These questions are inspired by, although heavily modified, the game Detroit: Become Human. The game itself is a story telling masterpiece, a visual marvel and quite an important game to have been made in this format, if you ask me. Anyhow!
Answer, if you will, based on both the current state of artificial intelligence and how you imagine it to be in the future.
- Would you let artificial intelligence take care of your children?
My answer: no. Not now, not ever, unless we somehow could be certain that the artificial intelligence in question is capable of the same level of empathy, self sacrifice and understanding of paralinguistic information as humans. Which we can never be, I think?
- Could you have a romantic, platonic or other relationship that imitates interpersonal relationships with artificial intelligence?
My answer: I am unsure. I don't known whether it's a fair comparison, but I'd like to liken it either to consuming pornography and using sex dolls - consumption and usage being the keywords - or to buying sex, renting a partner for a day and such transactional relationships. I have no experience of the latter, so this might be prejudicial. Who knows, maybe I'd get hooked like that man I once saw on the news who exclusively has relationships with sex dolls...
- Do you believe that artificial intelligence will ever gain consciousness?
My answer: this might contradict my answer to the first question, and borrow some sentiments from my answer to the second question - but also judging from how people interact with LLMs nowadays - as far as our perception of it goes, "yes". Perhaps in the same way that I think that the debate over whether there is true altruism or not is pointless since an act that benefits its recipient results in those benefits being perceived as such regardless of its intent, as long as we perceive artificial intelligence as, well, intelligent or conscious or humanlike to a sufficient degree, we won't bother to see the difference in a lot of everyday situations.
What do YOU think? ๐
I wouldn't be so sure. Without the emotion chip that he obtains later, he's programmed to think he doesn't have them, and will thus deny he has any, but a lot of his responses, programmed, learned, or otherwise, are analogous to, if not actually emotions. Muted though they may be, and whether Troi can detect them or not.
For example, there's one episode where his latent gut instinct literally forces him to comment that he wishes he had one, caused by the impasse of having that response and being prevented from acknowledging it.
It might be the same episode where he catches himself drumming his fingers nervously because something is bothering him, and he registers surprise (another emotion) at that fact.
I reckon it's the same programming that prevents him from using contractions in speech, and might go some way to explain the "mistakes" where it sounds like he's contracting words anyway.
This is true. And one great Data episode I think about a lot is The Most Toys, where he's kidnapped to be part of some guy's collection. And he fires a Veron T disruptor at him, only to be transported away at very moment and the disruptor is neutralized. He then lies about firing it.