That's what it seems like they're saying. At some point it's likely they will be indistinguishable from us on many levels, including emotions. There's a demand for it and a solution/peoduct will eventually be created to address that demand, once the means of doing so are technically and financially feasible/scalable.

Currently, yes, there's an innate difference, but it's only fictitious that there won't be a difference until it's not. It's plausible speculation. Writing it off as fictitious as of now feels like an "ostrich in the sand" means of molding around a static perception of reality.

Things will change, we're not special, labor as we know it will be replaced, machines will at some point acquire the same abilities as us, and we'll have to strive to figure out as a whole if we need to change the means required to carry on and/or individually adapt/overcome such sea changes in labor/income.

It will probably cause many issues within our societies, but many will also see opportunities. It's going to be a lot of grey, likely more so than now.

I agree that there’s hubris in thinking we’re somehow special. But pretending we will get there “someday” isn’t much different than saying one day we’ll time travel. Even if plausible, it’s so far from where we’re currently at it belongs more to philosophical thought experiments than serious technology inquiry

I'd agree that they would either be conscious or p-zombies, but I think humans are sufficiently easy to fool that the latter may well happen. I offer panpsychism and celebrity fandoms/parasocial relationships as examples of people's emotional sense of connection being misleading.

I don't think anyone has a sufficiently concrete definition of consciousness to even tell either how far we are from that now, nor how to get there from here.

https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2022/06/18/lamda-turin...

I do think humans are easy to fool but so far only in extremely constrained scenarios. E.g., limited to chat bots. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. To fool people in the manner that’s being discussed, robuts would need to fool people with buddy language and on a subconscious level. So much more of how we communicate is beyond reading words on a screen. Consider the uncanny valley that is still prevalent with deep fakes. Getting better for sure, but that’s still constrained to premise video. To be able to do that in person in real time is a much larger problem.

The other examples appear to me as magnifications of mental illness instead of generalizable scenarios, possibly including the Google employee when you consider his background.

Hm. To me, reaching uncanny valley means they're probably quite close in form and behaviour. But it may well be the case that the remaining 1% (or whatever the percentage is) of the details may be harder than the first 99%.

I can see your point. But to me, the uncanny valley isn’t evidence that we’re super close, it’s evidence that we don’t know how to fully define the problem because there are elements we know are not wore right but can’t say why. Because we can’t fully define it means we aren’t close to solving it.

I certainly agree that we don't know what we're missing. My best guess timeline for this is very vague for this exact reason.

Do you see/feel this "something innately different emotionally" when you do your banking? Most human bank tellers have been replaced by ATMs and websites.