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Why do people want to claim vague terms like sentience, self-awareness, consciousness, “general” as in intelligence etc? You don’t actually clarify anything of significance and nothing if consequence happens if you do persuade anyone the label applies
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Robot that can perceive its body has self-awareness, claim researchers | New Scientist newscientist.com/article/232824, see more tweetedtimes.com/futuristwatche
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These terms matter a lot to public policy regarding AI because we use word definitions in our mental/moral heuristics. Look at how much public policy debate centers around the idea of when someone is “alive,” either at the beginning or the end of their lives.
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Assigning these words is how the way we think about things changes. The public discourse doesn’t have a precise moral philosophy rooted in defined axioms: it is itself vague and based on assigning a broad category label to a thing and using that label to guide behaviors.
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Not really. This is closer to Arizona legislature declaring pi=3 in the 19th century. Public discourse is noise. Definitions improve when we actually discover more. Public policy is a lagging formalization around specific consequences. The current discourse is just noise