I never said anything about my knowledge coming from marketing articles. I have actually taken courses on things like machine learning and LLM's. Are you projecting your own ignorance onto me?
You're using "artificial intelligence" in a different way to everybody else on the planet. Nobody is saying that your idea of AI is going to happen. What people are saying is that machines are going to be able to do everything that humans do with their intelligence.
And that is obviously going to be a disaster for the human race because humans are going to be powerless compared to robot police, endless AI propaganda, AI taking their jobs and all the weapons of mass destruction that AI-driven science is going to discover. But you want to ignore what is obviously coming and stick to your own magical thinking that because AI is never going to be conscious it's nothing to worry about.
I don't think washing clothes manually involves any higher cognitive functions, although the way the machine does it could involve some kind of analysis that in previous times would have required human intelligence. So then we would say the washing machine has AI in it. Of course there will always be gray areas just as there are with who counts as a mentally competent human.
I don't see where I'm employing any "magic[al] thinking". I have studied how AI's work, but it sounds as though you haven't since you keep talking about consciousness as though that has ever been relevant to AI.
You're engaging in linguistic revisionism like the establishment does. "Artificial intelligence" has been talked about for over 80 years and the definition hasn't changed. It was never about consciousness or whatever you're trying to make it about. It was always about machines being able to perform tasks that could previously only be done by human intelligence.
Why wouldn't there be an alternative? When has apocalypse been the only possible future in previous generations? If you think things are different so that there's no hope this time then you've been successfully demoralized.
They're not merely allowing it they're going as fast as they can to develop AI. They're softening the climate hysteria, talking about small modular nuclear reactors, inflating the stock market and building huge data centers all around the idea of better AI and AI companies that openly work towards AGI and have clearly been making progress in that direction.
- Agent Network: Unleashing AI agent development and experimentation for AI-enabled battle management and decision support, from campaign planning to kill chain execution.
- Ender's Foundry: Accelerating AI-enabled simulation capabilities - and sim-dev and sim-ops feedback loops - to ensure we stay ahead of AI-enabled adversaries.
So AI is going to be simulating the enemies (inevitably going to be simulating everyone as in the Sentient World Simulation), planning the campaigns and carrying out the attacks autonomously. So there won't be much need for humans in the loop and we're setting ourselves up for the AI military to turn on humans as a whole.
Every powerful group wants to expand and consolidate their power. Making laws in their favor might be the strongest way to do that. This can be done without making it obvious through incremental laws and slow implementation of the laws, obfuscation of the intent and distraction by the media and controlled political movements.
Any successful agenda will cause society to be more in favor of it and less opposed to it. If Jesuits have had a lot of power for a long time then we would have seen society move towards pro-Jesuit views and beliefs that allow Jesuits to more easily control people. So we would have seen society move towards belief in the authority of the Catholic church and away from individualism and atheism. But that's pretty much the opposite of what we have seen. We also haven't seen it become popular to believe Jesuits do a lot of good in the world and need to be protected from all their unjust persecution. So either Jesuits haven't had sufficient power to make societal changes like this or they are incompetent at using their power.
OK let me set the standard needed to convince me a certain person/group has a large amount of power. They need to able to make national laws in their favor despite strong opposition to those laws. Their messages need to be spread regularly by well respected people/organizations that are able to repeatedly drill it into a majority of the population. They and their messages need to be protected by those in power and rarely criticized by them.
The only part of this that I see for Catholicism is that it's rarely criticized specifically. But its alleged position on abortion and Christianity and traditional values more generally are often criticized by those in power. While you have a bunch of Catholics in power in America they don't usually promote Catholicism or Catholic ideas and don't appear to be conspiring specifically with other Catholics.
Think the early 2000's were good? You should have been around in the late 20th century. But part the problem with both was how naive and consumerist people were. As mentioned, the middle class wasted their money on material luxuries and instead of doing anything difficult to make the future better for their children they just followed the crowd and believed whatever the TV told them. People today aren't a lot better but at least they're less trusting of institutions and in some ways a worse economy has made them less materialist (and in other ways more selfish).
We are gradually moving closer to people being able to talk about changing society back to the way things were. Currently that discussion is mostly in terms of politics and economics, but to end the "dystopian Sci Fi horror" we have to get rid of the sci-fi part.
This is almost counting the same thing three times. You can also get way more than just three sixes - count the number of points on the interior hexagon, the number of intersections and the minimum number of lines needed to draw the star. If you count other properties you don't get sixes. The number of exterior sides and vertices are both 12, the number of line segments without intersections is 18, the angles involved are 60, 120 and 300 degrees.
So you want me to talk about matrix transformations, word vectors, the softmax function, multi-head attention mechanism implementation details and so forth because that will make this conversation somehow more informed? That's like saying to argue that cars can go faster than humans need to talk about engine parts and their limitations. It's completely irrelevant. We can observe cars go faster than humans. Similarly we can observe various computer programs do tasks that were previously only possible by human understanding, judgement and creativity and thus we decided to call that "artificial intelligence". As opposed to natural/genuine intelligence that comes from a mind, but something that to an outside observer is indistinguishable from a mind.
Your only contribution to this conversation is finding excuses to discuss anything other than the actual arguments.