I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I thought the recent The Simpsons‘ episode Thanksgiving of Horror, a collection of three mildly ridiculous stories about Thanksgiving horror, to be noteworthy for the middle story, The Fourth Thursday After Tomorrow. Marge’s intellect is replicated by Homer and placed in a computer, from which she becomes the slave of Homer and Marge for the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner.
I’ve mentioned the use of a true AI may be functioning as a substitute for human slavery, and this episode serves to illuminate this in a very special way by cloning Marge, rather than spawning some fully artificial personality. By thinking about a personality of now some thirty years of age, no matter how artificial in one special way, it may serve to give pause to the idea of creating fully intelligent artificial entities without the option of the sort of limited self-agency to which we, which is to say Western Civ, often appeal.
The empathy for the Marge imprisoned in a computer, as it were, is certainly a plausible result, and if we can already have empathy for current computer entities which exhibit faux-behaviors reminiscent of intelligent creatures, perhaps we can still have hope of not mass-producing true slaves someday.
