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would love to hear even a single actual argument about how AI "changes the nature of humanity" not based in fanciful speculation

Demonstrating reasoning and language capabilities in computers alters our understanding of self, even if we don't particularly like the alteration

I disagree with your fundamental premise. The fact that a machine trained on billions of real conversations online can mimic reasoning does nothing to alter my understanding of self. And you haven't given any argument as to why it should.

This is the crux of the debate, right? Whether it's doing mimicry or reasoning. I struggle to see how you could view it as purely mimicry. It has to tie together multiple novel thoughts in a logical construction to create its responses.

This perhaps says something about the logic inherent in language, or in the surprising observation that compression has an equivalence to intelligence due to the nature of what prediction means, but here we are: the LLMs work through novel questions and scenarios regularly

next word prediction leading to intelligence is nicely described by the carl sagan quote "if you want to bake an apple pie from scratch u must first invent the universe" it needs to simulate a whole world to think of what would happen next, given its context