Re: poly: Dumbing down AIs (was: Modeling Economic Singularitie

From: Robin Hanson <hanson@econ.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sun Apr 26 1998 - 17:05:56 PDT

Nick B. writes:
>At this point you might object: If there is a certain job that can be
>done equally cheaply by either a mindless robot or a conscious AI,
>then, other things equal, it would be better to have the job done by
>the AI.

Yes, that was my objection.

>-Well, that makes sense. But are other things equal? In the one case
>we would have to give the worker rights, in the other we wouldn't. I
>suppose that the overall utility will depend on what rights our
>society requires us to give the AI. If we have a bad rights system,
>say with nasty unions imposing high minimum wages etc., then the
>total utility might be higher if we can circumvent the rights system
>by building an unconscious robot.

I was assuming that whether the conscious AIs should have "rights" was
also under consideration.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Mon Apr 27 00:09:44 1998

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Mar 07 2006 - 14:45:30 PST