@GossiTheDog If I had a nickel for every crackpot theory of how to get to artificial consciousness or whatever, I'd be a rich person indeed.

Every single person has a pet theory, and they're all massively oversimplified, skip a ton of steps, and lack rigor. They also come in many fun fruity flavors: logical rules, brain scanning, genetic algorithms, and now all manor of neural network magic.

They all desperately *want* to see flickers of consciousness in the thing they're building. Placebo.

@GossiTheDog Speaking firsthand: everyone working in AI is high on their own supply. They've kind of always been (going back to the 60's). You have to be to think you can create a scifi tech nobody understands. Tons of unscientific anthropomorphism happens.

But large superstar AI firms? They self-select for the most delusional ones. Everyone at openAI a couple years ago either believed they had a duty to create a benevolent AGI first, or that they needed to be the ones to make roko's basilisk.