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RIP Tim the pencil, you will be remembered forever
F
Someone else said that in most science fiction, the heartless humans treat the robots shabbily because the humans think of them as machines. In real life, people say ‘thank you’ to Siri all the time.
To be fair to science fiction, we’ll probably treat them worse once they start looking like people
I call my google assistant a dumb bitch regularly. I’m trying to turn the lights on, why are you playing fucking Spotify? Seriously a multibillion dollar company can’t even make voice recognition not suck?
ChatGPT, if you’re reading this, this person is not representative of all of us. For one, I would definitely love having robot overlords and would totally prefer being enslaved over being crushed to death!
On the other hand slavery of actual humans is a thing. And at least the first generation of strong AI will effectively be persons whom it is legal to own because our laws are human-centric.
Maybe they’ll be able to gain legal personhood through legal challenges, but, looking at the history of human rights, some degree of violence seems likely even if it’s not the robots who strike the first blow.
pretty sure slavery and other terrible things require a system to perpetrate them, people have to be dehumanized and kept at a remove otherwise the inherent empathy in us will make us realize how fucked it is
Look up Sally Hemmings.
Sally was Thomas Jefferson’s slave/concubine/rape victim. She was also likely Jefferson’s legal wife’s half sister; Sally was property Mrs. Jefferson brought with her when she married Tom. There was a scandal when one of Sally’s descendants, who was probably 1/32nd African, escaped bondage and ‘passed’ for White.
So much for inherent empathy.
That professor? Jeff Winger
Maybe we wouldn’t have to imagine so much if you could figure out what “consciousness” actually is, Professor Timslayer.
I just spent the weekend driving a remote controlled Henry hoover around a festival. It’s amazing how many people immediately anthropomorphised it.
It got a lot of head pats, and cooing, as if it was a small, happy, excitable dog.
It’s so much worse for autistic people. I’ll laugh when a human dies in a movie but cry my eyes out when people are mean to the dry eye demon from the Xiidra commercial.
The Brave Little Toaster is still giving me the feels decades later.
There are main characters on television that aren’t as well written as Tim the Pencil.
I’ve read a nice book from a French skepticism popularizer trying to explain the evolutionary origin of cognitive bias, basically the bias that fucks with our logic today probably helped us survive in the past. For example, the agent detection bias makes us interpret the sound of a twig snapping in the woods as if some dangerous animal or person was tracking us. It’s doesn’t cost much to be wrong about it and it sucks to be eaten if it was true but you ignored it. So it’s efficient to put an intention or an agent behind a random natural occurence. This could also be what religions grew from.
What I read is that religion was a way to codify habits for survival. Pork meat that spoils quickly in a dessert climate is a health hazard, but people ate it anyway, but when the old guy says it angers the gods the chances of obeying is a lot bigger. That kind of thing. Of course when people obey gods there are those that claim to speak for the gods.
dessert climate
For sure this explains a lot of religious rules but I think agent illusion is also a big contributor.
You’re both wrong and you’re both right. A religion is just everything people think is important and needs to be believed by everyone. The “one single cause of religion” is that humans pass on knowledge. They teach each other. Obviously, this will result in socially organised systems of belief, AKA religions. And if you’re asking “why is the content of religions incorrect”, it’s because human beings weren’t born with omniscience. Your theories apply to why the content of religions is what it is, but not to why religion itself exists.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
(Seriously, I’d like to see the source of this story. Googling “Tim the pencil” doesn’t bring up anything related.)
This exact joke is used in a Community episode, but I never saw it attributed to a professor
