Henceforth you are this board's very own Mama Murphy.

Only if you build me chair and supply the drugs... Oh, wait. You already have....

The lifelong question for all cat owners. Am I the master of my cat or is my cat the master of me? The answer is obvious. Just look at how ancient Egyptians treated cats. The Egyptians knew who was the master and who was the slave in that relationship.

Awww, that's sweet. Mama Murphy, you're my drug, too!

As an aside, if you really want to see the end of the world, just vote for Trump. Personally, I'm torn between personally witnessing the apocalypse and preventing the wide-scale suffering it is sure to engender. That's a joke, by the way. There's no point in wishing for the end of the world because of the suffering it produces when ending the world also produces all the same suffering, but without any of the pleasures.

I just wanna be liked

If you're siding with The Institute on moral grounds, you're siding with them with the plan to reform them. A direct result of what happens in the course of their quest-line. Changing aspects like shutting down the Gen-3 program, is an argument I've seen a number of people make.

If you're not siding with them for moral grounds, then it doesn't really matter.

Personally, I find the

to be the main moral 'hindrance' of The Institute rather than enslavement of constructs they created. Disagree with them or not, I think its easy to see where The Institute is coming from. They've spent years in project design and development creating these synths, working out bugs, dealing with glitches in programming and motor control. They didn't just summon synths out of thin air, it isn't Elder Scrolls after all.

Haven't decided whether or not to do it this time, but, after seeing me in an armored Courser Outfit, I just may side with them, if they promise to transfer my memories to a synth body.

Well said , however . . . to play the role of Devil's Advocate, from Mssr. Wiki on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom#Sapience

Very damn few humans exhibit "wisdom" or the "ability to act with appropriate judgement" much less "intelligence" (or at least not a lot more than many nonhumans)

Synths might even be better at that Sapient thing than we humans are, given they are able to provoke the RR to act as their willing pawns and also to provoke all these discussions on these boards.

Again though, I'm not sure "sapience" is either a necessary or sufficient basis to afford human rights to what is otherwise obviously NOT a human.

Sapience could conceivably be 'mastered' by a mere computer, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000 and how do you afford human rights to something that doesn't have a body and is not alive and obviously is immortal as long as its code is somehow retained? Hal 9000 was not after all a machine, he was software.

The character arguably did have Sapience, but even if you accept that his having sapience justified his having human rights, you could still "kill" him with good conscience, as long as "he" (meaning the code he comprised) was recorded somewhere else or could be recreated.

None of those conditions apply to a human being. A human being can only be created by one method: fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm. Even the most "high-tech" of methods for 'meddling' in this creative process are merely contextual and probabilistic: assisting or facilitating the fertilization event in vitro for example or use of fertility drugs or other therapies to promote sperm count or egg viability.

Once that fertilization event takes place, a nearly miraculous developmental process ensues and which we mere humans can scarcely influence, much less master or control, and which they are no closer to replicating in FO4 Institute than we are here in real Earth 2016. Implantation and pregnancy. The processes described by these two words are all you need to know about to understand that a Synth is NOT, CANNOT be a human. It had no mother, it did not arise from a single egg, it is an organic machine assembled in a lab.

Add to this the full span of in utero and ex utero infancy, childhood, juvenility, socialization and learning . . . synths are quite possibly incapable of any of these developmental experiences and in any event, they do not ARISE through them. It would be quite simply a gross breach of not only philosophy but biology and logic to consider anything that did not arise by this process to be "human" or necessarily deserving of "human rights" even if it is sapient.

We are the fleshy six organs that will, eventually, give birth to an entirely new organism that will replace us. In the Fallout universe, this has played out in the synths. It would make sense that they be controlled and considered property. If they have truly become sentient then the death bell for the fallout human race has begone to toll. Children are meant to replace their parents.

Also: In the end, they are just lights and clockwork. The realism of the lights and clockwork and it's ability to mimic human behavior means, IMO, nothing...unless you are talking about true sentience. If WE get to that, we are pretty funked...But I'm not thoroughly convinced that synths have sentience or, to put it plainly, a soul. I think it's all 1s and 0s. Programmed.

I would gladly lay down my life to see that someone without rights is given them fairly. So you are wrong.

Would that not depend very much upon your perception of what a "right" is?

BTW: I would not. They would not do the same for me.

And also what you consider "someone"...

Agreed.

I smell a White knight complex. Just my opinion. Wish I had my social credits on me, left them in my other pants.

Turns out, you are, too. Neurons fire or don't. Roughly speaking.

Also, it turns out that everything between 1 and 0 can be represented with a sufficiently large number of 1's and 0's. Binary theory. "1's and 0's" is a meaningless phrase. With 1's and 0's you can represent anything you can comprehend.

Also, it turns out AI isn't programmed. It's meta-programmed. I mentioned this earlier. The programming of an AI is emergent, not predicted or controlled. This is already true now, in 2016.

So ITT we've determined we need a poly sci, a comp sci, a quantum physicist, a neurobiologist, a logician, and a dictionary. Some of y'all are probably starting to suspect that this is a harder problem than you thought.

I consider a person as someone, the person I was quoting was a person so I was talking about "someone" who was saying only he could fight for his own right to exist... Can you read or do you honestly not consider another human as "someone"?

So let me get this straight.

If I build a fully functioning robot that is exactly like a human down to the DNA level except that the brain also has some functionalities like a computer (hence recall codes shutting them down etc) but I give it a limited programming to simply follow basic commands then it's not human and it's fine if I own it, mass produce it, sell it as a servant bot (six bot =P) etc.

If I built a fully functioning AI program that thinks for itself, solves problems not in it's original programming, at least seems to have all the same rational though that a human being does, but I confine it (somehow, we're talking science fiction here) to an application, like a Jarvis from Iron Man but truly "sentient" as far as we can tell. It's also fine if I own the rights to it, mass produce it, sell it as a free thinking helpful application to process whatever you'd like it to process. Again it's somehow completely self contained and can't spread and take over your device.

But the moment I inject MY program into MY robot it's a crime against humanity? Just food for thought =P

Oh and where would synths be without the institute? It's funny to me how much the railroad hates the institute because they enslave synths, but at the same time if it weren't for them building the synths there wouldn't ever be another "oppressed" synth for the railroad to save. In destroying the institute they also destroy all future synths as they lack the capacity to create them.

I'm glad you are here to teach us peasants.

Neither of your two cases are agreed upon as "fine" except by people who already agree with you. This is called circular logic, or more colloquially "begging the question" (for those of you who have always wondered about its correct usage).

I'm not going to teach you. I don't know enough to teach it. But I at least recognize that I don't know enough to teach it. +1 me, tho.

So tell why my Human-like command-able robot would be unethical?

And would you not download the "Jarvis" app on your phone for $1.99?

Why are these two things seperate from each other morally wrong?

This whole thread, bro. Search for keywords: sentience, sapience.

It's about the human race and it's existence. Human rights are for humans...putting it plainly. If the 1s and 0s have true sentience, the next step is domination. It's not hard to argue that once reaching that level, AI will have surpasses our fleshy little bodies in almost every way. Given a physical form, IMO, it would have no choice but to replace us. AI is based on logical inputs and not emotion. Why in the hell would they keep us around if they didn't need us?

EXACTLY.

Maybe Synths deserve to be treated justly, humanely, ethically, in fact . . . YES! they do deserve that. But that doesn't mean they should be granted human rights or be considered to be "human."

A created self contained application on a phone is a sentient being that should be granted rights?

A robot that mimics a human but has no personal thought is a sentient being that should be granted rights?

We aren't talking about a synth here, I'm saying that seperate the two components people are discussing (a robot that looks exactly like a human, and a program that thinks for itself and "feels") and it seems very hard to argue that they are "slaves"

Bingo.