darrin wrote: ↑Wed Feb 20, 2019 11:14 am
malcolm125k wrote: ↑Wed Feb 20, 2019 8:59 am
She shoved him around, broke things, got angry and stormed off, all because of a point of view that essentially went "How dare you judge us by our personalities! How shallow!"
No, that's pretty much the opposite of the "point of view" in question. "How dare you treat actual women as templates from which idealized 'components' can be lifted and commoditized into products for your own profit" would be closer imo -- and still ignores the issue of Ping herself, and the ultimate fate of those self-aware "products" once distributed amongst the "buyers". Now maybe his burblings on "fake people" didn't get through to Ashe yet, maybe it will take further conversation with Ping for Ashe to figure that part out... or maybe she already did, in which case her expression of anger here was completely appropriate, and not justifiably characterizable as a "tantrum". Unless people also think Liam Neeson was "throwing tantrums" in the Taken movies for example.
<scratches head>
From an engineering point of view:
We built better furniture and computer peripherals by observing how people's bodies rested and moved.
We figured out flight by observing birds.
We figured out how to build better ships by looking at fish.
Whole schools of martial arts were developed by observing how animals fought.
But AI's, or at least artificial personalities, should be developed without observing real personalities?
If you can explain how that works, please, be my guest.
As to the tantrum, I have no idea how Liam Neeson acted in the Taken movies, but if he walked up to someone he just met, got angry at them for developing something he didn't approve of, and then got physical and caused them to incur a monetary loss for no good reason, broke things and then stormed off after yelling at them, then yes. He threw a tantrum.
And the statement "We are more than the sum of our parts" begs the question of "OK, what is the 'more'?" If the argument is that the parts combine to synthesize something more, than it is still not inconsistent with the development method. He is just choosing which parts, the way a geneticist might choose a set of genes to get a physical attribute. The parts added might create something unstable, or produce unexpected traits that are undesirable, but the only way to know that is trial and error. His only sin in that is, perhaps, being arrogant to stand as the gatekeeper for what is "desirable". But, as he is striving to create a tool and not a person, perhaps that can be excused.
If that "more" is a reference to a soul, some undefinable extra thing that happens for people not just patched together out of parts, then the argument here leads to the logical conclusion that Ping is soulless, and can't be a person because of that lack. But as such, Ping then loses the status required to have evil done to her, because if she is a not-person, mistreating her would be akin to mistreating a car.
I think the only real moral high ground here would be to say "How dare you have the hubris to dictate what is and is not desirable and then use that to manufacture a person." Accusation of playing God through electronic eugenics, if you will.
But, that presupposes that Ping is Person, not Thing, and foxgirl's very statement argues against that, strangely enough.
Edit: I would like to point out as well that should Ping be Person (I hold this opinion), then buying and selling "Pings" would be slavery, and deleting or scrapping them murder, so that bit of Evil exists but has not been realized yet.