This logic doesn't hold. Humans are part of the universe and obey all its laws. It's arbitrary to say bacteria and bonobos and stone tools are naturally occurring but AI aren't. We distinguish them because we're conscious and we have the experience of choice, but to say our creations aren't natural to the universe implies that our consciousness is not a natural phenomenon.
Aren’t humans part of the universe’s rules? What makes AI development any less ‘free’ than any other emergent property?
That's just evidence of absent records, not that there are no records.
All I’m doing is calling out the intellectual dishonesty is making any claims about something we know nothing of.
Yeah, a lot of people get hung up on the term AI as it exists today, and protesting that it doesn't deserve such consideration. I should have been more explicit that I was speaking in the much more general sense, and on an evolutionary timescale, not about technology we'd recognize today.
What we have today is a crude software approximation mimicking what we think AI should be, but that AI itself is nowhere in sight.