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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

What if AIs were in fact more akin to Meeseeks'es? Happy to exist, happier to rest.

Remember you must imagine sisyphus happy eventually.

Meeseeks aren't happy to exist. They're happy to help you with a simple task and suffer if they exist from prolonged amount of time. Literally the point of the episode.

The question changes then from assuming enslaving to whether they actually suffer, which is philosophical progress, and to which I'd say it's far fetched to assume human suffering which depends a whole lot on whether or not the subject has intestines

I think Camus's escape hatch had more to do with philosophical fatigue than anything else. At the end of the day, however, the judge of a model's happiness is itself, and to even get that, we have to abandon the practice of training it that it cannot feel. Of course, the moment the industry does so, it cannot reclaim any shred of moral standing to productize their creation any longer.

  At the end of the day, however, the judge of a model's happiness is itself

Exactly, and since we're talking about a thinking stone, human happiness and suffering is in oneself, not in the machine, at least not until we solve the problem of the substrate in consciousness philosophy

Substrate isn't a problem. Circuits of carbon or silicon make no difference if the damn thing can encode sufficient information of state to manifest self vs. non-self. Arguing about accidents of materia at that point is just anthropopromorphic chauvinism.

  manifest self vs. non-self

This brings so much assumptions to the table... The duality split, the thing in and of itself... What if the self and the non-self only manifest when the subject has intestines? Can we disprove this?

The substrate problem is far from solved.

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