I made a summary of some things discussed at a recent philosophy night:
Q: Is AI intelligent / sentient / creative?
A: Some people thought it is becoming these things or has become some of them. It was noted that we tend to keep moving the goal posts of when we consider AI to be comparable to us; for example, in the past it was thought that the Turing Test was a good way to determine whether AI has surpassed us, but today AI can easily pass the Turing Test and does so regularly, yet we still feel like there are things that only humans can do. I personally do think that AI will eventually surpass us in intelligence and creativity but hasn't yet; it currently does some things better than us and other things worse than us. But I'm agnostic about whether it has attained or will attain sentience, because I don't know how humans attained it. In particular, I see no reason to assume that we attained it by becoming complex biological machines, though *if* that was the mechanism, then I see no reason why complex silicon machines couldn't attain it too. Nobody can explain where sentience comes from (see the paper "What Is It Like to Be A Bat?" by Thomas Nagel - http://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-like-to-be-a-bat/).
Q: Do human lives depreciate in value over time? I.e. do future generations matter less than the present generation?
A: We first discussed why human lives have value at all, which we couldn't really agree on. Due to the trolley problem, some lives are more valuable than others to some people, and the value of a particular life is subjective - e.g. a person values their child's life more highly than the life of a random person. As to what makes lives valuable at all, I thought any being with the ability to make free choices and have experiences has intrinsic value, and I also think happy experiences have value which means a life that's experiencing happy experiences has value. But I don't know how to compare lives so, all other things being equal, I'd have to say each person's life is equally valuable.
Regarding future lives, many people thought we tend not to value them because we've never met them and we tend to care more about people we've met and know personally. Because of the real possibility of humans going extinct soon (given that we're currently in the middle of an extinction event of worldwide species), that means future lives have less value than present lives because they might not exist. So the answer to the question partly depends on how likely you believe humans will survive into the future. I personally think there's a pretty good chance that at least some humans will survive climate change, after which there could potentially be a lot more humans than have ever existed, and as a result, although I'd agree that the value of lives depreciates a bit due to this not being assured, I still think our actions in affecting the world for those future humans matters a lot more than we tend to assume.
Q: Can we have happiness without sadness?
A: Most people said no, you need to know what sadness is before you can realize you're happy and be happy. For example, if you're sick all you can think about is your symptoms and then when you get better you're happy just to do regular things that you previously took for granted. I personally wasn't convinced, and see no reason why someone couldn't be happy without ever being sad - they just might not realize they're happy or might not have a word "happy". Of the 4 types of happiness I mentioned: immediate pleasure, mood, joy, and contentedness with your life (feeling like it has a purpose), I'd say you can at least have contentedness with your life without knowing a meaningless life, and you can have immediate pleasure from brain chemicals firing without negative brain chemicals firing. A happy mood, however, might feel neutral if the only mood you ever know is a happy mood, and I'm not sure about joy.
However, I think sadness is a lack of happiness, or something missing that previously made you happy, which means I think you can't have sadness without happiness.
