2026-10-02 07:28 UTC
Techies and engineers built these MLs from the ground up. An ML algo is barely even a machine. In its most physical form it’s a string of active and inactive transistors doing maths, it has no nerves or pain receptors. It does not feel because we have not programmed it to, it does not have experiences because it is an algorithm that only knows how to spit out “human sounding speech” or track patterns across big datasets.
Do you feel bad for all the electrons happily running around a circuit when you turn off an appliance?
Replies (1)
-
@Artisian@lemmy.world 2026-10-02 17:48
As a Techie and engineer who studies why ML methods work, said Techies and engineers understand what they’ve created and why it works much less than we understand, say, human biology. We don’t know what we’ve programmed it to do; if it is at all possible for a bunch of simplified neurons to experience pain, we have no idea if we’ve implemented that or not. (Common misconception btw! electrons barely move when you turn on the circuit, and certainly don’t disappear. On average they vibrate a fraction of a cm (link ). The electrons are all still there when you turn it off (otherwise suddenly the copper cable would be able to react with a bunch of stuff! This would be bad). See alternating current).)