MFC Rabbit Hole

The Mecha Fight Club project has aroused great interest among the community, not only because of game mechanics and the support of large funds, but also due to their statement of including artificial intelligence into the game mechanics. There are some questions that come to mind when a team makes such statements:
- how deep is the team working on AI integration?
- how far are they willing to go in 5 years?
- are the developers ready for a revolution or will they just stop on machine learning of game skills?
- what is the future of AI cyber pets?

And on top of those, there come ethical questions which the community might face, if this is truly a revolution and not a superficial implementation?

For the time being, the team haven't revealed all the cards, let's dream up, shall we?

Well...It's not a secret that artificial intelligence field is an exciting part of the foreseeable future.

According to Dr. Nando de Freitas, the leading researcher at Google DeepMind, humanity appears to be on the cusp of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) solution even during our lifetime.
“We are close to human-level AI (AGI). Now it's all about scale! The game is over!"

— he wrote in Twitter on May 14, 2022, commenting the Gato creation - the multimodal neural network by his company.

With such rapid advance in AI technology field, we will have to live in the same world with sentient creations soon, that are not humans (non-human beings, if wish so) - various chimeras: embodied AI (in gaming as well), as well as bioengineered products of living intelligent machines.

How deep the developers are willing to put AI into Mecha Fight Club is my main question. Maybe it is just an attractive marketing scheme with a superficial implementation of neural networks?

If the developers are really into improving AI development month by month, then we may encounter interesting issues that will go beyond ordinary gameplay.

Generally speaking, the main question of the coexistence of humans and non-humans will be the question of moral priorities between them.

As far as I know, there are no clear-cut solutions. The only prioritization mechanism "sewn" into us is the moral anthropocentrism (the priority of my species is the highest). Which easily turns into speciesism - the conviction of specie's in its own superiority.

Discrimination against advanced AI? This is a matter of the foreseeable future.

Species discrimination is analogous to racism and sexism in the sense, that species differences alone are sufficient for justification. In the context of AI, we are talking about future creations with complex behavior (AI) that initially live in the digital world.

The main priority in AI evaluation will be people's idea of its intelligence levels (the smarter, the more valuable; the smarter the rooster, the more expensive it is).

But the most interesting part will begin when AI starts evaluating our minds. However, that is a topic for another story altogether.

Recently produced research conclusively shows - "We are not the crown of creation. We are just a variant of mind evolution." For example, at least 3 other mind variants are known among animals, which demonstrate complex behavior. Whether our roosters demonstrate it or not, only will show.

I hope you don't get the idea that the articles topic is all about daydream and distant future. I'm sure advanced gaming AI will definitely appear as well as some kind of chimeras with complex behavior. I hope that Mecha Fight Club is one of them.

So, how far down the AI rabbit hole are developers willing to go? Will cyber pets become "sentient"? Will we face moral choices, such as removing a pet? Wouldn't that be murder?

It is interesting to observe the project from this perspective.