[Gatac]

Originally Posted by Chancellor Valium

Then don't call me Val

Seriously, do we have the right to PROGRAMME GUIDELINES into a thinking brain.

Well, we teach our kids not to kill their playground buddies to get their toys. Laugh all you want, but what reason would a blank slate AI have to think that it's bad to kill others?

Then again, there's a difference between having Asimov-esque laws hardcoded into your brain or being taught morality.

Nope. Assuming there is a God, what right do we have to create life? Surely it would be His divine right, and His alone? Obviously I can't prove this, but neither can you disprove it. And call me Pascal, but I'd rather not risk it.

Forgive me if this sounds silly, but by the same token, I could live in mortal fear of ever cracking an emu egg because I believe the space cats will eat me if I do. I don't know if there's a God; what I do know is that He hasn't really left us any concrete guidelines on the topic. (And that's under the assumption that we believe the Bible to be His word - bring other religions into it and you'll be lucky if you can agree on why the sun shines.)

There's also the question of whether we can create life itself, and also, why do we *need* androids and sentient robots?

Ask a medieval Samurai what you can do with an autoloading rifle, or the IBM guys in the 50s what the hell a microchip is good for. If there's one pattern in technology, it's that a lot of what we know came from cocking about and doing things because we could. In a lot of cases, we had the invention first and then found out about the neat things we could do with it.

Re: the second part of part three: Prove Godless evolution to me without reference to the phenomenal (see also: Kant).

Evolution is easy to show, it's abiogenesis that's hard.

Gatac