dimreepr

It's a metaphor, like karma, it's trying to teach people the benefits of cooperation and being nice now, equal's a better life now; it's a way to calm ones fears about tomorrow/death. The top is, the absence of fear/worry about tomorrow, enjoying today as best you can.

That god darned catch-22 again... Kinda sums up the topic though. 😉

Sentience is like alien life, we only have one source of evidence... 😉🖖

To what end? That just adds another parameter to be calculated, I see no mechanism for sentience and or consciousness, but without sentience consciousness is as irrelevant as ant without its hill. Gogito ergo sum, the ability to think selfishly...

I've never said that, what I said is that, if treated properly AGI is far more likely to benefit humanity than destroy it; but if it's left to the greedy to develop, with no ethical braking system, it will destroy us even more quickly than we are currently managing to. I just think the idea of sentience is a red herring and only distracts the conversation.

You've got to remember, "they're me in a different skin" (my little mantra), they might a have a perfectly innocent or valid reason for not behaving the way you want them too. There's nothing wrong with being proud of yourself, for a job well done or an act of kindness, etc.; the problem with pride only comes when being proud of yourself, makes you think your better than that other "me in a different skin"; that's when hate rears it's ugly head.

I think that anyone who claims to be self made, does forget 'for whom this bell tolls'...

Exactly, it forgets about everyone who helps, the path finders, the path builders, the farmers, the waste removers; it's like a gold medalist that forgets to thank the parent for driving them to the swimming pool, where they were taught to swim, and the cleaner that kept it safe to swim in...

What do you think it means?

However brilliant the entrepreneurs, they can't make a million on a deserted island.

That was a joke, sorry sometimes I forget the emoji.

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

There's a reason Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God", it's only a dilemma for the proud; it's akin to declaring, "I'm a self made millionaire", in that it's total bollox. When have you known me to do that?

But the level of complexity is order's of magnitude greater than that of a machine. You're essentially chasing a ghost because a) currently computers aren't sentient and there is no known way to change that. b) there is no known way to determine if they do. ATM this speculation is fantasy, and while that may change in the future; it's no different than speculating about FLT, physics says no.

Yes, but the parameters remain the same.

Yet it has been done, as per my examples in the OP, so it is possible with the right conditions; we can but hope that the emergence of China as the other superpower, will provide them. 🤞🙏 Then I'm with Yossarian, when he said IIRC "me, happy happy... dead: you, worry worry worry... dead".

I think it's a reasonable analog, an emergent quality is born of complexity, but with the right model we can be reasonably accurate with our prediction of tomorrow's weather; IOW when we start a program, even a complicated one, provided we've got the syntax right, we can predict it won't be sentient tomorrow. Before you go thinking that that "plays right into my wheelhouse", if we extend the analogy, we can be reasonably accurate when we say that next year's weather will be roughly the same and so on (and let's not go down the climate change complication, it has no place in this thread). Your uncertainty argument, that future events are eternally possible, doesn't hold true until/unless you find a new variable (previously unseen) into the equation that changes our current understanding.

One can feel safe in many way's, but it usually involves some sort of stick/weapon.

Indeed, virtual emergence has not emerged... 🧐 Our best guess is like a weather forecast, we can predict tomorrow's weather with a great deal of accuracy because we have a model based on yesterday; next year is a mistery, because the model isn't real...

History would suggest organic evolution, how could we emulate that process, mechanically?

Just ask for clarification, for instance you seem to be misunderstanding what cryptic means, because most of my post's are metaphorical/analogical; I'm not smart enough to provide cryptic clues. How can you mitigate the risk of an emergent quality? Especially one that you can never know if or when it has emerged...

Ironically, America's strategy in this context is built on war game simulations (you can't get anymore sanitised than that), nearly all of which ended with no nukes being fired; does Kirk's wisdom work in this case? Yes, but we'd have to trust, them... On a side note, a small exchange of nukes between India and Pakistan (250 nukes used) was run in a global simulation; that might be all it takes for humanity to face armageddon.

Way to miss the point... But it's not the computer that decides to infect us, and while that may emerge from the complexity of human intention's; the computer remains a tool, that's just as happy to rust in an unused tool box.

So is a loom, but here we are discussing it's descendants.

We've been going round in circle's for nine page's now and I'm running out of way's to say the same thing, a computer doesn't think it compares, much like an automated loom running a perforated card program; there's no reason to think that's alive/sentient/conscious in any sense, even though the loom is much better at the job than a human loom operater. Essentially your argument is, what if that rock suddenly wakes up.