> the world spends their ticket money on hanging out with the robot to hear about the movie.
Yes, but I can already do that by reading plot summaries on Wikipedia.
I've read precisely zero Harry Potter books, and of the films seen 1, 2 in the background muted, 3, and 4.
Despite this I know about Dolores Umbridge's personality (oh, and just recognised the reason for the name), that Snape Kills Dumbledore, and several other events and characters that were also not in any of those films.
The vault number is only mentioned in the UK version of one of the books, the US version was localized and this detail isn't included. This question has shown up in some trivia events and many consider it a gotcha because they only ever read the US version.
Movie recap channels on YouTube are basically this already. They summarize a 90-180 minute movie into 15 minutes of silent clips and narration. Very popular, and plausibly done end-to-end by a bot within the next few years.
What's next is the bot writing the whole story and generating the visuals. For the cost of one actual movie, Slopflix could turn out thousands of recap style stories.
I'm already getting personalized spam mail that's probably powered by AI ("use this API" type marketing in my work email.) I'm okay with this, even if I find it a little unsettling.
I think the dystopian future we're heading towards is personalized phishing and/or scams that sends to your hijacked accounts' contacts that you're going through a hard time and requesting donations, using training data from crowdfunding sites.
Or, one-level more dystopian, hijacking social media accounts and advertising AI-generated Patreon-style content using the actual account owner's likeness.
Imagine how dangerous this will be, once we have the technology to send a human with a built-in camera to that theater. Humanity and our poor 100 Million dollar films will be ruined!
A robot (nor the software that runs it) has no inherent rights, as it's a non-sentient creation. That's why they can't go into a movie theater without the theater's explicit permission. Plus, the whole "companies can chose who they associate with" thing means not all humans can even go into a movie theater.
And if we want to jog down this rabbit hole, I suggest starting with existing animals which we're realizing are sentient, but still prevent them from going into movie theaters. Once octopi can visit the movie theater, let's revisit the the robot argument.
> A robot (nor the software that runs it) has no inherent rights, as it's a non-sentient creation.
That's not why. We don't know what test could be performed to determine if some future (or present) AI is or isn't sentient, we just assert it and get on with our lives.
No, the reason robots and software have no inherent rights is because the law says so.
As a demonstration proof that this is a purely legal status that has nothing to do with underlying nature, the co-inventors of the automobile did not have many rights afforded to her husband: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz
And conversely many such rights do exist for corporations, which are not themselves sentient.
> No, the reason robots and software have no inherent rights is because the law says so.
This is based in a limited theory of rights being delivered by a state as sovereign rather than inherent to every being. There are other valid ways of interpreting rights beyond "because the law say so."
Those other methods are great in a philosophical debate, but have no power until implemented as law.
I'm not saying you're wrong, those kinds of debate are great at telling you what the law should be, but the practicality of it is that a right you can't enforce is not useful.
A view that a sentient entity has no rights but what the law gives is incompatible with that entity’s agency. Enumeration of rights is for the purpose of limiting the laws that govern any entity’s behavior and are not a specification for what the entity may do.
It's worth pointing out the main reason why people are invested in robots, AI, or corporations is that you can own them as capital either for direct production purposes or secondhand economic benefits, often replacing human labor, which you cannot own.
This status difference is rooted in significant recognized differences and philosophical beliefs about the value of individuals, and in the idea that the law and society should exist to support that. It's pretty far from "purely legal" and the fact that we're going to let people own robots should be only one of the many clues that there's something different about them.
Couple of hundred years ago, we could own other people.
All that philosophical stuff, that only mattered because it resulted in a change in the law — and in the case of the US different philosophy led to a civil war to reject/enforce the law.
I used that more in the context of the "speciest" accusation; I don't consider robots to be a species, particularly a species worthy of forcing a theater to allow their entry on their own merits.
You're right that using sapience is a bad way to identify what is and is not a species though.
Fair — "robot" is as vague a term at this point as, oh, "fish", I guess? Even sentience (or sapience) aside, a Roomba, an Optimus, and a vending machine are all importantly different kinds of robot, and a cinema would be relaxed, cross, and confused in that order by finding them in attendance during a screening.
The sentience angle is just dogmatic/philosophical and lacks any good evidence.
A service dog can be brought into a theater just fine, as it is sufficiently intelligent to be trained to behave appropriately.
There's nothing that specifically prevents animals from entering a movie theater, I'ma say they mostly just generally lack 1) any intellectual desire/intent to watch a movie, 2) appropriate social behavior to cohabit a space with humans, 3) money to pay their ticket.
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I would agree that current ML/NN based models might seem like a way to more or less circumvent copyright, but don't feel like there should be a blanket ban discriminating against potential intelligent entities that might arise in the future from more sophisticated technologies.
I also wasn't completely serious with my initial post. It is rather enjoyable to take an idea to the extreme and see what people's thoughts on it are.
[A robot is] a non-sentient creation. That's why they can't go into a movie theater without the theater's explicit permission.
Wait, whats the threshold for sentience and do all humans meet that standard? Does the metric for the threshold depend on cooperation from the subject? Asking due to recent headline "One-quarter of unresponsive people with brain injuries are conscious." [0]
It seems more straightforward to make the speciesist argument until cyborgs start containing majority biological components.
Why would that be weird? In addition to robots, other entities which are not allowed to buy a ticket to watch a movie include tigers, elephants, tardigrades, tarantulas, seagulls, ants, pelicans, dolphins…
If a dolphin, a tiger, and an elephant walked up to a cinema ticket office, handed over some money, and said they wanted a ticket, it would be interesting to see how the cashier responds.
Ants may not be taken seriously if they were to offer to pay, but then again nobody will stop them just walking in to a theatre without a ticket either.
Fortunately, since we already treat artificial entities like corporations and their interests as if they’re legally people even if it means that humans suffer, we should have no problems ushering in the cyberpocalypse in which we pretend that we’re being equitable to other things we pretend are life forms by sacrificing the interests of some human beings to those of others with the capital to own good stochastic parrots.
What a weird take. Nobody cares about a robot watching a movie, it's the robot reselling that movie and keeping the profits that is objectionable. I don't understand the speciest angle at all. Humans both inside and outside of tech rate intelligent non-human biological life as much less important than human life. I'm not saying that's wrong, but it's clearly true. Elevating non-biological life to parity with humans makes no sense.
But for the moment, and I say this as someone very impressed and somewhat scared with AI progress, they're probably sufficiently un-person-like today that it's not unreasonable to ban current models.
a company sends a robot to watch it. 7 dollars for a single ticket.
the world spends their ticket money on hanging out with the robot to hear about the movie.
i can't make heads or tails of what's next. i am as fascinated as i am petrified.