May 20, 2022

Dive into MFC AI

The Mecha Fight Club project aroused great interest among the community. Not because of game mechanics and funds support only. Rather, the introduction of artificial intelligence into game mechanics. The question is how deep is the team working on its implementation? How far are they willing to go in 5 years? Are developers ready to revolutionize? Or will they stop at game skills machine learning only? What is the future of AI-powered cyber pets? What ethical questions might the community face if this is truly a revolution and not a superficial implementation?

It is no secret that the field of artificial intelligence is an exciting point of the future.

DeepMind research director and Oxford professor Nando de Freitas has blown up the global community of AI researchers and developers.
"We're close to human-level AI (AGI). Now it's all about scale! Game over!"
— he wrote on Twitter, commenting on the creation of his company's multimodal neural network Gato.

In the 21st century, people will have to live in the same world with intelligent entities that are not people (if you like, non-humans) - various chimeras: embodied AI, as well as bioengineering products of living intelligent machines.

The first question of the coexistence of people and non-humans will be the question of moral priorities between them. And there are no clear solutions here. The only prioritization mechanism sewn into us is moral anthropocentrism (the priority of my species is the highest). And it easily turns into speciesism, and even into protonazism.
Speciesism (species discrimination) is analogous to racism and sexism in that it is discrimination against members of other species, either mindlessly or because of the incorrect assumption that species differences alone are sufficient justification.

The moral priority assigned by people to different types of creatures is determined by people's ideas about their mind (the smarter, the more valuable).

At the same time, studies of recent years convincingly show - “We are not the crown of creation. We are just one of the mind evolution options. For example, among animals, there are at least 3 more mind variants prioritization that demonstrate complex behavior.

However, people have not been able to overcome their moral anthropocentrism, even despite the “Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness” (in which a group of leading cognitive scientists write that not only humans have neural substrates)

So how far are developers willing to dive into the AI ​​rabbit hole? Will cyber pets become "sentient"? Will we be faced with a moral choice, such as deleting a pet? Wouldn't that be a murder? It's exciting to watch the project from this angle.