Lab-grown somewhat-intelligent servants
May. 10th, 2026 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI am not very vegetarian but I notice that there might be less fishing if the fish could scream well and I draw the line at cooking octopus and suchlike. I am not even particularly thrilled at the cow-eating and such except for that, if they weren't tasty, many of them wouldn't exist at all, so it feels partly just a question of if to allow them any life at all.
With modern LLM-based AI, one can have a fine conversation with it, it's a good mimic but, given how it works, I don't feel any fear of needing to face any sentience and rights qualms over artificial lifeforms anytime soon. While I ought to take proper care in applying my own reference points to alien entities, in this case I don't think the Turing test is much persuasive on the question of if they are in any way alive, whatever Dr. Dawkins thinks.
One thing that has started to bother me is our advancing ability with brain organoids. At some point, we're going to notice that we can grow little brains in labs, maybe from rodents or whatever, and do things like pilot drones with them. Well, I don't know about that particular application but you get the idea: I worry that we are gently approaching a morally uncomfortable world in which we will notice that we can have real brains serve us in some tasks. Perhaps LLMs are a saving grace there: they may be comparably effective while having lower running costs.
With modern LLM-based AI, one can have a fine conversation with it, it's a good mimic but, given how it works, I don't feel any fear of needing to face any sentience and rights qualms over artificial lifeforms anytime soon. While I ought to take proper care in applying my own reference points to alien entities, in this case I don't think the Turing test is much persuasive on the question of if they are in any way alive, whatever Dr. Dawkins thinks.
One thing that has started to bother me is our advancing ability with brain organoids. At some point, we're going to notice that we can grow little brains in labs, maybe from rodents or whatever, and do things like pilot drones with them. Well, I don't know about that particular application but you get the idea: I worry that we are gently approaching a morally uncomfortable world in which we will notice that we can have real brains serve us in some tasks. Perhaps LLMs are a saving grace there: they may be comparably effective while having lower running costs.
no subject
Date: 2026-05-10 07:49 pm (UTC)Morality is inherently subjective. It all boils down to how an individual feels about the worth of something or someone. Some people feel outrage if an object or document is damaged. People give all sorts of inanimate things a veneer of life and intrinsic worth. That is illusion. Feeling that one is having a meaningful conversation with a LLM is also an illusion. These are all conversations with ourselves.