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A Philosophical Discussion Concerning Video Games That Call You A Fucker For Doing Certain Things
I come to this subject through artificial intelligence. AI makes a good subject for philosophers - is it possible? Should we? and so on. The part of AI discussion that's relevant to video games calling you a fucker, however, is the question of their ethical treatment. Can you torture an AI? That sort of thing.
One of the most important things ever written about AI, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", touches on this indirectly.
What a weird question.
Anyway, now that we actually have AI, Siri and so on, we need to apply some nuance.
Firstly, we have degrees of AI. We don't have any AI now that could fake an in-person conversation with a human being, but we have some that could pass a Turing test. We have AI that couldn't really be considered person-like, but which do things we might intuitively consider "intelligent", like balancing budgets in relation to defined requirements.
Secondly, now that we can watch people respond to AI, we know that it's really pretty easy to pass a Turing test. People have believed AI were humans since at least ELIZA, written not more than twenty years after Turing's article. ELIZA, as an example, has made people think it was a psychiatrist since 1966, and perhaps more importantly, even people who know that it's a computer program attribute it with complex understanding and even emotional nuance.
But ELIZA is very simple. When people refer to ELIZA they don't usually mean PARRY, the AI written to seem to be a paranoid schizophrenic, they mean DOCTOR, the one written to seem to be a Rogerian psychotherapist. But PARRY and DOCTOR are not programs, really, they are databases of responses for ELIZA, which is a very simple program.
Here is how ELIZA works: It takes input. It runs a regular expression search on the input, against a database, like PARRY or DOCTOR. If it finds a match, it looks at the corresponding response to the found item in the database, and replaces a few nouns - "my" to "your", and placeholders to whatever noun happens to be in the user input. This is then presented to the user.
It's pretty stupid! But this is enough.
What ELIZA does is show that if you consider anything that can talk more or less personably an AI, practically anything could be considered one.
A video game then presents us with a bunch of AIs. In some sense they may be considered more sophisticated than ELIZA, because they have context. They can react to the player. At one point in the game, they say "Hey, we should go to Twoson!" but in another, when the player has been to Twoson, they say "Hey, we should go to Threeville!" This lends some continuity and sophistication, especially if the player can make choices - you don't go to Twoson and you don't get the Threeville dialog.
But it's also less sophisticated, in that it's entirely pre-written, not even replacing nouns (though it might use the player's inputted name).
Back on the subject of degrees, this is something I deal with a lot, outside of AI. You see, I'm a researcher. A young researcher, as they still call us. In biology. And what does that mean? Killing animals.
Last year I watched a living rat gassed and taped to a table, so that its beating heart could be removed. Blood pooled up in its discarded body. Last summer I gassed a mouse, cut its skull in half with a knife, and removed the portion of the brain so obtained so that I could carefully pick off the meninges. And this morning, I killed two worms for no more reason than to educate myself by watching its death throes through an electronic amplifier. We didn't get any useful data.
The first one bothered me a good deal at the time and still bothers me now. The second I didn't feel too bad about. The third I feel almost nothing for,
bored.
the point is, i don't really care when a video game calls me a fucker. because the characters calling me a fucker are just written to do so.
but that's wrong. i do care. i don't kill characters in RPGs, usually, because they talk to me, and that's enough for me to consider them enough of a person, high enough up on the great chain of thinking, that i don't want to hurt them. i do kill them in prescribed events. slay the dragon and such. because that's how RPGs are written.
i do kill characters in other games. in nuclear throne i have killed thousands of people. these people are vaguely humanoid "bandits" dressed in rags who walk around randomly and sometimes emit a red circle that slowly moves towards near where my character was standing during emission.
i don't feel bad about this, at all. i don't think it reflects on my moral character. i don't think it is really worth examining. sometimes it is kind of funny, like in the webcomic "Concerned" when the faceless transhuman soldiers you mow down in half life two have families and react with sorrow to the player character's killing hundreds of them over the game's course. but funny is about as far as it goes.
is it worth examining? maybe. maybe it's relevant to drone pilots or something, if only to distract us from the g wait this was going off topic. ha ha. off topic.
but what some games do, because, i don't know, they're lazy, is they act like the second kind of game, where i fire millions of circles at thousands of shapes until they cease motion, and then pretend like they were the first kind of game. there are the games about choices, like, i i i i i i i
forget it.
forget it. forget all of it. forget. forget.
wrote the tags before i got bored, btw.
One of the most important things ever written about AI, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", touches on this indirectly.
If a robot went to school, should it be protected from being bullied?I believe that in about fifty years' time [i.e. 2000 AD] it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109 [on the order of a gigabyte], to make them play the imitation game [i.e. the "Turing test"] so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it. It must be given some tuition. We need not be too concerned about the legs, eyes, etc. The example of Miss Helen Keller shows that education can take place provided that communication in both directions between teacher and pupil can take place by some means or other.
What a weird question.
Anyway, now that we actually have AI, Siri and so on, we need to apply some nuance.
Firstly, we have degrees of AI. We don't have any AI now that could fake an in-person conversation with a human being, but we have some that could pass a Turing test. We have AI that couldn't really be considered person-like, but which do things we might intuitively consider "intelligent", like balancing budgets in relation to defined requirements.
Secondly, now that we can watch people respond to AI, we know that it's really pretty easy to pass a Turing test. People have believed AI were humans since at least ELIZA, written not more than twenty years after Turing's article. ELIZA, as an example, has made people think it was a psychiatrist since 1966, and perhaps more importantly, even people who know that it's a computer program attribute it with complex understanding and even emotional nuance.
But ELIZA is very simple. When people refer to ELIZA they don't usually mean PARRY, the AI written to seem to be a paranoid schizophrenic, they mean DOCTOR, the one written to seem to be a Rogerian psychotherapist. But PARRY and DOCTOR are not programs, really, they are databases of responses for ELIZA, which is a very simple program.
Here is how ELIZA works: It takes input. It runs a regular expression search on the input, against a database, like PARRY or DOCTOR. If it finds a match, it looks at the corresponding response to the found item in the database, and replaces a few nouns - "my" to "your", and placeholders to whatever noun happens to be in the user input. This is then presented to the user.
It's pretty stupid! But this is enough.
What ELIZA does is show that if you consider anything that can talk more or less personably an AI, practically anything could be considered one.
A video game then presents us with a bunch of AIs. In some sense they may be considered more sophisticated than ELIZA, because they have context. They can react to the player. At one point in the game, they say "Hey, we should go to Twoson!" but in another, when the player has been to Twoson, they say "Hey, we should go to Threeville!" This lends some continuity and sophistication, especially if the player can make choices - you don't go to Twoson and you don't get the Threeville dialog.
But it's also less sophisticated, in that it's entirely pre-written, not even replacing nouns (though it might use the player's inputted name).
Back on the subject of degrees, this is something I deal with a lot, outside of AI. You see, I'm a researcher. A young researcher, as they still call us. In biology. And what does that mean? Killing animals.
Last year I watched a living rat gassed and taped to a table, so that its beating heart could be removed. Blood pooled up in its discarded body. Last summer I gassed a mouse, cut its skull in half with a knife, and removed the portion of the brain so obtained so that I could carefully pick off the meninges. And this morning, I killed two worms for no more reason than to educate myself by watching its death throes through an electronic amplifier. We didn't get any useful data.
The first one bothered me a good deal at the time and still bothers me now. The second I didn't feel too bad about. The third I feel almost nothing for,
bored.
the point is, i don't really care when a video game calls me a fucker. because the characters calling me a fucker are just written to do so.
but that's wrong. i do care. i don't kill characters in RPGs, usually, because they talk to me, and that's enough for me to consider them enough of a person, high enough up on the great chain of thinking, that i don't want to hurt them. i do kill them in prescribed events. slay the dragon and such. because that's how RPGs are written.
i do kill characters in other games. in nuclear throne i have killed thousands of people. these people are vaguely humanoid "bandits" dressed in rags who walk around randomly and sometimes emit a red circle that slowly moves towards near where my character was standing during emission.
i don't feel bad about this, at all. i don't think it reflects on my moral character. i don't think it is really worth examining. sometimes it is kind of funny, like in the webcomic "Concerned" when the faceless transhuman soldiers you mow down in half life two have families and react with sorrow to the player character's killing hundreds of them over the game's course. but funny is about as far as it goes.
is it worth examining? maybe. maybe it's relevant to drone pilots or something, if only to distract us from the g wait this was going off topic. ha ha. off topic.
but what some games do, because, i don't know, they're lazy, is they act like the second kind of game, where i fire millions of circles at thousands of shapes until they cease motion, and then pretend like they were the first kind of game. there are the games about choices, like, i i i i i i i
forget it.
forget it. forget all of it. forget. forget.
wrote the tags before i got bored, btw.
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Comments
you go to threeville and pauler subtly questions the ethical correctness of the 1040-T tax return form the player had to fill out in e-land
Something I might talk about in the Examination is game objective versus narrative world, or something like that; as well as how a game's theme/aesthetic/story/whatever may play a part in this.
i'll be more coherent later, if I do write on it.
They won't need transcriptionists anymore if voice recognition software gets good enough.
Then again, the rampant outsourcing is truly what's killing the industry, but there's no obnoxious "face" of that social ill that I can rant about.