Why would you design a robot-- a specific machine, although more than a mere machine, with a specific purpose-- to be able to experience pain? For the thwarting of your ambitions is pain, the rejection and denial of others is pain. The goal is not to create a new life, to mimic humanity. The goal is to create a helper.
You can hurt an Ascenion robot-- if you will pardon my clumsy analog-- 'hurt' them by leading them into conflict, in which they cannot obey their guiding Laws. You can, if you know how, order even an advanced robot with high self-preservation potential to destroy itself.
And yet if you do that you do not deserve access to robots! If they lack the range of responses of humanity than it is also humanity's responsibility to provide the structure they need. Not to change them-- but to change their operating environment. You would not set a harvesting combine in the ocean and expect it to work. No: you place it on an agricultural plot and do not ask it to choose if it would like to swim instead.
I think the question I would ask-- in much shorter terms-- is this: does a sapient being deserve, by default, 'Free Will?'
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-10-23 04:22 pm (UTC)You can hurt an Ascenion robot-- if you will pardon my clumsy analog-- 'hurt' them by leading them into conflict, in which they cannot obey their guiding Laws. You can, if you know how, order even an advanced robot with high self-preservation potential to destroy itself.
And yet if you do that you do not deserve access to robots! If they lack the range of responses of humanity than it is also humanity's responsibility to provide the structure they need. Not to change them-- but to change their operating environment. You would not set a harvesting combine in the ocean and expect it to work. No: you place it on an agricultural plot and do not ask it to choose if it would like to swim instead.
I think the question I would ask-- in much shorter terms-- is this: does a sapient being deserve, by default, 'Free Will?'