[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

No, I mean detecting the threat from a bot that's been programmed to kill is easy as heck....detecting latent flaws in the bot's programming OTOH...is about as meaningful as scanning a rock unless the bot is sentient.

You've missed the point. It's not that the bot is sentient, but rather that in the Psycho-Pass universe, humans are essentially treated like biological machines. This alternative society has adopted a very mechanistic, highly deterministic view of human behaviour. That is, it appears to believe that your every behaviour can be reduced to a set of chemical reactions that can be detected in advance, and thus prevented with the right pills, if so desired.

This society apparently believes that sentience is an illusion. If that seems mind-boggling to you, consider for a moment the full implications of the Turing Test, that classic test of whether a machine has become sentient.

The Turing Test is a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to or indistinguishable from that of an actual human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give the correct answer; it checks how closely the answer resembles typical human answers.

I wonder how many people have actually grasped the full implication of the above definition: that a machine can be essentially treated as sentient if it can trick an observer into thinking that it is as intelligent as a human being. It does not actually have to be capable of "free choice" like a human. It just needs to appear as though it's capable of making a free choice.

I've always wondered why the Turing Test is so easily accepted as the litmus test for sentience when it so cynically assumes that "free will" — that vital quality many of us intuitively associate with intelligent behaviour — is a trick.

So, rather than seeing a machine as the sentient equal of a human being, treat the human being instead as the mechanical equivalent of a machine. There is essentially no difference, just the reversal of a popular point of view. Hence, the situation in Ep3 presents no problems to a Dominator forced to make a spot evaluation on a threatening robot.

Originally Posted by Cosmic Eagle

Also how does free will being a process of our own brains make it an illusion? It's still our self that produces and is comprised of said chemical reactions that differs from person to person resulting in varied responses.

If it weren't even for said reactions the physical brain would not function.

It's a web of pathways said reactions can take but which pathway it takes is still a response to a host of various factors. A psychopath for example, has far less choice due to his wiring than a normal person. A normal person has far more possibility and potential perhaps.

That's the compatibilist view of free will and determinism and, indeed, the vast majority of thinkers today fall somewhere within this camp. Only a handful of outliers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins take a serious objection to the view. Harris, I'm aware, likened compatibilism to the arguments espoused by the apologists for religion, which he takes a very dim view of. In Harris' view, you either believe that our every action is completely determined by our biology, or you don't. There is no in-between.

It's my hypothesis that the Sibyl System is more similar to Harris' views than those of compatibilism. It's clearly a system that takes determinism to the extreme, going so far as to definitively label a five-year-old as a potential criminal who has to be isolated from other people, based purely on the child's biological/psychological profile. "Free will" in this society is, in effect, a Hobson's choice. You don't actually have a choice. If you're born diseased, you're doomed to be stuck with medication for life, or until someone finds a cure.