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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.

its always funny to me that saying LLMs are not doing independent reasoning actually makes LLMs even weirder, and the impact on how we view humanity even bigger than saying that they are capable of independent reasoning

like, LLMs are capable of solving incredible hard math that some of the smartest humans could not figure out with a ton of effort, and it turns out you can solve that by *not* reasoning? so our ability to solve hard problems via reasoning is outshined by systems that dont reason?

LLMs are notoriously at solving even simple maths