I mean, I think distilling my argument down into "I'm not much more than a calculator" is a little bit much, but maybe I was unclear. I just don't think there's magic there. Brains are mysterious, but so are our LLMs, and we invented those. Most of what we experience emotionally isn't magic, it's a complex chemical reaction of hormones applied to our inputs and outputs. But like I said, I don't know if we'd value that in our AI or not, so that complexity may not be necessary to emulate.

I’m going to go out on a limb here but I bet that deep down inside you know that intellect is only one mechanism from trying to understand the infinite complexity of existence.

I get into bird watching but as much as I like to our birds into categories, I know the information is always a little off.

There seem to be a lot of people in this thread who consider themselves to be calculators. I too have to restrain myself from writing massive rants.

People espousing this opinion seem to have grown quite a lot since ChatGPT first became public. Cynical as I am, I do suspect some astroturfing trying to prepare people for being "obsolete".

I also suspect astroturfing, particularly here, and I also notice it on Substack (I don't visit a whole lot of other sites anymore). On Substack I see two clusters, one group _very into_ AI, the other advocating a lot of caution.

I don't think it's preparing people to be obsolete; I think it's a combination of AI startup founders hyping up their tech, and people who identify with big tech/"the side that wants AI".

Hype no doubt plays a part, which is a perfect cover for any truly malicious astroturfing. But when I say "prepare to be obsolete", I mean prepare to be obsoleteD.

What’s the difference ?

Right now, billionaires who profess the view that AI could end humanity are working their hardest to progress the field as fast as possible, scoffing at "ethics", "safety", and "responsibility". So if they do get their god-machine, they're not going to look around at 8 billion fellow humans (biological stochastic parrots, according to some) who are suddenly "obsolete", but using up resources, and think "fully automated space luxury communism".

Got it. Definitely feels like some type of play for dominance.

Which leads to the questions, dominance for whom, and over whom. And why, if we're supposedly entering an age of post-scarcity where AI can enable anyone to do anything, we would need dominance in the first place.