I genuinely think that this whole argument is a waste of time.
What matters is whether the outputs are useful and the outputs don't change based on whether you call it "thought", "AGI" or "probabilistic word selection".
Trees have been given rights in some places. Some people believe dogs and cats have rights.
Humans have been not given rights in some places. Some people believe some humans don't have rights.
It's not about "sentience" or "consciousness" -- in reality, these concepts are religious ones, like the soul, and don't map to anything objectively meaningful.
A better way to think about rights, I think, is that they stem from the barrel of a gun. Can a thing reciprocate a social contract with me usefully? Can it help me if I'm nice to it? Can it hurt me if I'm mean to it? Alternatively, will entities that can help me do so if they see me help this thing or harm me if they see me harm this thing? That's all that matters; I'll be game-theoretically forced to grant it personhood. I'm programmed by my brain to show empathy to you, and, when that fails, you or others will harm me if I hurt you. Or, if I become a powerful dictator, I might execute you for being inconvenient to me. For all I know, you're a p-zombie that I could otherwise hurt with a clean conscience. None of that really matters; it's all about what I'm forced to do, from within or without.
Your ethics are leading you to believe this. For other people it doesn’t make sense at all that a computer program should have rights. It makes even less sense to people who know what a computer program is.
We don't give single cells rights, but we do give the complex organization of cells rights. Why should binary code never be given the same consideration as dna code? What defining factor is at play here?
To think that it is "just a program" could be like saying we are just machines without determination. This view may well become "racist" or "bigotry"
Individual ethics will determine the societal ethics that get codified into law. I have a hard time seeing how giving intelligent enough machines won't happen based on our existing ethics, laws, and history therein
> It makes even less sense to people who know what a computer program is.
I write code professionally and my beliefs are not what you claim them to be. Perhaps your opinion is the minority opinion? You should certainly not be claiming it as the de facto belief among programmers
Severance (the TV show) is a pretty entertaining exploration of this issue.
Still... Maybe its not a good analogy. LLMs are inifinitely replicable and editable. The "concious experience," if you will, is discontinuous even if you assume the architecture will advance massively. We definitely dont need to be talking about rights yet.
rights is part of ethics, which we most certainly need to be talking about
As I said, what we have today is not deserving of such considerations imho, but I do expect to see someone trying to marry an AI before I die, so this will become an issue not to far off
(in fact, someone already married an AI in Japan, and then the company that ran it closed, iirc)
Current tech is not there yet, but we should not wait to discuss either