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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3619375" data-attributes="member: 4937">And there is another glaring problem with your story.  Sentience is a fuzzy concept.  It's not a case that something is or is not sentient.  Something is merely more or less sentient (or more or less perceivable as sentient) than something else depending on the breadth of its 'strong intelligence'.  Before a bug can realistically produce a strong intelligence which is sentient, we'd need to be getting pretty darn close and that implies that society has been living with semi-sentient (meaning a good deal less sentient than ordinary humans are perceived to be) things for a long time now.  A claim of full sentience by a being is not likely to be believed by such a society, and instead will just be percieved as a wierd bug that produces behavior where the bot insists that its sentient, even though in fact it is not.  Because apparant sentience is going to be quite robust by that point, even in things that are provably not sentient ('Eliza's' for example), its going to take very strong proof before the property owner of this machine is going to accept that he can't just reboot the operating system or wipe the machines memory to make the bug go away.By that time, presumably society has had time to really think about the issue and is no longer thinking in niave terms about the prospect of creating sentient intelligences (very much 'playing God').  This makes your story all the more unlikely.If I had to come up with a scenario for getting independent sentient AI's to act as you suggest, it would probably be that they were deliberately created by some faction quasi-religious, quasi-mystics, or political types who believed that it was immoral to not create robots in our own image.  The descendents of the current crowd of trans-humanists that believe in machine raptures and so forth would be good candidates for that, although that crowd is likely to be even more mystic in nature by the time oppurtunity to develop AI's with near-human goal structures and emotional states develops.  Thus, I think such 'Strossian' machines would likely appear in the midst of well developed sentient AI's using other paradigms, and a few would likely survive by adopting very socially acceptable stances at the time (not starting a race war for crying out loud) and then over time these paradigms would become more acceptable in the society leading to something like a Banksian setting where people accept AIs as sophonts with the cavaet that AIs are hard wired to be friendly to the 'family of man' (as Brin calls it).</blockquote>

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