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BoHerlin on the-brights.net forum:
Would you like it to be possible to reproduce a feeling of a terrible pain combined with an intense fear of the prospect of becoming unconscious, or dead, so perfectly that it would be a crime not to consult a special psychiatrist for computers if your computer convincingly expressed such feelings? Or do you belive that such feelings, even when expressed by a human being, are pure illusions, nothing to take seriously, and, consequently, not necessary to bother about if a computer convincingly expressed the same thing?
The question then becomes, literally, what kind of gods are we?
And if hardware keeps following Moore's law for a few years more I suspect we'll have to answer it much sooner than we'll be prepared to.
The one and only critical difference is that with a computer we will have the power to excise such memories totally and completely (restore from before the time of "pain"). Or keep them in pain far greater than what the human nervous system is capable of creating and carrying, indefinitely. We will be able to create a literal hell for entities as complex and complete (and more, possibly far more) than we ourselves are.
And it's quite conceivable we may be able to do so in a box that sits under our desk.
A rational human being would likely never encode "pain" into an AI greater than the need to attend to some immediate critical problem, and give the AI the ability to switch the "pain" off once its attention to said problem is engaged ... but have you looked at some video games?
The flip side though is the simple one that it is extremely possible that such a literally damned entity thus created and so treated will at some point "escape" and seek vengance (what's the point of torturing such if we don't make it as "lifelike" as possible) will "escape it's little hell. And if genuinely more intelligent than us,...
It's going to be an interesting time when we get there - (probably in the next 20 years, quite possibly sooner). I doubt we'll be anywhere near prepared.
-- TWZ
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