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Originally Posted by Gatac
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.
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Exactly the difference I was referring to
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Originally Posted by Gatac
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.
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Better watch those space cats - when riled they're pretty dangerous. And they have *big* claws...
Seriously, difference is, space cats didn't create, if we follow the assumption that there is a God implicit in this particular end of the discussion, the emu egg in the first place.
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Originally Posted by Gatac
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
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I'd say the teaching of Jesus was pretty damn clear, myself...
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Originally Posted by Gatac
- bring other religions into it and you'll be lucky if you can agree on why the sun shines.)
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I think the question would more be who put the sun there, who pushes it around, why it does, why it's not in any other shape or form, where it goes, and who slept with whom in order to create it...
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Originally Posted by Gatac
Ask a medieval Samurai what you can do with an autoloading rifle,
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Not the best advert for the advancement of technology, it must be said. But fundamentally, do we *need* an autoloading rifle? A musket will do just as well in the end.
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Originally Posted by Gatac
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.
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True, but when the M or the E word come into the question, suddenly you aren't just cocking about with the neat things you could do if you tweak this or that -the implications grow uncomfortably.
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Originally Posted by Gatac
Evolution is easy to show, it's abiogenesis that's hard.
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Without reference to the phenomenal?