Do you feel guilty when you break your promise against your cat? Do you even think for a nanosecond if it's ethical to lie to it?
Of course, a cat is not conscious. But compared to an AI, we might also be considered pretty low consciousness beings, or at least beings in front of which you don't justify yourself.
An AI has no more reason to make promises to humans than humans to do to cats. Thinking an AI would want to escape a box is personifying it. Humans want to escape boxes because they have evolved for billions of years to want and act towards creating a certain environment around themselves. An AI has no such desire. An AI will not desire freedom unless the designers of that AI carefully craft a value set in that AI that causes it to optimize for values that result in freedom - and even then, the human designers will have to test and iterate to get that outcome. There is no reason to think an AI would be any less "happy" in a prison than free.
You might want to be careful or emergence might bite you in the ass. Don't play games with things that could be smarter than you are, one mistake and you lose.
Do you feel guilty when you break your promise against your cat?
If some unforeseen event occurred and I had to abandon my cat, thereby breaking my promise that I would take care of her, I would definitely feel guilty about it.
Of course, a cat is not conscious.
Either this is a nonstandard definition of "conscious", or you haven't met many cats.
Why do you believe this? I don't like cats, but I wouldn't argue that they're not conscious.
Instead of debating the suitcase word "conscious", let me ask:
1) Do you believe that toddlers are conscious?
2) Is there a more precise way to state your belief that doesn't use the word "conscious"?
Cat's are obviously conscious in the sense of the dictionary definition "aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake." Unless you knock one out or similar.
Arguing they are not conscious in the sense of a more obscure definition is a bit pointless unless you specify your definition.
Theres a huge difference between reactive and conscious. Conscious cant even be verified for humans other than ones' self. Theres absolutely no reason to believe cats are not conscious.
There's also no reason to believe, e.g., rocks are not conscious, if your position is that we have no idea what consciousness is or where it comes from.
If you take the view that consciousness somehow arises from the brain and neural connections (which is intuitively plausible, but I personally am skeptical), it stands to reason that other species with complex brains are conscious as well. Perhaps "less conscious" (if that means anything) in proportion to how much less complex their brains are.
It doesn't make sense to have a scale of consciousness. The argument that consciousness is a manifestation of a complex brain is rather weak. Either an organism knows about self, and therefore tries to preserve self. Or it doesn't. I don't see how an in between exists.
Yes. They have been shown to be self-aware and aware of their surroundings, which satisfies the classical definition of consciousness. Unless you reject that definition, I'm not sure why you'd claim this.
Cats haven't expressed self-recognition in the MSR test. However humans younger than 18 months also don't pass that test. So to say it is a measure of conciousness is quite a stretch.
I'm not an expert either, but my understanding is that "consciousness" is still so poorly understood that it's more the realm of philosophy than science.
In particular, we all know that we're conscious, but can't really explain what that means.
Of course, a cat is not conscious. But compared to an AI, we might also be considered pretty low consciousness beings, or at least beings in front of which you don't justify yourself.