humor me, dramadramaduck.

[nonesodangerous]

A particular opinion has been brought to my attention recently. "Flesh and blood matters more than electronics," I was told. So, out of interest, please place the following types of entities in order of importance, from 1-20, in your opinion:

Comments

[smilingtransfer]

I would tend to believe that anything with some form of sentience would be ranked the highest on most scales. It is difficult to say if an outside observer would be able to correctly identify sentience in some of these cases-- AIs, for example, lie in a rather tricky gray area, for who's to say that humans can or cannot truly create artificial sentience? And in terms of AIs that are not human-developed, and instead came about by themselves, the very concept is so alien to us that many would refuse to believe that they are able to be self-aware at all, simply because they may be self-aware on a different level than humanity. And then, of course, we get into the tricky problem of what you would term as importance. If a simple, non-sentient program had, say, some sort of ability that would greatly benefit the entire human race, and it was to be protected at the expense of any who attempted to destroy it, then we would be placing that program as more important than the lives that were lost to protect it. But then, of course, that may not be entirely true, because the reason we would consider the program important in the first place would be because of the human lives it would benefit.

My apologies for the digressions-- my initial point was that I don't believe you're going to get much in the way of variety in your answers.

[nonesodangerous]

You raise several interesting points. Time and again, you impress me with you powers of reasoning and logic.

I was not expecting much variety. I merely wished to see if the belief expressed to me by Ban Midou was one shared by other members of the community.

[smilingtransfer]

I tend to enjoy mental calisthenics.

I take it this is related to the program you tried to design for the community?

[nonesodangerous]

It is vaguely related, yes.