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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 is what concerns me about AI boosters. They see it as a simplistic dichotomy, mimicry or reasoning? It is neither. My favorite example is a prompt like “what is your favorite color?”. The mimic result would be the most popular color. The reasoning result would be

“I don’t know what colors mean”. Instead it churns the tokens and comes up with an answer based on what it calculates the reply you want is. I’m other words it is neither reasoning or mimicry. It is how the engine is coded

I'm going to guess it says something playful like "I don't really have a preference, but" or "I'm just an agent that doesn't have favorites" and then something like "but if I had to choose, _ is a lovely color." Let's see...

Ask it what the best store bought sauce for spaghetti is, colors are for toddlers.

I mean, obviously correct