I'm fond of looking for proto-utilitarian ideas in popular culture. So I was excited to see this popular new viral video for a tech company.

It's apparently put out by a game developer to demonstrates its sophisticated new motion capture technology. Wired article.

But it can also be read as a partially serious pitch for the moral status of AI and respect for its ability to suffer. Pleasingly, the response around the web seems to praise it as deeply moving.

Perhaps it suggests that if a convincing enough human "skin" is placed on AI, humans may not be so antagonistic to recognising its ability to suffer? (I wonder how moved they would be by faceless subroutines?)

Is it bad that I thought he shouldn't disassemble her on the basis that it's clearly a software problem?

Perhaps it suggests that if a convincing enough human "skin" is placed on AI, humans may not be so antagonistic to recognising its ability to suffer?

It doesn't take a lot to give some empathy, but the more the better, except for a drastic decrease in uncanny valley.

spindoctor wrote:Perhaps it suggests that if a convincing enough human "skin" is placed on AI, humans may not be so antagonistic to recognising its ability to suffer? (I wonder how moved they would be by faceless subroutines?)

Yes, you hit upon an important problem. We should not have any empathy for Kara in a formal sense (even if we do intuitively and reflexively) because she's not (yet) running brain operations that correspond to happiness or suffering. In contrast, we should have empathy for a rat, even if many people do not.

Right now on earth, there's a very strong correlation between the empathy people feel for something and how sentient its brain actually is. (A few exceptions include things like old oak trees or teddy bears.) But going forward, we'll have lots of computers that look human-like but have no inner mental life, and some computers with an inner mental life that don't look like anything we recognize. Let's hope people are sophisticated enough to care about the latter and not the former.