philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

12Nov/19Off

Richard Bartle interview: How game developers should think about sapient AI characters

richard-bartle-2I asked if sentient AI was on the horizon. He corrected me, noting “sapient AI” is the right description, as it refers to AI that are conscious, self-aware, and able to think. Before we create sapient non-player characters in games, Bartle believes we need an ethical system in place. And he’s not so sure that we should create them in the first place. Bartle believes that game developers are like gods of the worlds they create. “Those who control the physics of a reality are the gods of that reality,” he said.

Let’s suppose that we have these AIs, but they’re in a pocket environment and they can’t get out. They can’t do anything to us except through us. How should we treat them? What’s right and what’s wrong? It turns out that when you look into the philosophy of this, well, the philosophers haven’t. They haven’t really looked at what it means to be someone in control of an entire reality in which intelligent beings live.

Theologists have, sort of, but they’ve only looked at our reality. They haven’t looked at a sub-reality in which we are the gods.

If I assert that the game characters are my property — I bought them with my $60 for the game — can I just do anything I want with my property?

If I create a game as a designer and the game’s got intelligent NPCs, then I sell that game to somebody else.

I’m not selling the NPCs. I’m just selling the world in which the NPCs live. But what happens when you lose interest and stop playing? All those characters are going to disappear and die? Did you just kill all those characters? That’s something we don’t really have an answer for at the moment.

Emergent behavior and consequences

GamesBeat: I had some similar experiences in Red Dead 2. I shot a dog by accident, and the sheriff came after me and wanted me out of town. I didn’t go out fast enough, and so he started shooting at me, so I fired back and killed the sheriff. Then a whole posse came after me and killed me. I learned the lesson. You shouldn’t shoot dogs in this game.

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Bartle: What I would say is, there’s a larger question. That is, is it actually moral or ethical to create an intelligent being in the first place? Never mind what the dangers are, because if they’re intelligent, then they’ll probably develop their own sense of morality and it will probably be in line with ours, because every time any culture in the world has had to develop a morality, they basically come down to the same set of core rules, humanist types of rules. The larger question is, should we create intelligent life anyway? Ignoring anything that it could possibly do to hurt us, assuming that isn’t going to hurt us, is ethical to create life?

See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/11/11/richard-bartle-interview-how-game-developers-should-think-about-sapient-ai-characters/view-all/

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