"They can't be intelligent as they lack consciousness"

"Ok then how does intelligence require consciousness? What is consciousness? How could one prove that someone or something has consciousness?"

"That's on you."

No, no it is not. If consciousness is a prerequisite for intelligence or moral patience, then it is on the proponents to define exactly what that is and how to prove it.

On matters of moral patience especially, we should err on the side of caution, because the cost of getting it wrong is catastrophic.

In developing countries, including China, my experience has been that this is the standard, and people will act accordingly even if there is abundance. Cancelled transit is a good example as well, it interacts with a primal fear of ours of being left behind or drawing the short stick, even if rationally, it is pretty inconsequential.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCseyin_Do%C4%9Fru

Thing is, I'm still reading the majority of generated code, and I have colleagues who'll laugh at me if my PRs are a shit show. I fear what vibe coders are pushing to the servers of myriads of start ups, and pity the poor people who'll have to clean it up in a year or two.

And Gemini is kinda good enough at everything. Never the top, but it is decent at every task, and it is much faster than Kimi K3 and significantly cheaper. Kimi is very focussed on coding, Gemini isn't.

More importantly, it natively understands text, audio and video. If/when we are able to make the jump to robotics, this becomes essential. As you say, Google has a lot of deep background and deep pockets, they are able to make more of a long play. No idea if it will pay off, but it is way to early in the game to count them out.

- Doing too much at the same time, it is super exhausting, and I get nervous and stressed

- Sycophancy makes me overestimate myself

- When my stress meets external pressure, quality goes down. The little voice of 'surely the AI got it right' can lead to defects and code quality going down.

Except for doing some manual coding, I've started doing a couple of other things that are probably just healthy regardless of using AI heavily in day to day life:

- Do literally nothing for at least half an hour. Read something written by humans, even better if it is fiction.

- Do something that makes you feel stupid. And don't use AI to help you through it. (That could be Leetcode, but for me it is learning about statistics)

- Slow down when you feel like things are moving too fast. By far the hardest thing, but the moment I realize I'm trying to rush for a deadline, I'm going out for a walk. Realistically, I'm moving 3-8x faster than before, this little delay is nothing, and keeps me sane and quality on a good level.

As the person above said, AI has significantly increased my ability to execute on ideas. I always liked computers, always liked building things, but was never that great at coding, and was never that good at going super deep into one topic. Instead, I have broad knowledge of a lot of things like product design, requirements engineering, devops, security.

I work with a fully agentic flow, but I would argue very seriously; My job has not gotten easier, I am doing at least as much hard thinking as before. From assisted RE over design (TDD focused Spec), implementation by agents, review by agents with partial human oversight, I have a speedup of maybe 50-100%.

More importantly, I can do things I couldn't do before. And when it comes to performance and defect-density, it is comparable to very senior people I couldn't touch before. I do agree that the code doesn't look like a human would write it - too abstracted, sometimes convoluted, often way too dense. But it isn't worse code, and if you accept that no one has to read that code ever again, then it is good. Agents are able to grok it just fine.

> When we offload decision-making, we become unaware of the trade-offs.

My biggest issue with the new agentic workflow is that I'm constantly asked to make decisions, and it is not always immediately obvious how important they are. Like, yes, I see the people who just write 'implement feature x' and then call it a day. These people were lazy und uncreative to begin with, and will continue to cognitively decline with AI. But if you use it seriously, you're in a constant state of doing requirements engineering, weighing trade-offs, and making architecture decisions.