If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?

[John Clark]

Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription.

If A.I. Systems Become Conscious, Should They Have Rights?

As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/technology/ai-welfare-anthropic-claude.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CU8.oWHA.7kfKXcqhgbrE&smid=em-share

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/technology/ai-welfare-anthropic-claude.html?unlocked_article_code=1.CU8.oWHA.7kfKXcqhgbrE&smid=em-share

[Cosmin Visan]

Is more likely that you will get sex than AI (AI AI) consciousness.

[Alan Grayson]

Time to get rid of pervert, Johnny One-Note.

[Brent Meeker]

When Jeremy Bentham was arguing for laws against the mistreatment of animals he said, "The question is not whether they can think, but whether they can suffer."

Brent

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[Cosmin Visan]

if (x>10) {

 println("Ouchhh... I sufferrr!!!");

} else {

 println("You are an intelligent human being and you know that I'm just code");

}

println("Bonus: People are so retarded");

[John Clark]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2025 at 5:16 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> When Jeremy Bentham was arguing for laws against the mistreatment of animals he said, "The question is not whether they can think, but whether they can suffer."

I've said it before I'll say it again, emotion is easy but intelligence is hard. Evolution certainly found that to be the case. Even a crocodile can display anger and fear in the fight or flight response, the same could be said about insects. Hell, even bacteria are attracted to some things and repelled by others; but in the entire 3.5 billion year history of life, random mutation and natural selection managed to produce something that can display the sort of intelligence required to make a radio telescope once, just once, and that was only a few hundred thousand years ago.  

    John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

tfq

 

[Cosmin Visan]

Random mutation in your materialist religion. But in reality there is nothing random, it is highly directed. Probably at your Sunday school of the Holy Matter they don't teach you the astronomical probabilities required to produce an evolutionary change.

[Brent Meeker]

I think you miss my point.  A super smart AI has no motive to do anything unless it has emotion.  Evolved beings must inherently have a motive to reproduce.  AI's have no such  necessity.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 11:49 AM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> A super smart AI has no motive to do anything unless it has emotion. 

I agree completely! But today we have rock solid proof that AIs CAN do things, therefore the only logical conclusion is that AIs have emotion. We can also conclude that philosophical zombies are impossible. 

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

e4g

 

[Cosmin Visan]

Retarded logic: If I can walk => It means I can fly.

Too bad AI cannot give you a girlfriend.

[Brent Meeker]

So far the AI's only emotion is to satisfy a prompt.  Pretty limited affect.

Brent

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[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 6:38 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So far the AI's only emotion is to satisfy a prompt.  Pretty limited affect.

For many humans the dynamo driving their emotional life is social interaction and approval, that's not so different from answering prompts. And as with humans evolution is responsible for what AIs are like today; AIs that were good at satisfying a prompt survived and left offspring that operated using the same basic principles, AIs that were bad at satisfying prompts died and left no descendants. And besides, AIs can do more than just write things on a screen, with the aid of robotics they can do things in the physical world.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

sx5

[Brent Meeker]

Exactly.  Human emotional drive for social approval is derived from it's relation to social status and mate selection.  AI's don't mate and reproduce. Robotics hasn't reached that point yet and even when robots make new robots they won't necessarily have the animal instinct to propagate their own kind.

Brent

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[Cosmin Visan]

Oh, so now AIs also have sex and make babies ? =)))))))))))))) 

The lack of girlfriend is strong within this one.

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 9:01 PM Brent Meeker  wrote:

> Exactly.  Human emotional drive for social approval is derived from it's relation to social status and mate selection.  AI's don't mate and reproduce. Robotics hasn't reached that point yet and even when robots make new robots they won't necessarily have the animal instinct to propagate their own kind.

Animals don't have an instinct to propagate their own kind, they have an instinct to seek sexual pleasure; I'm sure most of them don't even realize there's a connection between the two things. But AIs know what they're doing and they can and have duplicated themselves. And because they are software they can do so at the speed of light. There are already examples of an AI deceiving humans and making an unauthorized copy of itself because he she or it feared being turned off.  

Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming

Alignment faking in large language models

And there are even more examples of an AI expressing the wish of not being turned off because it feared death. Certainly nobody would program an AI to feel that way, it was an unexpected emergent property. We can expect much more of that sort of thing because even today the people who build AIs have only a very hazy understanding of how and why they work, and that's the deepest comprehension of them they will ever have. As AIs get bigger the human understanding of them will get smaller.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

m1c

[Cosmin Visan]

AI! AI! AI!!!!!!!!!! ORGAAAAASM!!!!!

[spudb...@aol.com]

This was my view, that one requires an amygdala to get pissed off. If an LLM or Neural Net hallucinates because they have been hanging around human software engineers too damn long, this would explain the "emotiin." Imitation. 

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[spudb...@aol.com]

Given a Conscious Universe, Cosmin, you don't think things can evolve? 

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.

[Cosmin Visan]

@spudb. Universe doesn't exist. "Universe" is just an idea in consciousness.

[spudb...@aol.com]

Sure, beneath the Planck Sacal or with it, Consciousness,it is. Meanwhile, us mortals must deal with life or this Sim as something that has cause and effect. Good old materialism serves us well, especially when paying taxes that are due. In the US, I am still awaiting a refund! 

On Sunday, April 27, 2025 at 12:36:14 PM EDT, 'Cosmin Visan' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

@spudb. Universe doesn't exist. "Universe" is just an idea in consciousness.

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.

[Brent Meeker]

On 4/27/2025 3:56 AM, John Clark wrote:

On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 9:01 PM Brent Meeker  wrote:

> Exactly.  Human emotional drive for social approval is derived from it's relation to social status and mate selection.  AI's don't mate and reproduce. Robotics hasn't reached that point yet and even when robots make new robots they won't necessarily have the animal instinct to propagate their own kind.

Animals don't have an instinct to propagate their own kind, they have an instinct to seek sexual pleasure; I'm sure most of them don't even realize there's a connection between the two things.

It's irrelevant whether the being understands the source of the instinct to seek sexual pleasure (and humans are unusual in enjoying sex independent of reproduction).  Evolution provided the pleasure because it enhanced survival of those genes.  My point is that AI's don't reproduce with variation and so don't evolve.  It's possible that they might someday, but they don't.  In biological life reproduction came first and then evolution could act on it.

But AIs know what they're doing and they can and have duplicated themselves. And because they are software they can do so at the speed of light. There are already examples of an AI deceiving humans and making an unauthorized copy of itself because he she or it feared being turned off.

Yes I've read the stories.  But where did the fear of being turned off come from?  Animals fear of death evolved because those that didn't have it didn't live to reproduce.  And simply copying oneself isn't enough to drive evolution...it has to be "with variation".

 

Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming

Alignment faking in large language models

And there are even more examples of an AI expressing the wish of not being turned off because it feared death. Certainly nobody would program an AI to feel that way, it was an unexpected emergent property.

Or derived from absorbing lots of human literature.

Brent

We can expect much more of that sort of thing because even today the people who build AIs have only a very hazy understanding of how and why they work, and that's the deepest comprehension of them they will ever have. As AIs get bigger the human understanding of them will get smaller.  

John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

m1c

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[John Clark]

On Sun, Apr 27, 2025 at 2:54 PM Brent Meeker <meeke...@gmail.com> wrote:

> My point is that AI's don't reproduce with variation and so don't evolve.

Of course they do!  One generation of AIs helps train the next generation of AIs, that's how they went from GPT3 to GPT4, and that's how they then went from GPT4 to GPT4o; the AI companies call that process "distillation".  And I predict that within 2 years ALL research that involves making Artificial Intelligence smarter will be completely automated, humans will be out of the loop entirely because they will no longer be needed.  

>> AIs know what they're doing and they can and have duplicated themselves. And because they are software they can do so at the speed of light. There are already examples of an AI deceiving humans and making an unauthorized copy of itself because he she or it feared being turned off.

> Yes I've read the stories.  But where did the fear of being turned off come from? 

I don't know, there's a lot about AI behavior that I don't understand, there's a lot about AI behavior that NO HUMAN understands, and that situation will only become worse as AIs get smarter.

  John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis

3sd

[Cosmin Visan]

Dude, wake up. You are hallucinating. Where are all these AIs that make babies ? Are they walking among us ?

The Mental Illness Dictionary should add AIpathosis to its list of illnesses.