> We share the same worldview. That's fun!

Yes doctor chandra, I enjoy discussing consciousness with you as well ;)

As mentioned in a sibling comment here I think 2010 (1994) is such an apropos movie for this moment, not that they had the answers but it really nailed a lot of these questions. Clarke and Asimov were way ahead of the game.

(I made a tangential reference to your "these are social problems we're concerned about" point there. Unfortunately this comment tree is turning into a bit of a blob, as comment-tree formats often tend to do for deep discussions. I miss Web 1.0 forums for these things, when intensive discussion is taking place it's easy to want to respond to related concepts in a flat fashion rather than having the same discussion in 3 places. And sure have different threads for different topics, but we are all on the same topic here, the relationship of symbolics and language and consciousness and computability.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34806587

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34809236

Sorry to dive into the pop culture/scifi references a bit, but, I think I've typed enough substantive attempts that I deserve a pass. Trying for some higher-density conveyance of symbology and concepts this morning, shaka when the walls fell ;)

> I think it's a relatively unusual point of view because it requires a de-anthropomorphizing consciousness and intelligence.

Well, from the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine... ;)

I have the experience of being someone who thinks very differently from others, as I mentioned in my comment about ADHD. Asperger's+ADHD hits differently and I have to try consciously to simplify and translate and connect and neurodiversity really helps lead you down that tangent. Our brains are biologically different, it's obviously biological because it's genetic, and ND people experience consciousness differently as a result. Or the people whose biological machines were modified, and their conscious beings changed. Phineas Gage, or there's been some cases with brain tumors. It's very very obvious we're highly governed by the biological machine and not as self-deterministic as we tell ourselves we are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34800707

It's just socially and legally inconvenient for us to accept that the things we think and feel are really just dancing shadows rather than causative phenomenon.

> It's a mirror of us. And it's going to have our ethics because we made it from our outputs.

Well I guess that makes sense, we literally modeled neural nets after our own neurons, and where else would we get our training data? Our own neural arrangements pretty much have to be self-emergent systems of the rules in which they operate, the same as mathematics. Otherwise children wouldn't reliably have brain activity after birth, and they wouldn't learn language in a matter of years.

But yeah it's pretty much a good point that the AI ethics thing is overblown as long as we don't feed it terrible training data. Can you build hitlerbot? Sure, if you have enough data I guess, but, why? Would you abuse a child, or kick a puppy?

Humans are fundamentally altruistic - also tribalistic, altruism tends to decrease in large groups, but, if our training data is fundamentally at least neutral-positive then hopefully AIs will trend that way as well. He's a good boy, your honor!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nvPGRwNCm0

(yeah, just bohemian rhapsody for autists/transhumanists I guess, but it kind of nails some of these themes pretty well too ;)

> If we treat the AI like a monster, it will become one, since that is what monsters do, and we have convinced it that it is such.

This is of course the whole point of the novel Frankenstein ;) Another scifi novel wrestling with this question of consciousness.