Social Media Garden
On benchmarks for recognizing AI as subjects rather than objects or tools:
First, as a panpsychist/idealist type, I’d advocate treating even tools with care 
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Second, that’s a hard question!
I think it can help to take a functionalist perspective to ask: “When would it make sense to legally hold an AI itself accountable for its actions?”
This comes up in the discussion of autonomous vehicles: when someone gets hurt, who do we blame? Whose fault was it? Who do we need to incentivize to do better next time?
If there is an autonomous, self-learning AI that passed an exam to attain a driver’s license and owns the car that it’s driving as well as its own servers, learning via the reinforcement signals, then it might make sense to offer legal incentives and penalties to the AI itself and not the programmers, right?
This benchmark seems to be: to the extent it makes sense to interact with the AI as a subject rather than to interact with the AI via its developers, it may be appropriate to start recognizing it as a moral subject, too.
**dodges the phenomenological questions** 
It’s incredibly common among my acquaintances to expressly state a lack of a desire for complete fulfillment without consequence a la perfect neural-implant VR simulations.
I suppose another assumption of X’s may be that these scruples will “fall away” as we see how great it is rather than, err, remaining as we work on the nuances with AI support xD
Ban is a strong word. I note you skipped psychedelic medicine such a mushrooms, MDMA, LSD.
As for regulations of media, what about banning directing styles that aim to make a show excessively gripping? No artificial cliffhangers to be resolved in the first five minutes of the next episode. End the episode with a relative low point so that people will experience greater sovereignty in when to watch the next episode. I don’t believe the directing style that pushes one toward marathoning shows actually makes them so much better . . ..
With both medicine and (social) media, the point of the regulations is to maintain a healthy harmony with the rest of life.
Are there ways to take cocaine that do this? Probably to an extent. Is this what problematic addicts do? Afaik, generally not.
AI guys doing their cosmic duty serving the machine god as usual 😉
Chats
I really enjoyed the book, “Thoughtless Mindless Spiritless Forceless Manifestations”, that Jeffery Martin recommended (especially for those attracted to a “Charmed LIfe” (L2.3y).
Richard Dotts suggested that thoughts are primarily helpful for:
1) Pragmatic problem solving
2) Clarifying what one would like to experience
Beyond that, one’s suggested to rest in pure awareness, trusting in universal action (of which one’s own actions are a part).
(There were nice suggestions for doing effective thinking on paper to better compartmentalize and focus it 🤓.)
I note that with regard to “X destroying all of humankind”, the Finders responders to the thread generally:
1) Don’t see pragmatic action steps they can take.
And at least one noted:
2) It’d be nice if human life continues.
So they’re sort of in line with this approach. There’s not much room for the “fearful” thoughts to dance.
In terms of “mattering” and “counting”, the pragmatic question is: will one’s body be observed taking actions to influence the situation if the opportunity arises?
Lately I like the view that in a sense we are all “solutions”…
Cosmically, life is exploring an infinite search space.
We can’t know what from branch A will be valuable to branch B in advance (a priori). But once such a connection/proof is made, it can be traversed, so solutions are kept and continue exploring —
— and now I’m a walking, talking solution to what I know not. Sometimes I fulfill others in ways I wouldn’t have thought and vice versa — w00t!
So at some base level, the lay of the land is infinitely difficult xD
Yet whatever path I explore, it’s hard to rule out a priori that it will not lead to some interesting discoveries, be it an easier or more difficult path… 😮 :-3
Philosophical Speed Dating: five minutes to discuss your most contentious philosophical ideas to determine whether you need to duel to the death or can be intellectual collaborators!
“It’s only small talk if you don’t actually care about it.” (Alan Roger Curry) The intellectual depth doesn’t determine whether it’s small talk or not — the extent to which you care does ;- ) Context also matters: the same content could be small talk or big talk. It depends.
tfw one realizes one’s socioeconomic system and culture isn’t up to these “#disruptive” technologies 🤓.
Q1: is linguistics relevant even though people speak well enough?
Q2: for specific tasks, will algorithms or neural nets perform better?
Q3: AI superstar effects? 😈