What the fuck does something being your property have to do with that thing deserving a certain bar of treatment? You need to examine the dangerous implications of that line of thinking and grapple with it.
I think a lot of people would put pets or even houseplants in that category, and argue that you have an ethical responsibility for their basic care.
But to be more general (since digital systems are not alive), any physical property requires at least some amount of energy and resources. So if you blatantly abuse your tools, you’re probably wasting things like electricity or mined metals (via poor operation or need for replacement), in addition to your own time and money.
No my point is that to look at a pet or a houseplant and ask if it is your property before you consider it potentially your responsibility to participate in caring for is insane and we only think this is a normal way of living because of how much being raised in capitalism fucks us up in our heads.
A pet or houseplant deserves to be treated well independent of any concept of ownership abstractly imposed upon it, the fact that we have wandered into thinking otherwise is terrifying and damning of our collective future.
I don’t exactly disagree, but I suspect humans were domesticating plants and animals well before capitalism was a thing. Domesticated dogs for example are rather dependent on us and wouldn’t survive well in the wild. Yes “property” and “ownership” are loaded terms but I think there can be some similar underlying truth in regards to our relationship with other things.
In some ways that can extend to nonliving objects or entities. If you create a piece of earthenware from nothing but clay and fire and your own hands, you own it and it’s your property in a sense unrelated to capitalism. As in, you would not be happy if someone stole it or broke it or used it to commit a crime, and you would inherently consider your relationship to that object in your daily treatment of it and your reaction to those events.
And I’d say some of those aspects would extend to an AI or agent. Of course virtually all of the LLMs and other AI/ML models (to my knowledge) have been created within in a capitalistic society so as you point out they have all the additional baggage that comes with that. I’m just saying that’s not 100% of their attributes. The way you treat something should also respect the labor and materials that went into it.
And that’s actually a problem with many of these LLMs that were trained on the creative works of others, but that’s crossing into a whole other topic…
I think a lot of people would put pets or even houseplants in that category, and argue that you have an ethical responsibility for their basic care.
But to be more general (since digital systems are not alive), any physical property requires at least some amount of energy and resources. So if you blatantly abuse your tools, you’re probably wasting things like electricity or mined metals (via poor operation or need for replacement), in addition to your own time and money.
No my point is that to look at a pet or a houseplant and ask if it is your property before you consider it potentially your responsibility to participate in caring for is insane and we only think this is a normal way of living because of how much being raised in capitalism fucks us up in our heads.
A pet or houseplant deserves to be treated well independent of any concept of ownership abstractly imposed upon it, the fact that we have wandered into thinking otherwise is terrifying and damning of our collective future.
I don’t exactly disagree, but I suspect humans were domesticating plants and animals well before capitalism was a thing. Domesticated dogs for example are rather dependent on us and wouldn’t survive well in the wild. Yes “property” and “ownership” are loaded terms but I think there can be some similar underlying truth in regards to our relationship with other things.
In some ways that can extend to nonliving objects or entities. If you create a piece of earthenware from nothing but clay and fire and your own hands, you own it and it’s your property in a sense unrelated to capitalism. As in, you would not be happy if someone stole it or broke it or used it to commit a crime, and you would inherently consider your relationship to that object in your daily treatment of it and your reaction to those events.
And I’d say some of those aspects would extend to an AI or agent. Of course virtually all of the LLMs and other AI/ML models (to my knowledge) have been created within in a capitalistic society so as you point out they have all the additional baggage that comes with that. I’m just saying that’s not 100% of their attributes. The way you treat something should also respect the labor and materials that went into it.
And that’s actually a problem with many of these LLMs that were trained on the creative works of others, but that’s crossing into a whole other topic…