There has been an enormous amount of conversation among some very smart people about the impending age of Ultron. Or shall I say Skynet. Or shall I say Colossus.
I don’t see any real evidence that robots have achieved sentience. I do see evidence that computers are becoming progressively better at mimicry. The best cutting edge chatbots now let you spend several minutes in the company of software, under the illusion that you might be talking to another human, before you realize it’s just software.
But what does any of that have to do with actual human intelligence? The ability to create puppets that mimic human behavior has nothing to do with the far deeper problem of what might actually be going on in our own minds.
It’s as though people are looking at a still life of fruit, and saying “Wow, that looks a lot like fruit!” And then they try to eat the fruit.
Am I missing something?
No. But they are.