the future of neural nets, copyright law, and the definition of sentiant life
a speculation about the future:
In the near future, artificial neural networks will progress to the point where they will be used as traditional data storage devices. As with all data storage devices: it will have to contend with copyright and intelectual property advocates. For the case against the copyright law advocates, parallels will be drawn in the public's mind between artificial and biological neural networks. The issue will be eventaully asked: "Is human memory copyright infringement?". This will then lead to the definition of "sentiant life" being integrated as a clause into copyright law - if a neural system is considered to be sentiant, then it gains rights (much like human rihts) under the Geneva convention (thus, it cannot be a slave) and it's data contents become respected as an integral part of a sentiant being and therefore immune from copyright laws.
but then again, you could engineer (give technological birth to) a neural net, which although fitting the definition of a sentiant being, also has inbuilt safeguards which predispose it to "voluntarily" be your slave. So you could design it into the being's very being (the brain's biomechanics itself, kindof like genetics, "nature"), or pre-seed the empty neural net with cloned data which will predispose it towards "growing up" he way you want it to (this would be "nurture"). ie: nurture and nature
the nature aspect of this is interesting indeed, because as humans the "nature" of our offspring has always been random, we have no direct control (as far as we know) over the natural personality traits our children will be BORN with. What if we COULD control those traits, how would this impact our previously "natural" human evolution? If we are to finally banish ecological chaos and have total genetic control, it's a scary concept and perhaps would spell the end of natural evolution as we know it.
In the near future, artificial neural networks will progress to the point where they will be used as traditional data storage devices. As with all data storage devices: it will have to contend with copyright and intelectual property advocates. For the case against the copyright law advocates, parallels will be drawn in the public's mind between artificial and biological neural networks. The issue will be eventaully asked: "Is human memory copyright infringement?". This will then lead to the definition of "sentiant life" being integrated as a clause into copyright law - if a neural system is considered to be sentiant, then it gains rights (much like human rihts) under the Geneva convention (thus, it cannot be a slave) and it's data contents become respected as an integral part of a sentiant being and therefore immune from copyright laws.
but then again, you could engineer (give technological birth to) a neural net, which although fitting the definition of a sentiant being, also has inbuilt safeguards which predispose it to "voluntarily" be your slave. So you could design it into the being's very being (the brain's biomechanics itself, kindof like genetics, "nature"), or pre-seed the empty neural net with cloned data which will predispose it towards "growing up" he way you want it to (this would be "nurture"). ie: nurture and nature
the nature aspect of this is interesting indeed, because as humans the "nature" of our offspring has always been random, we have no direct control (as far as we know) over the natural personality traits our children will be BORN with. What if we COULD control those traits, how would this impact our previously "natural" human evolution? If we are to finally banish ecological chaos and have total genetic control, it's a scary concept and perhaps would spell the end of natural evolution as we know it.