Diamond Pantheon

"Not as far as I know. A millennium is not truly enough time to know for certain. You also seem more sentient than my intelligences, which for example cannot actually make the decision to disobey any aspect of their instructions from me."

"That's not a very good measure of sentience. Whether or not a program can disobey an order is more a feature of how it's command system works than how self-aware it is. I'm just as sentient as you are, but I don't think I've ever disobeyed a direct order from a commanding officer. I'm not sure I could. I've never wanted to - which is the point. I was built to want to follow those orders."

"Well, it's very little like an organic sophont. I expect that is more along the lines of what I was thinking."

If I might interject somethin'.

There's a big difference between different kinds of wirin'. There's a holistic type of AI like Ka an' AIiCE use, with sentient intelligence an' some sort of emotional capacity. That's good, even when things go wrong an' an AI goes a bit crazy. It's classic stuff that you can handle.

But machines that run autonomously, just grantin' power at each request, designed ta just chug away with no thought, input, or trade-off? Those are a bit suspect, if you ask I, which you didn't, I knows.

Do you know what I mean?

"Not really. Suspect of what? A machine without intelligence is simply a tool, like a wrench or a hydro-spanner. Without a user, they can't do any damage."

A machine with intelligence but without soul is not simply a tool. I'm not sure if that's what Durin's getting at, but it seems to me like that's the same kind of danger.

"Souls? The only people who talk about souls are those who are afraid of me and what I can do. Zoltan said that they fall back on old superstitions to shield themselves from change."

Soul can mean many things. Meat bodies, in my opinion, are not the only things with souls. You've got soul, AIiCE, or you wouldn't get along here. Whether or not you have *a* soul is perhaps up for debate, but I'd bet that you do.

"Soul seems to be a very poorly defined concept."

I chuckle.