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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

That's a meaningless statement. People task AIs with working through scenarios and answering questions. Some of those problems are incredibly complex but at no point are we seeing anything but machine accomplishing a given task. There's no motivation or independent reasoning .

I mean yeah but that *in itself* is weird in a way that changes how we think about ourselves, right? That a language prediction system with no motivation or independent reasoning per se is capable of all of this.

I mean, I don't think someone plugged into tech 10 years ago would find "giant statistical models of human language" THAT outlandish. If you unwind an additional 10 years, then yes. But someone back then would also find cloud computing, what LLMs are built on, outlandish.

That is to say, LLMs are a very impressive technology, but even so, they're unlocked by an (IMO) even more impressive technological development, which is the scale at which we're able to do computing today

People could never imagine a machine doing what it was designed to do.

People did not think that it would become possible to create a machine to do this as quickly as it did.

They very much did imagine that, and long before ten years ago; pretty much every 20th century cautionary tale about dangerous artificial intelligence was set in what is now the past.

Actually, the people who built and designed it did think that. People have been thinking about machines capable of even more for a very long time.