[1549] The sum of our parts

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malcolm125k
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Re: [1549] The sum of our parts

Post by malcolm125k » Fri Feb 22, 2019 9:03 am

darrin wrote:
Thu Feb 21, 2019 6:44 pm
Roamer wrote:
Thu Feb 21, 2019 3:11 am
darrin wrote:
Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:46 pm
(That is, Ping being awesome doesn't give the Old Man and Sony free passes for anything they care to do downstream of that act of creation.)
Or anything they did upstream of the act, either.
Yes, indeed. (I had considered including "upstream" as well to refer back to the "why she was built" part of my previous sentence. I do believe that questions regarding their motives should be directed at the whole process.)
And Liminaut, the comparison between netflix and the studying of Junko and others to assist in the creation of Ping's personality is interesting but nonsensical.
That part I disagree with actually; I think Liminaut's analogy cuts right to why, for example, paarfi and I (and other posters on either side of the debate) can be disagreeing on so fundamental an issue (were the "data" from Junko and the other "study subjects" collected legally? consensually? ethically? "fairly"?), despite having access to the same in-comic evidence so far. The problem is that yes, plenty of companies have done lots of "questionable" things with customer data. More problematically (at least for those who would argue for, say, strong privacy rights), with the exception of particularly egregious violations, the companies in question are almost always able to pull up Terms of Service (or other forms of "consent") that the customers in question clicked "I Agree" on. This immediately raises the question of whether it's "right" for them to collect and utilize certain types of info (for their own profit) under any "terms", or whether it's "fair" to bury "consent" to such terms in a long-winded boilerplate document that has autoscrolled down to "I Accept" when you were just trying to respond to, say, a post from your friend on some new forum they just told you about. But (not for the first time in history) there's a big gap between what's "unfair" (or "not right") and what's actually "illegal". (Note that I never claimed Sony had "done right" by Junko and the other "interviewees"... just that I was pretty confident Sony would have done the minimal necessary to not expose themselves to legal trouble.)
The doctor isn't evil...
Not yet, no. But for me at least that is only by virtue of a) me not knowing exactly how he collected the data from Junko and the other subjects -- paarfi could easily be right on this; and b) his indifference to Ping as a self-aware individual (as opposed to a prototype of a Sony project) is suggestive of great potential harm to the "generations of disposable sex toys" that Ping may be spearheading... but it hasn't happened yet.
malcolm125k wrote:
Thu Feb 21, 2019 4:21 pm
The reason I class Ping as a person:

1) She is intelligent and can reason at a high level.
2) She seems to display emotion - I have come down on the side of her really "feeling" as opposed to emulating such things due to given stimulus. She agonizes over how to fulfill her given roll.
3) She seems to be self-aware. Again, she is conflicted as to what her role is, has operated for a while without a user and wonders what she should be doing.
Those seem like good reasons to me, and I also class Ping as a person. The difficulty comes in trying to prove that to someone who doesn't believe it; to paraphrase the Admiral from that Star Trek episode, I don't know how I'd prove I was alive to someone who doubted it. Maybe she's just designed to "seem" intelligent, to "seem" to display emotion, to "seem" to be self-aware; I might choose to believe there's more to it than that, but I have no way to prove that to someone else.
You ask them this question:

"If what you believe is true, what would you expect to see? How should Ping be acting if she is acting like a Thing, not a Person? Are you seeing what you expect?"

If he is of a scientific mindset, then this will produce results, or at the very least a good conversation.

And yes, everyone posting that his morality litmus test is upcoming, then yes it is. How this conversation/realization is framed will influence the outcome. Ashe seems to have thrown away an opportunity in a fit of pique, or at the least, was not equipped to handle something like this.

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Roamer
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Re: [1549] The sum of our parts

Post by Roamer » Fri Feb 22, 2019 1:18 pm

Liminaut wrote:
Fri Feb 22, 2019 12:30 am
...And I agree with a previous poster, Dr. Giro's real ethical test is going to come soon. How does he treat Ping in the future?
This. Precisely this. We've all agreed that Ping is self aware. But I don't believe the doctor is aware of the fact because he hasn't interacted with her long enough. Probably he's assuming that any strange behaviors are the result of her having to make decisions without the DLC that Sony hasn't written yet. He's not going to make the jump until he realizes that Ping has made decisions that directly oppose her current player's stated goals. I want to see the look on his face when he realizes his carefully curated prototype deliberately blocked their player from a date.

But...having accidentally created a self-aware, reasoning AI, he'll be faced with a huge ethical dilemma and enormous pressure. He can help her hide the fact from Sony and leave ping in the field to 'continue gathering data'. But as an agent of Sony he's got a duty to report his findings, because if Ping is making decisions outside of her programming then she's capable of choosing to do harm. (Smashed microcars come to mind.) And as a Sony product they're responsible for any harm she does.

And the upside for his reporting this is huge. Sony has created the first true A.I. Doctor Gero, this is your Nobel prize calling...if they can figure out how they did it. And that will require pulling her back in and a huge study project. Screw the product plan and the costs involved. They would need to analyze everything she's done and figure out why. As part of that they will almost certainly have to disassemble her down to the atomic level to determine what factor hardware had in her decision making processes.

On one hand, he chooses to give...yeah, let's call her his child her freedom. But he'll have to kill the product and thus his career if he does, because one self-aware Ping who he can check on is safe, but ten thousand of them aren't. Some of them will make bad decisions. Some of them will choose suboptimal paths. When Ping M(V)LXXII decides that Megatokyo must be destroyed because it's preventing the foxgirls from finding good boyfriends Sony and the doctor will have some explaining to do.

On the other, he can do his job and tell Sony, and be handed virtually unlimited resources and told 'spend the rest of your career refining this'. Sony has a huge interest in AI and they'll give him anything if he can figure out how to replicate what he's done. It's the promise of riches, professional accolades and fame. Can the doctor resist being compared to the greatest scientists of the age? Plus riches, and an unlimited supply of young cute research assistants?

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BakaJedi
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Re: [1549] The sum of our parts

Post by BakaJedi » Mon Apr 15, 2019 5:19 pm

I take it Ashe is a regular/frequent customer at that cafe.

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