X-Message-Number: 15963
Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2001 13:17:41 -0500
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <>
Subject: Re: Trust In All-Powerful Lords

Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> > Incidentally, am I imagining things, or did you just
> > get through saying that it would be morally OK for you
> > to impose a Sysop on your own creations!?
> 
> Interesting.  An exceedingly bright man, Mr. Yudkowsky
> doesn't intuit that what I do to my property is any
> different than what he or this AI, I suppose, does to
> me.  This bespeaks a cultural chasm.

Yes, it does.  PEOPLE ARE NOT YOUR PROPERTY.  They can NEVER be your
property.  Everyone owns himself, herself, or verself and can never be
owned by anyone else.

You think that you're a free and independent entity and that someone you
create is your property.  I see no difference between the two of you.  You
interpret this to mean that I think you're property?!  I think you're both
free!

> Since I would
> presumably have the right to run my creatures

They are not "your creatures".  They are citizens.

> as slowly as I would like, perhaps giving some of them only a
> finite amount of run time,

The word you're looking for is "killing".

> then perhaps their AI would
> feel justified to run me as slow as it likes (for the
> sake of higher projects, of course!).

It's not justified when you do it to them; it's not justified if someone
else does it to you.

> Either that,
> or demand that if I make a creature in my own space,
> then I'm obligated forever on to devote some fraction
> of my resources to it.

Before you create someone, you're obliged to transfer some increment of
the matter you own or control - "Minimal Living Space" - to be set aside
as owned by the new entity.  At least, this is a resolution that sounds
reasonable to me; I think this is also discussed in "Engines of Creation".

> We see here how failure to
> appreciate PRIVATE PROPERTY, and failure to appreciate
> LEAVING OTHER PEOPLE ALONE, leads to complications,
> to say the least.

I see; so we all have to leave you alone, but you don't have to leave your
"property" - you know, the thinking, feeling, emoting beings you created -
alone.  Tell me, if I suddenly revealed that I'm an Observer construct and
that you're living in a sim, would you suddenly decide that you have no
rights?

--              --              --              --              -- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/ 
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15963