovered tomorrow, we probably would have no trouble calling them sentient beings (regardless of whether they were first-born or were created by other beings) but we would definitely have trouble including them under *people*.
I agree that the rules and views of societies change, but I do believe that there is a meta nature to the human society than what is defined by the rules and views alone (essentially because of the nature of beings forming the society).
In 's novels, there is never any question of the immortals not being considered sentient but the question that is asked again and again is whether and how much they are humans.] ¶ 9:07 PM
