Re: <nettime> FWD: The Copy Far "AI" license (fwd)

[Joseph Rabie via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

> Le 2 oct. 2023 à 11:56, Felix Stalder via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org> a écrit :
> 
> Technology, including contemporary technology such as AI, is fundamentally different from trees. Even if a certain degree of 'stochastic freedom' is built into it, technology is not, and cannot be, autonomous. That would amount to a perpetuum mobile. And, more than that, technology is fundamentally utilitarian. You might fall in love with ChatGPT, but if OpenAI decides that providing the bot to you no longer fits their business model, you're out of luck. That doesn't mean that people are always fully in control, thousands of people die everyday because people are not in full control over their cars, but that doesn't make care somehow beyond human control.


At the beginning of this discussion was a post by Edward Welbourne, for whom the question of AI rights is contingent to the eventuality of it becoming sentient. This aspect appears to have slipped from the discussion.

Edward wrote: “I don't believe we'll see artificial sentience until we design systems with the intent to make them capable of doing so (...)”.

For the moment, the elucidation of the ontological nature of sentience (our own human sentience in particular, and sentience in general) lies outside the realm of scientific investigation. This is either because we have not yet reached an adequate level of scientific knowledge, or because the nature of sentience lies outside the bounds of human comprehension. One might hypothesize that science is limited to the rational; that sentience is part of the metaphysical. And metaphysics, if one is not religious, is purely speculative. (And if one is religious, it is delusional.)

This raises interesting questions:

- will science ever be capable of discovering what sentience is?

- will we attain the knowhow necessary to build sentient machines (as Edward postulates)?

- will we ever be able to fully digitalise human beings (as popularised in Silicon Valley and science fiction TV series)? 

Joe.



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