One analogy might be to the misleadingly named motion picture. We all have heard the stories of early cinema-goers who dove out of the way when the train on the screen barreled towards them. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of these images on the screen as the real thing -- even the mistake of thinking that they move.
But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was.
This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move.
This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.
To be fair, it doesn't sound like anyone is literally judging this person for his moral stance -- it sounds like he is judging others for not sharing his morals. They're not making him an outcast; he is literally casting others out of his life because they don't meet his purity standards.
I'm not saying that as a criticism. I think a lot of people who value a human-made culture are going to drop out of mainstream society in the next decade or so, find each other, and found human-first communities where shared human norms dominate. If AI companies wanted to get ahead of the bad press? They'd help found some of these communities. No strings attached.
I was just re-watching "Westworld" recently, and there's a moment when Aaron Paul's character Caleb is having a telephone conversation with a sympathetic HR employee who tells him that he didn't get the job.
"Listen, Caleb. Your application was very strong. Unfortunately, our strategy group just hasn't found an opening for you."
Caleb sighs, and says nothing.
The HR employee gently asks, "Caleb, are you still with me?"
"Ok, thank you. Is there anything I should be working on to make myself a better candidate?"
"Like I said, your application was very strong. We just don't have anything that would be a great fit for you right now."
"If I'm not a good fit, is there a different shape I could squeeze myself into?"
There is a pause.
Caleb asks, "Hey, no offense but... are you human?"
"I'm Shaun," the voice says. "I can help you with all kinds of resources... anything else I can do for you today, Caleb?"
As I pointed out above, this is really 20th century thinking. Social media allows for a kind of mob behavior that has shown itself antithetical to the kind of market liberalism most of our current assumptions are based on.
Or did you not notice that Parler and its hundreds of thousands of users had literally been systematically erased from the internet yesterday by hounding their service providers?
It's bizarre to see the liberal left I grew up with now defending a kind of insane market fundamentalism and corporate control of the commons of free speech without even blinking at the contradiction. I think that liberal left I grew up with is dead.
We need a name for what it has become, and where they are taking us.
We really need a better vocabulary for talking about this sort of thing than the 20th century terms of fascism, communism, and liberalism. I don't have the words yet, but we need to start inventing them.
We are in a new era, and our disasters won't look like theirs. People who shrug away this kind of censorship with the magic words "private company" are in a dangerous form of denial.
But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was.
This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move.
This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.