To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from biology.

I'm not aware of it if so, and while lots of shit has been anthropomorphized by us, I think it's the fact that 'AI' better called LLM, uses our language and because it seems like it talks to us with intent...

A friend recommended the anime "Frieren" to me, and the titular character made the argument that the fantasy specied called "demons" shouldn't be treated as people because they prey on humans, and their adoption of human communication, both language and emotional cues, is mimicry toward this end

At the time, it struck me as a grotesque argument. An excuse to dehumanize. I've come around to it by thinking of analogy to corporations using LLMs. LLMs are basically good natural language processing, a kind of convincing mimicry, and corporations have emerged as the foremost predator of humans

I think the point of this thought experiment wasn't to say "some humans aren't people", but "what if something that only wants to eat you was also really good at manipulating you via communication skills?" An LLM is just a computer program, a capability. But attached to a corporation it's a "demon"

Humans are pretty easy to convince to anthropomorphize a thing, but sapience is a strong strategy for increasing that tendency and a flexible language capability can be very effectively tuned to manipulate people. We're already seeing some of the effects of that. This is scary without being AGI

I remember there being freakouts about furbies. Which seemed fair enough at the time since those things were creepy. Nobody knew that if they'd made them just a little more personable we'd have probably spawned a subculture and inoculated society against the nice chatbots

bsky.app/profile/tams...

Turns out he was just patient zero... www.scientificamerican.com/article/goog...

There were concerns that if the trains traveled too fast, the people onboard would asphyxiate because they wouldn’t be able to breathe. So there were a lot of things they didn’t understand.

I remember reading something about that which is both hilarious and interesting

Like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?

Herbie

Yeah. Like Christine!

No but it doesn't talk either. Although, some people still refer to their cars as "she" for whatever stupid reason.

because boats and ships are 'she'

Boats and ships don't have feelings either!

the ocean is also a she which is interesting but no wommens on the boats it's bad luck

Of course we have feelings

Not that I’m aware of. 😂

i think it's been more from the cultural ideas we've built up on/in scifi. you get all the automoton and their struggle for humanity stories from asimov and all the others, each one building up to the idea that a sufficiently complex machine could feel ways about stuff.

so now we have these charletans claiming to have built a sufficiently complex machine (they haven't) so now we must question if it does indeed feel to prove if it is sufficiently complex.

and it's frustrating because the entire point of the stories were to affirm the humanity of all humans and now we're searching for the humanity in machines at a time where we are being pressured in many ways to deny the humanity of certain humans.

"Does Your Jalopy Feel The Blues?" -The Saturday Evening Post