Now: a chance encounter with someone of a different faith leads a citizen to respect the religious freedom of others in the realm of self-determination.
Future: a young hacker's formative experience leads to the idea that citizens should have the basic right to change out their device's recommendation engine with a random number generator at will.
Those future humans will still think of themselves as exceptional because the AI tools will have developed right alongside the current human-exceptionalist ideology.
Kinda like those old conservative couples I see in the South where the man is ostensibly the story teller and head of household. But if you listen long enough you notice his wife is whispering nearly every detail of importance to help him maintain coherence.
You've never actually seen this happen because it doesn't happen. This is not how real people interact, it's how the caricatures in your head interact.
I guess my real point is that I don't view experience or consciousness as something special or exceptional. My guess is that over time we come to understand how the brain works better and better but never find anything that definitively explains consciousness because it's totally subjective and immeasurable. We eventually produce computers complex enough to behave totally convincingly human, and they will claim to be conscious, maybe even be granted personhood, but we'll never actually know for sure if they experience the world, just like we don't know that other humans do.
Personally these sorts of things don't really matter to me- I don't really care if other people are conscious, and I don't think I could prove it either way- I just assume other people are conscious, and that we can make computers that are conscious.
And that's exactly what I'm pushing for: ML that passes every Turing-style test that we can come up with. Because, as they say "if you can't tell, does it really matter?"
The concept of consciousness is wildly more expansive and diverse than computation, rather than the other way around. A strict materialist account or "explanation" of consciousness seems to just end up a category error.
I take it as no surprise that a website devoted to the computers and software often insists that this is the only way to look at it, but there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism, nor are they "spiritual" or religious which is a common rejoinder by materialists, an example is the implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work from Philosophical Investigations and his analysis of language. And even in neuroscience there is far from complete agreement on the topic at all.
if there is no duality, then what else can it be?
> there are entire philosophical movements that have developed fascinating accounts of consciousness that are far from strict materialism
philosophers can bloviate all day. meanwhile the computer nerds built a machine that can engage in creative conversation, pass physician and bar exams, create art, music and code.
I'm not saying there's nothing to learn from philosophy, but gee you have to admit that philosophers come up a little short wrt practical applications of their "Philosophical Investigations"
But then I have no idea how she goes on to conclude:
> Human obsolescence is not here and never can be.
There's no fundamental reason why you can't put ChatGPT in the real world and give it a real life. The only things that probably will never be replaced by machines are things where our physical technology is likely never going to match biology - i.e. sex.