AI individuals may not be that far off so...

[rayheinrich]

Some folks I follow through Youtube, mainly Adam Conover and Dan Olson, are....skeptical about this whole A.I. thing, to say the least, drawing some clear comparisons between the hype for A.I. now and the hype for the Internet during the dot com bubble (not to mention the very recently burst bubble over blockchain). What technical knowledge I have on the subject is actually meta-knowledge, mainly from the aforementioned names but also from some conversations with various Computer Engineering friends, who all seem to generally concur that A.I. personhood is a very remote possibility, at the moment. And since it was just as remote a possibility during the time of Isaac Asimov, maybe just consider his work? I think the real use for this sort of speculation, at the moment, is in consideration of what rights we humans should possess, as well as whether entities as "simple" as fetuses or "lesser" species of animal to those as complex as corporations or microstates should [continue to] possess certain rights, but yeah, that's still no speculation, on my part. I dunno -- I guess I can't be bothered to really think about this, only to note what I've here noted.

As you said, even if we're not willing to entertain the possibility of AI that experience
themselves as living beings, it is a good reminder to go over our treatment of smart
species that already exist with us on this planet. Especially, I think, how arrogantly
we've acted in the past now that there's a possibility that we will need to be more
humble in the future. Not that it will be much different for most of us, since we've
lived our whole lives with lots of people being smarter than us, it will only be the
top few percent of our population who will need to be humble about their intelligence.

Adam Conover is funny, but hardly somebody that is knowledgeable when it comes
to AI (and he's prone to repeating cliched cultural myths).
Dan Olson, on the other hand, is someone I have a lot of respect for.
Isaac Asimov was one of my favorite SF authors and definitely saw into the future.
If he'd had the chance to learn about the current Large Language Models, I sure he'd
have a different opinion.

But yeah, we'll just have to see how this thing plays out. But one thing's for sure:
Whether there's sentient AI are not, AI at the current level, as evidenced by several
commercially successful corporate products, is going to put millions of people out of
work and cause lots of cultural havoc.

The .com bubble only affected badly financed companies, the ones that were properly
financed weren't really affected by it and went on to create the immensely successful
internet. Blockchain technology was always a con job. Crypto is indeed a viable system
if the current problem of speculation can be overcome as a viable currency needs stability
and crypto does not have that at the moment. AI is currently a cultural bubble, but financially
there are very large corporations such as Microsoft (and Amazon and Google, among others,
by different routes) that are already producing very profitable business software, so financially
there's no bubble at all.

P.S. I included some copied comments about .com, blockchain, crypto, and AI below
should you wish to read them:

Blockchain technology: And its predecessors in the form of secure military communications,
were already well known among systems experts as having a severe shortcoming because their
response times went up logarithmically with the number of active nodes. The blockchain was
hype generated to trick people. Just international inter-bank transactions alone occur today at
a rate of more than 10 million per second, and Mastercard and Visa are much higher than that.
The fastest blockchain technology, at the moment, running on far fewer nodes can barely
manage 10 per second. It was never a viable commercial technology.

Crypto currency: Is viable if a way can be found to manage the speculation. One of the main
characteristics for a viable currency is stability, something which major cryptocurrencies do
not have at the moment.

Dot.com Bubble: Was indeed a bubble and many companies went bankrupt. But it was a temporary
bubble that didn't affect most well-funded companies. Those companies went on, as you know,
to create the immensely successful internet we have today.