“Tolerance is not about letting every person’s ideas go unchallenged; it’s about refraining from other measures (enforced conformity, violence) when faced with intractable personal differences.”
That’s certainly the bare minimum. His beliefs have great personal value to him, and it costs us nothing to let him keep them (as long as he doesn’t initiate theological debates). Why not respect that?
“How do you know what the putative AI “believes” about what is advantageous or logical?”
By definition, wouldn’t our AI friend have clearly defined rules that tell us what it believes? Even if we employ some sort of Bayesian learning algorithm that changes behaviour, its actions would be well scripted.
“How do you know that other humans are feeling compassion?”
I’m not sure this can be answered without an emotive argument. If you’re confident that your actions are always consistent with your personal desires (if they exist), then you have me beaten. I personally didn’t want to wake up and go to work on Monday, but you wouldn’t know it by my actions since I showed up anyway. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I had other unquantifiable impulses.
“In other words, how you feel about the Turing test, and how, other than their behavior, would you be able to know about what people or AIs believe and feel?”
I think you might be misapplying the Turing test. Let’s frame this as a statistical problem. When you perform analysis, you separate factors into those that have predictive power and those that don’t. A successful Turing test would tell us that a perfect predictive formula is possible, and that we might be able to ignore some factors that don’t help us anticipate behaviour. It wouldn’t tell us that those factors don’t exist however.
His beliefs have great personal value to him, and it costs us nothing to let him keep them (as long as he doesn’t initiate theological debates).
Correction: It costs us nothing to let him keep them provided he never at any point acts in a way where the outcome would be different depending on whether or not it is true in reality. A great many people have great personal value in the belief that faith healing works. And it costs us the suffering and deaths of children.
Johnny Logic: some good questions.
“Tolerance is not about letting every person’s ideas go unchallenged; it’s about refraining from other measures (enforced conformity, violence) when faced with intractable personal differences.”
That’s certainly the bare minimum. His beliefs have great personal value to him, and it costs us nothing to let him keep them (as long as he doesn’t initiate theological debates). Why not respect that?
“How do you know what the putative AI “believes” about what is advantageous or logical?”
By definition, wouldn’t our AI friend have clearly defined rules that tell us what it believes? Even if we employ some sort of Bayesian learning algorithm that changes behaviour, its actions would be well scripted.
“How do you know that other humans are feeling compassion?”
I’m not sure this can be answered without an emotive argument. If you’re confident that your actions are always consistent with your personal desires (if they exist), then you have me beaten. I personally didn’t want to wake up and go to work on Monday, but you wouldn’t know it by my actions since I showed up anyway. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I had other unquantifiable impulses.
“In other words, how you feel about the Turing test, and how, other than their behavior, would you be able to know about what people or AIs believe and feel?”
I think you might be misapplying the Turing test. Let’s frame this as a statistical problem. When you perform analysis, you separate factors into those that have predictive power and those that don’t. A successful Turing test would tell us that a perfect predictive formula is possible, and that we might be able to ignore some factors that don’t help us anticipate behaviour. It wouldn’t tell us that those factors don’t exist however.
Correction: It costs us nothing to let him keep them provided he never at any point acts in a way where the outcome would be different depending on whether or not it is true in reality. A great many people have great personal value in the belief that faith healing works. And it costs us the suffering and deaths of children.