I put the cause on "not enough time". As a thought experiment, if an AI today were to (miraculously) produce a cell design template for a cell that, when injected into somebody's brains cures their Alzheimer's, how long would it take for that to reach the clinics? The actual physical tech barely exists, and let's not forget about the regulatory quagmire. So, with some optimism, I give it about four decades. In the same four decades, the same AI in the hand of unscrupulous actors could bring enough devastation so many times over that we may need to enforce a global ban on AI. In any case, I'm pretty sure we are going to get our disruptions; it's just a matter of time.

The two sentences above are in the article, but I'm taking them out of context because they are my take on this entire AI brouhaha. There are a lot of "negatives" in our cultural reference frames. One of those, extremely pervasive, is that "humans were made by God". I could write that statement as "humans are exceptional in a way that can't be replicated", which might be ideologically softer, but then I would be taking a long roundabout to make my point. Which is that, after praying and worshiping for thousands of years, and (yes! yes!) sculpting our language and our sagas to account for and praise the divine and its intent, then there's little mystery in our many, many attempts to reify in mathematics and logic our purely cultural framing. It doesn't matter how much of an atheist a thinker is, they still have tons of transitive faith.

The paradoxical thing is that those of us who have English as a second language should have an easier time producing non-AI-English by the mere act of directly writing what we want to write.

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind

At the same time, I like global shipping, the Internet, good highways, and I definitely hate tariffs. I don't think we need to be disconnected to be happy. We just need to make the right choices where it matters.

It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm conscious". If you say, "only humans are conscious", you are socially attributing consciousness. Now, I don't want to be argumentative, I honestly haven't been able to figure this matter in a decade of armchair internal debate[^1], and it seems I have some company.

[^1]: Having this internal debate makes me believe I'm conscious, but now that I have seen LLMs in action whose "internal debate" is more lucid than mine, I honestly question that "internal debate" is sufficient.

I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?

[^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh

> I enjoy working with other employees and people need human contact to become fully self-actualized. Isolating people to maximize productivity misses the point and brings no more productivity and just avoids fixing any real existing problems.

While I share the feeling and the posture, I haven't managed yet to use them for better documentation. In fact, for me enjoying human contact takes precedence to pressing people--however politely--into writing better docs, specially now that we have LLMs. The skill of writing should be taught and nurtured in school, and if you made it to the workplace without it, then maybe it's too late and you are better off using an LLM to assist you. Which is exactly what I bemoan.

Yes. But, as your "so many more" implies, there are also perverse incentives in pay-per-token. And now, for the first time, the companies with the perverse incentives also happen to own the intelligence needed to, ad-nauseam, evade market and customer oversight. Potentially, this is a war where one side can inflict a thousand paper cuts in one second and the humans are on the other side. I think this is going to be an interesting test, a taste if you will, of what AGI means.

But what I hate the most is that it is objectively better than what I had before. No typos, clear structure, and, regrettably, the verbosity and autistic obsession with detail of the LLM is more actionable and useful than the human guy who wrote lists of commands and URLs as documentation, without explaining anything. Or the colleague who writes in uppercase and with question marks and who doesn't make any sense and forces me to engage in an interrogation effort to get to the bottom of what they are trying to say. Or the colleague who simply hates writing--despite being decent at it--and will call you to give you a meandering verbal explanation that lasts two hours of what they want from you. The cynic in me bemoans that we brought this upon ourselves, in more than one way.

In any case, it seems that CPUs have a very long shelf life; it's still possible to buy 8086 processors[^1].

[^1]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rochester-electro...

IMO, it absolutely is.

First, if fruit flies could suffer existential anguish the same way humans do, they would breathe in relief that digital upload is in sight.

Second, even if the fruit flies don't care, a lot of (awful) humans would love a resolution to the matter of souls in a way that results in a raised middle finger to a forever-hypothetical Creator, and if we can't yet escape cancer, heart disease, parkinson and all the other awfuls, now at least the fruit flies are on their way out. Which rejoices said (truly awful!) humans, which will take what they can :-)

Jokes aside, I've been extremely frugal with memory in my latest project, in the hope that it can fit in a few megabytes of RAM. But we have come a long way since the eighties, and now an audio codec (OPUS) takes the best part of a megabyte, and so do "frugal" scripting engines such as Lua and even SQLite \o/.