alt Hacker NewsBut you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program. A computer is incapable of receiving it.
We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity. You be kind hoping the other person will reciprocate. That is the social contract. AI cannot participate in this, yet.
Edit: Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.
Apparently some people get a dopamine hit from roleplaying kindness toward inanimate objects. Whatever turns you on, no hang ups here. For me, that dopamine hit is not worth the 4% intelligence tax.
Replies
Kindness is that, yes. Fundamentally, though, it's about being considerate in one's actions so as to not harm others. If someone truly believes that acting a certain way at any point risks their ability to reliably be kind in others, then it's a social kindness to be kind and considerate in all actions.
I'll not reach for the easy response and say "Be kind to the Earth" fails your definition without reaching for pedantry with "the Earth has living things" because the Earth is instead a wet rock that cannot understand kindness, yet we show it.
> We practice kindness between humans because of the law of reciprocity.
Yet, this law is so embedded in us that practicing kindness even towards a rock makes us feel good.
So practice kindness, first and foremost for yourself.
> A computer is incapable of receiving it
Citation please.
Without examining the corpus, it's entirely possible that the training corpus has better results when you are kind to it, so one can imagine a situation where "reception of kindness" is meaningful, and in principle if you were an AI provider, you could RLHF your way to "being rude gets you worse results" as a means to train the human users.
> But you cannot practice kindness towards a computer program.
And yet rubber duck debugging is a thing
>Kindness REQUIRES two living beings, one to give and one to receive. If there is no receiver, there is no kindness.
I guess, in some pendantic interpretation, but that doesn't seem relevant. Whether I am "practicing" or "roleplaying", I do it too, and I don't expect reciprocity.