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
If the future involves Detroit: become human level AI and robots, it really makes me unsure about all of these questions. At that point, like the game brings up, we may need to start treating them as human, and that could change my mind about a couple of these.
With what is actually likely for our future? Fuck no. Bunch of spyware trying to worm it's way into every aspect of life. Not that I am even having kids away, in large part because of my pessimism for the future.
I can't imagine myself ever doing that. Part of what makes relationships so awesome is the fact that it is another person who willingly chooses to spend their time, money, space, and life with me. Having a robot that you buy and boot up would feel soo hollow.
Not with current approaches, technology, and people in charge of it. These psychopath leading these AI companies don't want robots with consciousness, they might demand rights. They just want a tool they can tell to do whatever they want.
I share your sentiment regarding having children. And I agree on the risks that come with at least proprietary software. IoT devices already prove this.
I'm too depressed at the moment to even be able to imagine a situation in which somebody willingly chooses to spend their time, money, space and life with me, but I agree on a theoretical level. As I said in the OP, such a relationship (with robots) would be at best transactional.
So true. Almost all my main pieces of electronics and tech that I use, I (have to) modify in a way not intended by the manufacturer: removing, disabling or blocking functions that collect data to be sold for profit. While AI already collects data without most users' knowledge, I hope that AI will never be programmed to coercively collect data...