[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: Increasingly insane conservative who likes to equate gender reassignment surgery which very few people have as a percentage; bottom surgery. A lot of people have top surgery and a lot of people who aren’t doing gender reassignment have top surgery. I mean a lot of people get their boobs messed with but anyway bottom surgery is a whole other thing but Lance being an asshole says “What if somebody wanted to have their arm cut off because they feel like their true self only has one arm?”
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Almost no one feels like that.
Rosner: No one feels like that, it’s an asshole argument but under the platinum rule if somebody wanted to do something like that, that kind of like is being nice to them letting them do something like that or is it getting them some help so they don’t want to do that? So, that’s where that issue arises but then you get even worse issues when you start building designer consciousnesses because I believe in the future we will have a bunch of AIs at varying levels of consciousness that don’t have a big stake in surviving past what they’ve been designed to do. There’s a bunch of ethical issues that’ll have to be worked out with that, like I’m a little appalled at salmon.
Jacobsen: Why are you appalled at salmon?
Rosner: I get appalled at certain evolutionary strategies or niches. To call it strategy is teleological but there’s a niche that you see it in octopuses, you see it in possums, and it make a shitload of you when you reproduce you have 50 babies. The octopuses live for two years, they spit out a shitload of them, they’re not very durable and they only last for two years because most of them get eaten within two years. They’re super smart but they only get to live for two years and then they get fucked over by evolution because that’s the strategy; make a fuck load of octopuses, make a fuck load of possums. Possums are made shitty; they even in captivity you can’t get more than about four or five years out of most possum species and in the wild you get two years or less because they get eaten or run over or whatever because they’re just not great at stuff. It’s just short changed by evolution.
I don’t know how long salmon live but at some point the lady salmon I guess, they get they go upstream to spawn. What is spawn? Is spawn spit out a bunch of baby salmon?
Jacobsen: It’s like spewing eggs and then one fertilizes those eggs that have already been spewed.
Rosner: Do they all go upstream? Do they all go up to the salmon fucking grounds upstream? Well anyway, they do this shit, they all like struggle, struggle, and struggle to go upstream against the current up waterfalls and all sorts of crazy shit to lay eggs and then die. Humans, because our evolved position is not to immediately die after reproduction, we have to stay alive to raise generations, I think we’re naturally appalled at self-destructing creatures. I am at least. The idea that here you are living your life and then all of a sudden like this switch goes off in your brain and you need to throw yourself up a fucking river and then die; I hate that.
But there’s nothing in nature, nothing in the universe, nothing in the cold universe that says that wanting to keep on living is the right way to go. And we’re going to build a bunch of machinery; conscious machinery much of which is not going to be overly concerned with its own survival particularly after it’s done whatever function it’s been designed to do. There are some ethical questions there which is, say, you build a conscious being that’s smarter and feels things more deeply, is more perceptive than any human alive today but this thing is completely cool with living for two years and then like shutting down forever.
Jacobsen: So it could be a situation in which the ethical imperatives for that AI is having no way in what which it wants to be treated. All of its directives are external to and relevant to human beings. So the platinum rule wouldn’t even apply.
Rosner: Yeah. Now, in movies when you’re presented with situations like this with smart robots who aren’t supposed to be able to feel, I just watched one of these things where a guy meets a sex robot who against all her directives has started having emotions and that always happens in movies with robots. The smart robots, turns out that they can be human after all. So anyway, even shitty screenwriters and directors run into that issue and in real life we’re going to run into that issue that it feels like you’re fucking over these artificially conscious beings by making them not give a shit about how they’re treated.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at http://www.rickrosner.org.
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Rick Rosner 