It seems like the internet of the 90s to 2010s was forever a special moment in history. Destined to be short lived.
AI is an experience flywheel, it serves many people and learns from many people. It elicits our tacit experience and captures our reactions as it works through tasks. I see this as the primary way experience will spread in the future (distributed population generated tasks -> centralized experience in LLM -> distributed contextual application). It's like auto-open sourcing our problem solving as we solve problems.
I'm not asserting that they are aware, just asking how you can tell that they are not?
So when someone says AI is aware then that someone should demonstrate with arguments that it is true and convince the one saying that it is not the case.
And like humans have to speak one word at a time (serially), so does the model. Distributed activity of neurons funneled through the centralizing bottleneck of serial token prediction. This parallel-to-serial process is the key, I think it's where consciousness is.
Who needs to use the internet when you can have an agent do it for you? And once it is filled with agents, what will be the point of using it?