The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Skynet fights back…
But that really hasn’t happened at all. And we have computers that are plenty intelligent enough, seemingly. We can have programs that mimic human communication quite well, but again, they’re just programs written by people and mimic the communication to some other end. The desires of the programs themselves are non-existent.
I think you’d need a Dr. Frankenstein or a team of Frankensteins working quite deliberately towards that end. Quite possibly a malicious end. Why should we honor such efforts? Servile intelligent robots and computers are tools we have built. Sentience isn’t really a value add to us self interested humans. Any more than a competitor apex predator that wants to eat humans, excessively bothersome pest creatures, or communicable diseases are value adds.
This is a very interesting point you guys bring up.
Why would we want to create sentience? It seems to me that it would be in our best interest to just be able to create intelligent machines/robots that will do work for us without rioting, protesting, complaining about their rights and equality. What benefit would it have to create sentient machines? Why not just stop at the most intelligent machines that will do what they are programmed to do to work for us and make life easier for us? Why would you want to give them free will if you had the ability to?
Given that we do not know what in intelligent wetware results in the emergence of sentience, it may occur without any intent on the designers’ parts to create it.
Given that we do not know how to recognize sentience (other than the assumption that those built like us and responding like us have it), there is no reason to have confidence that we’d recognize or accept it if it was in front of us, especially if it didn’t look or respond like we do.
Networked AI systems could be sentient now and we’d never know.
As to the OP- one approach is QALY which looks at quality adjusted life years. Generally the the US we consider medical interventions reasonable if the cost about $50 to 60K per QALY. Not consistently applied of course.