The pacing and the prolonging, obviously!

Artificial intelligence.

If humans are machines executing on some medium eventually it will be possible to emulate them on some other medium. Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.

We already have human intelligence. Creating new humans is easy (and fun)

The only reason to emulate human intelligence is to capture it, exploit it, and reduce the negotiating power of those who have it naturally. Anyone who wants this is not a friend of human beings

> Creating new humans is easy (and fun)

This could not be further from the truth.

Creating a new educated, competent human takes ~25 years, and significant costs and resources.

AGI can be just copy-pasted at essentially no cost. Even a robot that is mass-produced for tens of thousands of dollars is still much less expensive and takes much less time to make than a competent human.

But it is more than just fun , it gives purpose to our existence … pardon me but it is idiotic to look at bringing up a child so objectively.

Yes, but I think we should separate human economic value from the true purpose of our existence. If AI can replace us in economically valuable tasks, we will have no choice but to do so. The economic value part should be looked at objectively.

What is the true purpose of our existence?

That is a very good question, perhaps without an objective answer. But it's definitely not a 9-5 job, at least for me.

Except there's already billions of humans with millions becoming competent humans every year. Also the machine analogy breaks down in some ways for biological organisms. It's messier, more complex and organisms weren't designed for a purpose. There is no software humans are running. That's just a metaphor for whatever the brain & nervous system (throughout the body) does.

I do mostly agree with you, but...

> Creating new humans is easy

If you did a survey I suspect agreement with this statement would be rather bimodal.

That's fair. It starts easy, then gets difficult.

Sure, but that only stands if you believe the only purpose of human intelligence is for economic benefit.

That does not follow. The argument about the possibility of artificial intelligence makes absolutely no claims about the purpose of human or artificial intelligence. One is a claim about "is", another is a claim about "ought".

>Believing otherwise requires some essentially religious convictions on the existence of the soul or similar.

My doubt has nothing to do with religion.

I believe we'll never be able to harness the amount of technology required to replicate human intelligence.

Technological changes to economic conditions in general are not possible to opt out of forever. I'm not an AI accelerationist myself, because I think there are severe risks beyond the merely economic, but the auto industry is a good example of where many countries are engaging in what one might call "EV accelerationism". In principle you don't have to, it's possible to let them roll out only to the extent that the market naturally demands, but if you know internal combustion engines will become a niche hobbyist thing by 2050 there's a lot of value in making that transition faster and intentional.

That all persons doing intellectual work die of hunger as they cannot find a job. At least that's how I understand what the parent commenter is implying. They say that all people doing intellectual work better die quickly so they don't suffer a long 'transition period' to inevitably being dead of hunger.

Wonderful. And these people call themselves utilitarians too. God / Buddha / Allah / Batman, save me from their kindness!