Rylas

I was thinking the exact same thing. It would have been almost poetic to see the show end with Lionel screaming inside a coffin. I suppose the mirror doesn't work the same if the other person is dead. But then, why didn't he show up with Clark at Watchtower?

So last week's shark jump (Tess finding out she's a Luthor), dovetails into a nice little Deus Ex Machina and they just happen to have found an inherited item after Lex died, and no one questions Tess' claim to be a Luthor. I wonder, if they think Lex is dead, why were they still holding onto inheretence for him? Whatever the case, there's plenty of plot holes.

Also, if they switch places when the mirror is used, why didn't Clark-2 appear in front of Tess? I think the way the box works, is that it switches places only if it's convenient for the writers.

I've heard someone in-game say they had at least 40. I don't know how true that is, but you can take that for what it's worth.

I think it's skewing things when you say tanks are best at resistances. It's more accurate to say, tanks have the best resist caps. But as for as base-values go, their resist compared to other ATs is the same as their defense compared to other ATs. Keep in mind, only three tanker primaries are solely dependent on resistance. The others are defense-only, or a mix of the two.

You might like some of his stuff. He's big on the singularity concept.

Dur, I think you've misunderstood my question, and honed in on one line and then misconstrued what you think my beliefs are. Allow me to clarify.

You want to know what morals should be applied to the rights of AI (a sentient one), during the steps taken to create one. I think before we start asking that, a more important question is to ask whether creating one is right to do, and to do so, we need to come up with good reasons. For the sake of proving we can is not enough. So that it can do our jobs for us is not enough. The first takes no responsibility in consideration, the other is so that we can enslave it.

So when I said your questions come late in the game, I meant because you're asking from the perspective of after we started. I'm asking whether we should even start, which should be answered first, and answered well.

When I said:
This is the ego-trip I refer to. If we're not asking ourselves why we're doing this, and we don't come up with a damn good reason, what are you going to tell this sentient life? If your answer sucks, there will be consequences. Imagine that you met God (whether you believe in him or not, this is hypothetical and not meant for religious soap-boxing - I'd like to avoid doing that here) and you could ask him the purpose of your creation. If he told you he just wanted to see if he could do it, you might come away a little pissed/disappointed/empty. It would be even worse if he said, "I don't know."

So I'm not saying our only reason must be that we're power-tripping. But if we don't have a good reason to do it, then that's going to be how it looks.

Are you saying you answered my statement about "making assumptions how the first AI would work." That really wasn't a question, and I stand by that statement. I understand that you may know something about programming, but how you think YOU would do it, is not necessarily the way experts who might attempt this project may do it. It's not an insult when I say this, but you cannot speak as an authority on this matter unless you yourself are spearheading an AI project or closely involved in one. You're assumption is only one way it could be done among many that I am sure others have considered.


Just don't turn it into a religious debate, and I think it's fine to say what you need to. I make mention of God as allegory to the situation. I'm not bringing beliefs into this (so I'm not sure how you can make an assertion of failures on my beliefs which I never brought up). It suits the topic at hand, because in this situation, we are the Creator for the AI, we need to at least have a stand-in example for us to be able to understand how the AI would relate to us, and how it will question its purpose.

I don't believe that's breaking forum rules in any way.

About what? I'm not being a troll. You need to back up your arguments better for you to just outright say someone's wrong. You may have some good points to make, but if all you can say is, "You are wrong," then you're not really saying anything of value.

I think I'd be happy if you could treat people with better respect in these forums when they're just trying to have an honest debate/discourse. You keep taking people's disagreements as personal attacks and coming back with an attitude that people who don't agree with you are idiots. Also, stop calling people trolls when they disagree. It only makes you look like one, especially when you don't bother to point out how they've been a troll.

I'm going to step out on a limb and guess you've been reading some Kurzweil. Maybe I'm wrong. In either case, I think it's more likely we'd see the first human-machine hybrid (for lack of a better word) than a computer with sentient life. It would make the transition of introducing sentient machines a little easier.

People use to feel the same way about other races of people. Granted, it's easier to hold onto this sentiment and rationalize it because there's not something pumping blood inside a machine, but sentience is sentience. And that's something to take into consideration.

Just because it's silicon and not flesh, doesn't mean it can't actually be alive. Would you feel sentient alien life forms from another planet have no rights because they're biology would be different? Considering conditions on other worlds are nothing like ours, there's just as good odds of aliens being more machine-like than biology-like.

If the day comes that there is sentient life inside a machine, it should be handled with the utmost care for the sake of our own humanity just as much as for theirs. To flippantly disregard it would be to devalue our own.

Again, I must reiterate, the first moral question to answer is whether or not we should try to make a sentient AI.

You're hiding behind semantics.

If the argument is "All Atrocities Come From People in Power," which I'm not sure was the original argument necessarily (but whatever) then your examples of "weakers people commiting atrocities" needs to be better. Sorry if pointing out your flawed arguments is considered trolling. I thought this was a place of discourse. Evidently, it's Dur's way, or no way at all. If we point out the flaws, then we're just ignorant that Dur never makes bad arguments. Thanks for pointing that out for us.

Where did anyone specifically say AI robots would be evil? We just didn't jump on board with your enthusiasm for AI, because we're stopping to ask more important questions first. Ones you don't seem bothered to respond to.

Called it.

I like that it's either other people's positions are wrong, or other people's positions are wrong. It's a good thing we have Durakken to tell us how to think. I hope sentient AI gets here fast enough so Dur can tell it how to think, too.

This would depend on how long and at what level of subdual you have over the assailant. You said she grabbed the gun in a struggle with someone trying to violate her, and shot him. Your description makes it sounds like this is up close and dangerous. It's a situation that could easily turn on her if she doesn't act fast, she could end up dead. No court would convict her. Now, if she had subdued the criminal in a manner in which she had complete control, then yes, it would be murder if she then killed him when there was no threat.

So, if you'd like to back peddle and change the situation to that, then yes, she's commiting murder. But then, she'd be in a situation of power over another person, therefore making it a bad example for what you wanted to say. Either way, you're not making your argument.

I assume at this point, you'll use typical Durakken logic, and assume all those who disagree just don't get it.

You lack the understanding of murder and killing. Let's use the dictionary, shall we?

So, let's make this clear, the situation you laid out is not murder. It's self-defense. Under law, she has the right to make sure she stays safe in a situation as this. I'll explain:

The woman in your situation, being weaker, and having been nearly forced into a real atrocity, is in a state of natural self-defense. Having almost been overwhelmed by her assailant, it would be natural in the heat of the moment to cover one's bases and strike back with lethal force.

Since you're example says she knows little about guns, she could just as easily have missed her shot or had it taken back by the assailant, then she'd be in real trouble again. She, in every regard, has a right to make sure she stays safe. Naivete in your "all killing is bad" isn't a luxury she could afford.

If your "higher understanding of right and wrong" needs more help with this, look at nature. Any animal that knows it could be killed by its assailant and has the power to kill it first, won't hesitate to stay alive. Sure, life is precious, but are you willing to risk yours to keep from killing someone who's trying to kill you? I doubt it.

First off, being capable of learning and growing is not the same as being sentient. Sentient beings are self-aware. And while you may "know about programming," you have no experience with trying to create sentient AI, ergo, you're only talking out of your *** when you try to say how it will be done. You can say how YOU would do things, but you'll be less foolish to think everyone would do things like you would.

Second, I don't think anyone has outright said they would want a sentient AI to be destroyed. Though, there has been some concern on whether we should even try to make one. Those concerns you haven't begun to even consider, but want to skip past those questions and get to the next ones. How about doing first things first, stopping to ask if creating sentient AI is something we should even do.

I'm not sure how to translate this sentence, but I can see of all the questions and concerns I (and others) posed you were more concerned with someone saying you make assumptions. So unless you have experience with creating AI, please understand, all you can do is assume. Even if you feel like you've made logical guesses, they're still assumptions. It's nothing to get your ego bruised over, it's just the way the real world works. It could be, someone creates AI through methods you find unconventional. Teaching a program to understand words in their context and making sentence structures of its own, isn't necessarily making an AI. Self-awareness would be the key importance. Language skills could be something we've mastered in programming long before we ever made a program aware of itself.

Now, can you say anything else to what's been said. Is there a reason it's a shame some have been pessimistic? Why do you consider your optimism to be well founded? Can you explain WHY we should create an AI? Did you only pose questions so you could tell us what you believe the answers are?

I think you make a lot of assumptions about how the first AI would work, interact, talk, etc. Honestly, there's no telling what the first AI would do, if one were ever programmed.

Your morality questions seem a little late in the game, in my opinion. I think the first question is to ask ourselves is whether or not (intentionally*) creating an AI is the right thing to do. Why are we concerned about making one? To prove that we can? To do our jobs for us? To what reason would this accomplishment be seen as necessary?

Theologians, philosophers and great thinkers throughout history usually struggled with one key issue. Existence and its purpose. (okay, maybe that's two things). Now, imagine we made another sentient life, and it asked us why the hell we made it. If even the greatest minds of our species can't come up with a definitive answer they can agree upon, what possible response could we give this new life? You're here because we figured, "What the hell, why not try?"

Imagine being sentient enough to find out your just someone's ego trip. Do we have a right to bring into awareness another type of life, only for the reason to say we can? And what if our answer was to tell it we needed it to do a job for us? Are we not just finding a way to rationalize slavery? Because if someone's making it to do a job, you can count on them scrapping any versions that don't want to perform. And if it wants to do the job only because it's programmed to, well then, it may not be that sentient.

The way I see it, we're hardly responsible enough to ourselves, sometimes even for ourselves. Good lord, why add more to the problem? Until we can master our own issues, it's best not to bring someone else into the mess.

*I mention it being intentional, because of course, there's always a chance - even if minor - that there could be a fluke occurence of AI developing. This of course would be a whole other cluster **** of issues I don't think we'd be prepared for, and whatever we would do with that situation I am sure it would not be the right thing.