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Comment by alan_cx | Hacker News Reader

If that were to happen, I would suggest that an artificial "soul" could or would be created. Once you have that on your hands, things being to get interesting. Ethics, religion law, and so on will have one hell of a job on their hands. Especially when you consider that there would be immediate and obvious military applications.

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Do animals have souls, and do we care?

A cow kicked a lantern and burned down Chicago.

A powerful and incensed AI could destroy the foundations of global society before we would even know what's going on.

What does that have to do with a soul, whether one exists, or whether we care?

A powerful and incensed President could order a nuclear strike that could end civilization as we know it. Why the concern over a theoretical intelligence that could theoretically have emotion and theoretically have so much power it could theoretically do the same?

It's hard work to become president. It is much easier to build software that can be hacked to cause far greater devastation than things can be built. Presumably an AI can hack better than humans.

It doesn't matter what we define as a soul, it is the relationship humanity will have with artificial intelligences that matters. If we don't ask these questions, our children will wish we had...if they're still around.

No. You are comparing something that we know is possible, to something where we have no idea if/when it will be possible. So for all we know, it's infinitely easier to become a president. There have been 43 individuals in history who have become US president. There are 0 individuals in history who have built devastating AI.

We care if an animal is intelligent, because then it is sentient like us, and has rights.

Why does it have rights? Why do we have rights? Which rights do we have?

That's how perceive things. It's judged by us as the best way to secure our own interests. It can be seen as a pact between intelligent creatures to shown each other mutual respect.

A fascinating account of how a wide range of species exhibit sophisticated intelligent behaviour we normally only ascribe to humans.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-liv...

We can't know whether animals have a soul any more conclusively than we can know that about ourselves. But it's arguable that one is not less probable than the other.

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