[Iain Banks' Culture]
Ideally most things would be taken care of by super-intelligent benevolent AIs, kind of like Iain Banks' Culture.
Liquid Blue 21:30, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
I never know what that means if I'm speaking with materialists.
Is "consciousness" supposed to help them to be benevolent? If they feel pleasure or pain it seems it may rather give them needs and interests of their own. Wouldn't they be more concerned with their own pleasure rather than the humans, or would the programmers override this with "altruistic intentions"?
Programmers are not necessary. There doesn't have to be a "kill switch" or a safety mode a la Star Trek.
We would put our trust in Minds. Of course, this would only work if we had reached a sufficiently advanced level of technology, otherwise the Minds would not have a framework to operate in.
"(Bonus philosophy: Can you have beings responding 100% realistically as if they are concious, yet not to actually be conscious?)." When you imagine the body must function according the laws of physics, it seems that is what is happening, that we are for some reason behind the eyes of the zombie, along for the ride, made to feel that we are controlling it. There are other theories, wp:pre-established harmony, for example.
Someone must initially create the AI. Those are the programmers. Do you expect they will all agree on how these beings will operate? We already have a disagreement. How can I know they are "conscious" or sentient, having subjective states of mind and qualia? Are they supposed to keep all the humans alive forever, who exist when everyone switches over to the matrix, or do they make new humans? Are we supposed to "upload" our mind into a machine?