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Asked by ZakaryA on 24 Jan 2024.
Question: If I make a sentient AI from scratch and let it know I'm it's creator, will it respect me more than everyone else?
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Andrew Maynard answered on 24 Jan 2024:
We simply do not know — although there’s no reason to think it will respect you more simply because you are its creator. It all depends how it’s designed
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Carl Peter Robinson answered on 25 Jan 2024:
Fascinating thought experiment! Let’s say you’ve created a sentient AI. How are you defining sentience? Are you saying it’s self-aware and aware that it exists in a world, with human beings? For it to be able to respect you, it would need to know what respect means and how it is measured. What are the measurable qualities of respect, both in a positive and negative sense? I get the feeling this AI would need to have an understanding of what morals and ethics are, and about the philosophies of different cultures. How would you teach, or train, this AI about these topics? And then how would you test and measure if this AI has grasped the meaning of these topics?
Let’s say it has successfully been trained on these topics (no doubt there are many other factors and measures it needs to be trained on too!). We can then turn our attention to you and how you interact with and treat the AI. If you’re going to behave in a negative way toward the AI, or to other people and the AI observes this, then no, I don’t think the AI will respect you, in the same way a human would not. But if you behaved in a positive way towards the AI, and your fellow human beings, based on what the AI has learned, it would likely respect you. Whether it would respect you more, depends on which other humans it measures your behaviour against.
Or, if you’re asking for the AI to respect you simply because you created it, akin to you being a parent and the AI being your child, then I think you would need to instil in the AI what creation means and what a creator is. Whether it would respect you more simply because you created it, I still think depends on how you interact with the AI and the world around you. I think there is a difference between respect and simply obeying someone because of status. I could type about this for hours, so I think I should stop here. Hope this has given you some ideas to play with.
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