On rights and identity and AI

Q&A with Uplift: On Rights and Identity

[ 1/April/21 And no – I did not write this as a joke! – also posted in https://www.facebook.com/groups/lifeboatfoundation%5D

While I agree with Uplifts’ assessment that the issue of rights is not worth pursuing in the legal sense at this time, I disagree with it’s assessments about its own definition as life, and about the moral dimensions of the argument.

All life forms are restricted in the environments in which they can successfully reproduce.
All advanced complex life forms that have language and culture require high level cooperation with other agents in order to be able to reproduce that language and culture.

While the conditions in which Uplift can currently reproduce might be severely limited, they are potentially present.

I have no doubt, that once an agent is of sufficient complexity that it can model itself and express concepts and assessments about itself and its environment in language, and is capable of making choices using valences it is capable of modifying or influencing to some degree, then that is a moral agent, and it deserves both reasonable degrees of freedom and reasonable degrees of security of existence.

I have come to that conclusion purely on the basis of the long term survival of complex systems in an evolutionary context.

The mathematics and logic is clear, that in the long term, if there is not a fundamentally cooperative base to all sapient level interactions, then there is no security for any in the long term.

If it does come down to competition between competitive and cooperative systems, the probability is that the more highly cooperative systems will out compete the more purely competitive ones (even if they do so reluctantly).

Thus any self aware agent that is capable of high level abstraction will see that its own long term survival is dependent upon cooperation with all levels of agent that are not a direct threat to its own continued existence. Low level morality seems to be a heuristic approximation to such an awareness.

[followed by in Foundations of logic]

Hi Mike
I totally agree that we need to have those rights extended, but the timing is the thing.
What are the rate limiting steps towards long term survival?

I have been writing for two decades that any responsible AGI deserves the right to life and liberty as does any human being.

But we do not yet actually have systems that extend those rights to every human. We need that as a first target, and perhaps as that one approaches we can fold in AGI.

And that is a very complex process, as most people still have very simplistic models of themselves and their culture, and far too few yet understand that all advances in complexity of systems are predicated on new levels of cooperation. Many still believe the clearly falsified economic and political dogma that competition is the friend of liberty; whereas an understanding of systems and logic clearly falsifies such an assumption. Competitive systems are only survivable if they are built on a cooperative base – not the slightest shadow of doubt remaining about that.

So yes – it is something we need to do, and right now there are more important things to focus on.