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Peter Martin
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 17 March 2008
Location: Canada
Posts: 16465
Posted: 12 June 2026 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

The Pope is right. This is a massively serious issue and lawmakers and regulators should be all over this and ensuring AI works for the benefit of all humans not just a handful of folks who are in a position to pull the strings. Instead, they are abdicating their responsiblity and rubbing their hands at the prospect of an AI arms race. We are already seeing despicable things happening in armed conflicts across the globe, where no one seems to want to grasp the nettle and stand up for the civilian populations who are suffering. This pattern will get way way worse if AI starts controlling weaponry. Entry level jobs are already being swallowed by AI to improve the bottom line for those at the top and the asset hoders. The general populace are going to be the ones that suffer in the aggregate and this probably does not end well.

Edited by Peter Martin on 12 June 2026 at 6:13pm
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Evan S. Kurtz
Byrne Robotics Member


Joined: 04 July 2022
Location: Canada
Posts: 355
Posted: 12 June 2026 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

I'm disappointed I can't find it, but someone posted about this on the forums in the past few months. (My lizard brain thinks it was sometime within the past 3-4 months but I might be wrong.) 

Personally I'm not arguing on behalf of this outlook, because I think it gets semantical, but the general argument stems from observations made by Robert Sapolsky, who observed that all living beings are products comprised entirely of the environments they live in and the DNA they were born with, meaning that when a neuron fires within our brain as a reaction to stimulus, the course of its action is predetermined. 

From Sapolsky's perspective, for free will to be provable, then a neuron would need to fire in response to a stimulus in exactly the same way in a brain that is entirely lacking in the environmental and biological components that as it does in a brain which contains environmental and biological components. 

I wish I could remember the poster who mentioned this or the previous discussion on the topic, but that's my understanding of what Sapolsky argued on behalf of. I know there are numerous scientists and mathematicians who find that to be difficult to dispute, but my general take is that Sapolsky is a scientist who's saying free will can only exist if we have no evidence of why a neuron fires in a specific way, which feels anti-scientific, particularly since this is a test we cannot conduct. 
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