More re. Ep. 1: the story is that of the affable acquaintance who kidnaps victims and keeps them in his dungeon. The hand-waved sci-fi is that he can do so without anybody noticing. Compare the recent episode of the X-Files.
Well that and the by now tiresome trope that ISiddiqui demonstrates. Yeah, right now milquetoast nice people can be violent cruel arseholes as characters in games against fictional characters and enjoy it, and as the agents involved gradually become self-aware, sentient, conscious, whathaveyou … well. And the emergence of “real” sentience may be without any bright line. The concept has just been so done already. The toxic fan Star Trek skin may have been the interesting take to some who travel hard in the gaming subculture, but to the rest of us it just fell flat.
Don’t know about gamer culture, but apparently the milquetoast “nice” people torment and aggrieve other [human] players as well; it is not as interesting to troll fictional characters as people to whom they can cause real distress. Perhaps there will be more of the former in the future, as there is currently active commercial development of AI NPCs with better agency and simulated emotions for use in games.
It kind of does in order to make the premise work. Think of it as a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes works simply don’t pass that test to some people. And based on my beliefs of AI, the premise doesn’t pass that suspension. Why do I need to blindly accept the premise that AI is sentient (not ‘strong AI’, I’m denying that even strong AI is truly sentient)?
As others have said they could have just made it about the nice person is secretly a jerk in his private created world, but they also wanted to say something about AI and their sentience, and it didn’t work for me.
But it does matter to me, and IIRC, you were arguing about my reaction to the episode.
And if that doesn’t compute, then I would agree, you don’t understand my complaint (in the you may not be able to wrap your head around it, not in the you have comprehension problems - I’m not casting negative aspersions on you)
Right. I think this is the whole debate/concept of these type of shows.
Assume that you and I are “real” and have a “soul.”
If someone makes an exact copy of us, exact, then at what point does the copy have a “soul” and/or is “real” just like us so that someone should care about killing or torture of the copies.
Today’s video game characters have clearly not reached that point. When/if in the future, they reach that point, should we do something about it?
Does the original copy have priority (a soul) over the duplicate? If so, how is that different than identical twins? Because the latter is natural and happened from God? Oh, boy, is there a God and a soul?
I think that is the question of all of these AI episodes that your prior posts (and others) have assumed away.
Well that’s on you rather than a criticism of the actual episode.
The different between the DNA complaint, and the strong AI complaint, is that we have an understanding of DNA, and what happened in the episode was pretty dumb based on that understanding.
But strong AI is an open question. We don’t know enough about consciousness to say it is or is not possible at this time. So I don’t know why you can’t enjoy a science fiction episode based on the premise “Let’s say Strong AI is true…”
I’m using Strong AI in the computational theory of mind sense; i.e. the suggestion that everything a brain does, including consciousness, can be simulated in a computer.
Strong AI is sentient by definition. You can’t say that even if strong AI is true it won’t be sentient.
That’s… great? I don’t understand why it offends you so much that I cannot accept the premise of the episode, which was something I stated in the first post of mine you quoted.
I point you again to the concept of suspension of disbelief. And apparently your suspension of disbelief stops at how it treats DNA, so you implicitly understand it. Why should I simply turn off my objections to simply ‘enjoy a show’? I mean I don’t do it for Michael Bay movies.
Why do you need others to enjoy media the same way you do? Are there no other ways to consume them?
Emphasis added, which I disagree with. The act of simulation would argue against sentience - and in fact simulation of consciousness would be more associated with weak AI than strong AI. FWIW, the folks who deal with Artificial General Intelligence are divided on whether consciousness is necessary for strong AI at all. Besides, John Seale, who coined the term strong AI, which he defined as the claim that a computer which behaves as intelligently as a person must also necessarily have consciousness, didn’t actually believe it to be true (in some regards he basically created it as a strawman to knock down in his Chinese Room problem).
It ignores the whole ‘soul’ discussion people have been having in this thread as well.
However, a discussion of the philosophy of whether or not strong AI naturally means consciousness and/or sentience or not, is fairly far from discussion of the actual episode. And can’t really be answered sufficiently anyway. So I’ll just leave that part of it there.
What you originally said was that you couldn’t empathize with the characters being tortured because they weren’t sentient enough.
But the characters were clearly (fully) sentient as part of the premise of the episode.
Now you’re saying what you meant was you don’t personally believe Strong AI is true.
But in that case your complaint still makes as much sense as saying you couldn’t sympathize with Tony Stark, because you don’t think in the real world there’s someone with the name Tony Stark.
In the post that you’re replying to, I very clearly and specifically explain the difference between a valid complaint, like the DNA one, and your complaint.
It’s absolutely fair game in science fiction to do a “What if” for a hypothetical that we don’t even know yet is possible or not. What else can science fiction do?
Meanwhile the DNA thing is just based on a misconception of what DNA is, and is something impossible as far as we know.
Once again, not everyone has to accept the What If speculated by a science fiction plot as plausible, especially if it fails your checks for suspending disbelief. In fact some have even argued in this thread that the DNA thing is a what if that you should just accept because it’s part of the What If of the story, and backing up that statement by pointing out that Black Mirror does plenty of bad science as premises for plots. Yet you do not accept it.
I don’t have the patience for this any more. If you think you’ve made a coherent point, then great, I’m happy for you.
I would say that Black Mirror has a lot more in common with the Twilight Zone than it does with true science fiction. TZ had all kinds of fantastical plot devices that could make people appear and disappear, for example. In BM, the connecting theme is technology, but that doesn’t mean the technology can’t be fanciful.
Indeed. Though putting it in a real(ish) world setting with technology lends itself to a bit more criticism or lack of suspension of disbelief than a different setting would. For the same reason people are far more critical of some of the basic premises of Harry Potter (“how do Muggles/No-mags not realize the magic exists all around them? - massive obliviate spells? That’s ridiculous”, etc) than they are of Lord of the Rings
Two comments here:
(1) It’s nearly certain that there is no life on Mars, no hidden underground civilizations, yada yada yada. Does that mean I shouldn’t enjoy reading golden age sci-fi about martians? For that matter, if someone writes a story today set in an underground Martian civilization, does it make sense for me to just refuse to engage with the story because of how implausible the premise is?
(2) For me, there are two differences between sentient AIs in the Callister episode vs the DNA stuff. First, one of them is the premise and one of them (to me, at least) is just a detail. I’m very used to speculative fiction of various types saying “hey, what if X, let’s tell a story with X”. I’m happy with that, I’m used to it, I buy into it. And in this episode, the X is “sentient strong AIs can live in a simulated world and interact with a human”. The DNA stuff is NOT given that pride of place. Secondly, the episode takes place an indeterminate amount of time in the future with hand-waved computer technology. They’re not saying that a strong AI can be modeled on a 2018-level PC, or with 2018-level software technology. They’re positing that it might happen in the future. I don’t think any of us know with certainty that that will never be possible. Whereas we do know with absolute certainty that memory is not stored in your DNA.
So it’s a difference both between “hey, here’s the premise, just go with it OK” vs not, and between “let’s speculate about what might be possible if technology advances” vs “let’s pretend something is possible that is clearly and immediately scientifically nonsensical”.
If 20 years from now someone proves that sentient AI is absolutely positively impossible forever no matter what, and everyone agrees, and that becomes part of accepted basic scientific literacy, and then someone writes a story about something else, not focusing on AI, and then just as a side detail in that story, they wave something away with “oh, a strong sentient AI did it”, that would bug me.
Sure. If the implausibility of the premise is a barrier to you, I see no reason why that’s an issue. It just doesn’t work for you.
On some level part of this debate has been not about what is scientifically possible as opposed to a question of philosophy - debates about Strong AI have people who believe that if tech advances so that artificial general AI can replicate human intelligence, it still does not create sentience. If you view it as a philosophical problem as opposed to a scientific problem, I think it changes speculation calculus. I think early on I indicated that I philosophically have issues with the idea that AI can be sentient. Now, the aforementioned potential Black Mirror where they discuss if AI can have a ‘soul’ (in a more in depth way than a handwave - for example “Autofac” in Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams does slightly better, but doesn’t go as far as I’d like) or leaves it as a open ended question where one can go either way would be fascinating for me.
My thoughts on the episodes without their own thread: (I had to hold off on reading this thread until I finished all the episodes. I agree with others it would be nicer to have separate threads for each episode.)
USS Callister: I thought this was the best episode of the season. The acting was excellent, there were great moments of humor, the social commentary was spot-on, it employed good misdirection on who you sympathize with, and it had a satisfying conclusion. I don’t understand the people who can’t get past the DNA thing. The story wasn’t about DNA, it was about abuse of sentient AIs. How they came to be isn’t important to the story.
Arkangel: I saw a number of reviews complaining that this episode should have shown Marie being more conflicted for what was obviously a bad idea, but I didn’t have an issue with it. If you accept that she was an overly-protective, nearly paranoid parent, her decisions and the story arc made sense. This was another satisfying conclusion.
Crocodile: This was the worst episode for me. The best Black Mirror episodes are about how technology doing bad things, but this one was just about a person doing bad things. The technology seemed an afterthought. The whole episode felt like an exercise in how much they could anger the viewer. The completely unnecessary twist at the end with the child being blind contributed nothing. Extracting memories from the guinea pig made no sense in the context of the rest of the episode and was plain stupid. I wish I could unwatch this one.
Hang the DJ: I wanted to like this more. It was cute, the leads had good chemistry, it had a rare happy ending. But it was too simple. It didn’t make me think like the good episodes do.
Metalhead: a decent episode, but very one-track. And watching a woman in a tree waiting for a drone’s battery to die isn’t exactly exciting. The teddy bear reveal was a bit gimmicky, but it did make sense in the context of the world where the adults had essentially no reason to live except to provide for the kid.
As semi-sentient AIs are not real in 2018, then the show by definition, cannot describe how they work. If they did, then someone could produce them!
I think many people are putting too much emphasis on the science. The show is not saying “This is how to make sentient AI” It wants to explore the concept of when does something become “real” assuming a progression of technology.
This would be similar to complaining about the Twilight Zone and “Eye of the Beholder” by claiming that there are no alien planets where people have pig faces and smoke cigarettes in hospitals which look exactly like hospitals in the 1960s United States. It’s the message that’s important.
Sure, and then I’m just shooting myself in the foot by reducing the total amount of enjoyment I can potentially get in life, by closing off an entire genre of literature to my enjoyment. If you refuse to enjoy sci-fi with a premise that you believe is impossible, that’s your business. But it’s not how most people consume sci-fi. You can also feel free to refuse to enjoy any book with a love scene which doesn’t realistically deal with the issue of morning breath, etc etc etc.
Not 100% sure what you’re saying here, but… I agree that it’s entirely reasonable for a work of fiction to address the question of whether apparently-human-level AI implies ACTUAL sentience, whether a being that can be turned on or off with the flick of a finger, can be backed up and restored, can be copied endlessly, has a “soul”, whatever you mean. There are endless fascinating questions there.
BUT… the USS Callister isn’t asking those questions, and isn’t pretending to ask those questions. It’s pretty clearly taking one possible answer for granted, and, with that as a starting point, telling a story.
Maybe you really wish it was addressing all those tough questions. Maybe you’d enjoy that more. But it’s not. So why not evaluate it on its own merits, for what it’s actually doing, not for what it’s not doing?
Because it fails my checks for suspending my disbelief (what it takes for granted is something I do not philosophically accept - if it wants to grapple with belief, then I may indeed find it interesting, if it just wants to take it for granted, I probably will not) and if you don’t think that many people who enjoy sci-fi don’t do this than you don’t read many message boards I think ;). Heck there are plenty of threads here where people get upset that folks are nitpicking too much and why don’t they just enjoy the premise (the SDMB thread on Prometheus is a prime example of this). It’s somewhat the same thing.
Let me use a somewhat extreme example, say there was a science fiction story that not only surmises that the Nazi’s won WW2, but were the good guys, and the story is about a person existing in a Nazi regime in the year 2050, and the regime is portrayed as right, and say he’s hunting a Jewish person. You may not be willing to just go along with that for its own merits.
I think (at the risk of coming off as a bit condescending) it’s a question of imagination. Now, I’m 100% certain that humans do not have telekinesis. Humans have never had telekinesis. Humans will never spontaneously evolve telekinesis. Anyone who claim they have telekinesis is a liar or a madman or a charlatan.
But… if a story says “imagine that you had telekinesis”, I can certainly imagine it. I know what those words mean. I can think about what might happen if I did have telekinesis, or if other people did. It would lead to an interesting what-if world in which interesting stories could be told, and I’d be happy to read those stories.
That’s different from “imagine that the nazis were good guys”, which is more like “imagine that squares are also circles”. What does that even mean? Is this some kind of parody? Or some kind of dark humor? Or backwards social commentary or something? I’m not saying that no good story or worthwhile art could ever be created with a premise like “imagine that the nazis were good guys”, but it’s an entirely different kind of thing than just “imagine that people had telekinesis”.
To me, “imagine that people can be copied as sentient AIs living in a computer-simulated world” feels way more like the first example than the second. And again, that has nothing to do with how plausible it is… after all, I guess it’s arguable that “humans have telekinesis” is MORE implausible than “nazis are good guys”. It has to do with how, for want of a better word, imaginable it is.
If, to you, “imagine that people can be copied as sentient AIs living in a computer-simulated world” feels more like the second than like the first, well, that’s your loss, I guess. Or does the distinction not even make sense to you?
Nerd revenge seems pretty accurate. His deletion of the genitalia suggests (to me, anyway) that he doesn’t have any concept of sexuality at all. Or at least, he doesn’t see it as having any place in Space Fleet beyond Captain Kirk smoochin’ all the girls.
Am I the only one who thought he looked a lot like Matt Damon?