I doubt the “soon” part. Artificial neurons are vast simplifications of real neurons, and even complex networks like GPT don’t come close the complexity of biological networks, both in network structure and in terms of what goes on between the neurons (eg chemical processes, as opposed to just the activity of the neurons themselves). Individual neurons have been shown to have capability to both process and store information, something which artificial ones don’t do. Besides, we are only scratching the surface in our understanding of biological neurons and brains. How can we say “this thing we built that is a vast simplification of this thing we barely understand will soon exceed the complexity of the thing we don’t yet understand”?
All trends indicate we’re only a couple years away from an AI superintelligence. No additional understanding of biological brains is required to get there.
It could be hubris to assume we know enough yet to replicate our 'kind' of intelligence. Just as it might be hubris to assert AI doesn't have some 'kind' of experience. A minimum (which will be raised once we have a better understanding) is still: change of state, to have an experience - we simply don't know what else exactly is required, so that threshold minimum remains to be raised.
We do not need to "replicate" human intelligence. It's enough to "simulate" it. The coming AI models will be entirely "alien" types of intelligence to us, and that's OK as long as they are useful. Most likely these AI models will be able to finally explain to us how our own brains work.
That’s not to say that it’s not useful in its current form, because it is, but that’s not what we are arguing here. You asserted that “Soon it will reach levels of complexity vastly exceeding any human brain.” while I’m asserting that the human brain is far, far more complex than you give it credit for and that the latest AI models are not even close to that yet. I am doubting that LLM’s and similar machine learning will exceed human brain complexity, and certainly not VASTLY, in any timeframe that I would call “soon”, unless there are fundamental discoveries made. It’s not even clear the current models can scale any further due to the lack of any new non-LLM-generated training data to train bigger models on, so the GPT3.5 to 4 shift is unlikely to reoccur.
Which parts of the (skin) cell are alive?
Here are the options: 1: All of it is irreducibly together alive. 2: Some of it is alive, some of it is not.
If 1: then life is made of non living material. If 2: repeat the above options with this new smallest piece of life. If there are no parts left to examine without reaching 1: then it is all alive.
Then we are left with two options. A: Life is made of non-living material in specific arrangements. B: life is a property of all material.
More than likely we are dealing with the first option. Life from non-living material. Which implies life could be created from other arrangements of materials that function analogously to a cell (at a different scale, maybe).
This question may be settled soon... well, as soon as someone builds a x-sized replica of a cell and proves it 'works' (given proper input/output/environment).
My gut also tells me this is true: with the following reasoning. A chair isn't actually any particular chair, but a template: a pattern, which can be expressed in other materials besides any one particular example. A pattern can be expressed in different mediums, and life looks like such a template... to me at least.
That's my two cents: add some salt.