Perhaps it's because deep down I don't believe in free will.

I'll never understand people like you. Why on earth does a piece of pigshit that would beat, rape, and bury a child deserve to be rehabilitated?
Two in the chest, one in the head.

I believe life imprisonment is far worse than any violent death.

Perhaps it's because deep down I don't believe in free will.

Hence, the very concept of "deserve" doesn't mean anything fundamentally.

old

They could dangle him and then pull the guy out for a 3 hr break once his legs are gone

I hope to god you never have to ask yourself if you still believe this statement while standing over your child's hospital bed.
If that happened to my daughter, I would do everything I possibly could to make sure that whoever did it met a BAD end.

I'm of the belief that child molesters should be put into wood chippers in the middle of town square.

lots of morons in here

I don't want to get into a FW discussion here and now, but I believe given my cursory analysis of this issue, that free will exists just not in an absolute sense. I think free will increases in the direction of greater complexity of life. Where humans would have more free will than apes, and apes more than insects. I don't have a high degree of confidence in this position simply because I have not given the question enough consideration. However, with degrees of free will, there can be degrees of responsibility.

..and as soon as you've done that, your society will put you to the chair. Or whatever.

Point being, it's just cyclical. If you're not enough of a person to let the buck stop at your door.. well, fuck ya.

Why on earth does a piece of pigshit that would beat, rape, and bury a child deserve to be rehabilitated?
Two in the chest, one in the head.

Perhaps it's because deep down I don't believe in free will.

RUH ROW, RAGGY!!

Rehabilitation is bullshit. The percentage of inmates who get rehabilitated and proceed to stay out of trouble is so small it's laughable. Most end up committing the same crime again, if not a worse crime.

Live in prison is bullshit, too. It costs $60,000 to imprison a man per year. The death penalty is just a quick spike in the electrical bill.

The problem is, it's very hard to define responsibility.

Consider a computer that is programmed to make decisions that require a lot of deep analysis. It does so using complex algorithms, or sophisticated connectionist processing.

Furthermore, let's say that as a result of one of the computer's decisions, a million people get blown up.

We could hold the computer responsible, and shut it down, but would it make sense to be angry at it?

I want to say that if you're crazy and don't know any better, then the world is better off without you, but that's an oversimplification.

If you know the difference between right and wrong, and you still commit the act, buh-bye. Say hello to Uncle Dirtnap.

Issues of mental illness are a different story, and a bit more complicated.

What's the solution? Spend a boatload of taxpayer money to treat someone's illness after they rape and murder someone? Why? So we can all feel better about ourselves and allow some freakzoid scumbag to suck on the public tit for the rest of the state-sponsored lives? Fuck that.

This example is unclear. We don't know the circumstance under which it made the decision that resulted in those deaths.

Regardless, if the AI is at fault for those deaths when they were reasonably avoidable, it will face consequences for it's actions. The best course of action would probably be to reprogram it to place greater value on human life or the lives of all sentient conscious beings. Then confine the AI to a simulation where you could test it with a huge number of difficult scenarios, dilemmas, where a decision is required. Should it pass, re-release it and monitor it's actions for some period afterwards.

We don't have that kind of flexibility with the human brain, yet. If we did, some extreme criminal acts may justify compulsory state sanctioned re-engineering of the brain to physically prevent re-offense. Upon release, there may be long term or life term monitoring. If not compulsory, this procedure may be given as one of two options including life without parole or the death penalty.

At the same time, those at high risk to offend may volunteer themselves for such a procedure where they have more say in what is done to them.

Pie in the sky? Maybe.

Where do you get this statistic from? Somebody convicted and sentanced for murder, and then released, is no more likely to commit another crime than anybody else.

Regardless of whether we knew the circumstances of the decision, or whether or not we could reprogram it, wouldn't it be a bit absurd to get angry at the machine?

Afterall, it was merely functioning in accordance with the laws of nature. If you were to rewind time back a million times, it would make that same decision over and over again.

If you had a laplacian calculator, or a mathematical archangel, you would (barring quantum indeterminacies), be able to predict in advance the decision that the computer made.

Similarly, we could do the same for a human being from the time she was born.