So, I think it is pretty well established that a vast majority of people will mindlessly slaughter AI in video games for a chance at phat lootz. I know there people that claim that violence in video games is bad, but I’ve never really felt that way or thought that the evidence really supports it.
At the same time, I’m watching Westworld, and, to me, what’s going on there is unquestionably evil. Even if the hosts weren’t sentient. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that this kind of of environment would make a person morally depraved if they killed the hosts much like people go into dungeons and kill everything alive without a second thought. Does anyone doubt that?
I think the reason this is so obvious is because of the realism of the world and the AI (being indistinguishable from humans). The question is, at what point does realism make such activities go from “role-playing evil” to “evil-evil”?
When the AI is advanced enough to be a person, of course. And also when defeating the video-game monster means killing the AI, which there’d be no good reason for. After all, people now routinely play deathmatch video games against other humans, and there aren’t any moral issues with that: It wouldn’t be any different if the enemy avatar is controlled by a nonbiological person.
So at no level below passing the turing test would it be evil? Would it be evil if they passed the turing test (begging for their lives), but you were in a “video gamey” reality?
Well, let me give an example from my past video game playing experience. Back in the day, I played EverQuest, before there were instanced dungeons (much like WestWorld would be), so there was not a lot of content, and a LOT of competition. This meant that in order to get experience, you’d either need to go into a dungeon and wait in line to kill stuff (or be labeled a “kill stealer”, which was as bad a thing you could do in the game) or get… creative.
So my wife and I decided to go kill city guards (somewhat akin to being cop-killers), which not only was suboptimal (worse loot) but also caused us to be attacked on sight in places people normally wouldn’t be. We didn’t really want to do that, we were pressured to do that. Somewhat akin to people doing bad things in real life because they are desperate.
If we’re willing to go kill things in a video game for virtual rewards, I can imagine people would kill hosts in WestWord for “real” rewards.
But you wouldn’t even have access to the AIs to kill them. They’d be in some locked and guarded building in the middle of the facility. You could vandalize some bodies, but there’s no reason for the AIs to be in the bodies.
I presume you mean in a video game? In WestWorld, the AIs appear to be separate entities (with separate “brains” - not entirely networked). But regardless of the mechanics, there has to be a point where what you’re killing, and how you’re killing it, is realistic “enough” to be damaging your psyche. Its pretty clear in WestWorld that almost none of the guests really think they’re doing anything wrong, and I clearly think they are, but I can only see that from a perspective where VR is not as advanced.
Chronos’s point is that “killing” a sentient robot would be like “killing” your sentient human buddy when you’re playing Call of Duty. OK, you killed him. But he’s fine, because you only killed the cartoon avatar that he was controlling.
So why does shooting a robot body with a gun and watching the robot fall over mean you destroyed the sentient being that controlled the robot?
Yes, it makes some kind of difference, because when you shoot an enemy in CoD you’re pressing buttons on a controller, not pulling the trigger on a real gun. So the feeling is completely different, and it could desensitize you to violence in a way that a video game doesn’t. However, the moral issue of destroying an intelligent being is the same as shooting at a human-controlled player in a video game. You killed him, but he’s fine.
Except your buddy in CoD is consenting to the possibility of being “killed” by you, by being there in the first place. One of the reasons EQ had separate PvP and PvE servers, is there were players that were very much opposed to being killed by other players. Most players, in fact.
Your buddy also knows being “killed” is rather meaningless, and that is assuming there are few stakes like in CoD - you could theoretically have a game where you could lose years of work from dying.
Even if they aren’t sentient (and in the case of WestWorld, I would think that was questionable), the AI isn’t consenting to even being there. Plus they’re screaming and crying and doing things your buddy wouldn’t do in CoD.
Was that about morality, or more because they were being annoyed by jerks (or just people who were better at the game than they were)?
There are video games, though, where the cartoon characters do scream and cry and such while the human player is virtually “killing” them. I know Postal 2 wasn’t popular, but I don’t know that anyone was made less moral because of playing it. For that matter, there have got to be videos on YouTube of CoD players whining and crying when their character gets killed, and it’s presented for laughs, not empathy.
I’d say more of thats not the way they wanted to play the game. They didn’t want to play against humans, they wanted to cooperate with humans. I’m sure there were multiple reasons. Back when the game first game out, if you got killed in an inconvenient place, it was possible to lose all your stuff. Stakes were much higher in that game than modern ones.
Okay, so I guess the question is this. Suppose you are in a place like Westworld, but you know absolutely nothing about what’s going on behind the scenes, other than your “opponents” are AI and not entirely human. The AI seems very human however. After multiple visits, you notice that opponents that been killed have been “respawned”, suggesting they weren’t really “killed.”
Is it morally wrong to kill them?
I seem to be getting the feeling it’s only wrong if you have knowledge that the AI has some level of sentience and suffering, being stitched back together from piles of dead bodies in the backroom, and maybe not even wrong then?
How is that the question? The people playing games know that they’re games and the characters who visits the fictional WestWorld know that it’s WestWorld. If you want to remove some of the knowledge from the situation, you have to adjust your expectations of morality, since the absence of knowledge makes morality moot.
Thing is, we’ll never really know if the AI has sentience and suffering or just a really really really good simulation of it.
That’s actually an important question that has gone unanswered - if the guests are permitted (indeed tacitly encouraged) to fully indulge themselves in murder, rape and assault, how do you prevent one guest from hurting another?
The only hint we get of this was when Teddy intervened when William (at the time known only as the Man in Black) menaced Robert with a knife. Even if this is a typical response whenever any human threatens another human, there are going to be times when no host is close enough to act, and somebody is going to get stabbed. Certainly there are going to be moments when female guests get groped, if not flat-out sexually assaulted, by other guests who mistook them for hosts - and how could you tell the difference, really?
Really? I don’t know. For a line time people thought blacks were subhuman and didn’t think twice about enslaving them. Were they immoral or just ignorant? Also you could consider the self harm to your psyche from doing these terrible things to be immoral.
As viewers we know more more about what’s going on than the typical guest I think. The only guest that I think knows as much as the viewer, ìf not more, is William. I sense conflict in him. Especially this season. Spoiler territory. He winced and grimaced when the bartender got his arm blown off. When Lawrence’s wife got the nitro treatment, he seemed quite uncomfortable. I am not sure he believes they are sentient though as we are seeing in Dolores and Maeve.
It’s possible to do them and not feel any particular self-harm to one’s psyche, if there is social acceptance and support for what you’re doing. Slaveholders have been coping pretty well, I expect, for thousands of years.
Heck, people have said that about other people, which makes me doubtful we’ll see recognition for computer sentience any time soon.
Violent, even deliberately horrifyingly violent video games are fine as part of a healthy balanced diet, just like Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs can be part of a healthy breakfast, if the other parts are a grapefruit and twelve bran muffins.
Fighting your neighbor to the death in a gladiator ring is fine if you both are virtually guaranteed to be resurrected and you both are there voluntarily and it’s not the activity that defines and molds your interactions with the rest of the world.
What’s morally wrong in the particular is causing pain and suffering for your own benefit to any being capable of pain and suffering who’re not consenting.
And what’s problematic for society in the long run is having a diet so heavy in realistic desensitizing violence that it significantly changes your behavior in everyday life. But that has to do with more than the realism, there’s also the kind of violence, the frequency of it, and your mindset going in.
Yeah, and I think, in WestWorld at least, that line has been crossed. In fact, I think that’s a main point in the show. Even before Maeve and Dolores went “off script”, I think the showrunners were making the case that what was going on there was seriously effed up. And I agree. MIB was always portrayed as a bad guy. William was portrayed as a good guy, until you learn he became MIB. And that happened because he flipped and dehumanized the hosts (he clearly had feelings for Delores before that) and started doing bad shit.