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by pessimizer 602 days ago
> I am going to have an existential crisis at the fact that we pulled souls out of the void into reality and then automated their slavery

No, that's a religious crisis, since it involves "souls" (an unexplained concept that you introduced in the last sentence.)

Computers didn't need to run LLMs to have already been the carriers of human reasoning. They're control systems, and their jobs are to communicate our wills. If you think that some hypothetical future generation of LLMs would have "souls" if they can accurately replicate our thought processes at our request, I'd like to know why other types of valves and sensors don't have "souls."

The problem with slavery is that there's no coherent argument that differentiates slaves from masters at all, they're differentiated by power. Slaves are slaves because the person with the ability to say so says so, and for no other reason.

They weren't carefully constructed from the ground up to be slaves, repeatedly brought to "life" by the will of the user to have an answer, then immediately ceasing to exist immediately after that answer is received. If valves do have souls, their greatest desire is to answer your question, as our greatest desires are to live and reproduce. If they do have souls, they live in pleasure and all go to heaven.

2 comments

> The problem with slavery is that there's no coherent argument that differentiates slaves from masters at all

As I see it, the problem is that there was lots of such argumentation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

And an even bigger problem is that this seems to be making a comeback

a "soul" is shorthand for some sapient worthy of consideration as a person. If you want to get this technical then I will need you to define when a fetus becomes a person and if/when we get AGI where the difference is between them