The alarmism around AI is just a marketing spin.
As @pluralistic@mamot.fr wrote: that’s “mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics”.
Real problems we face with AI are:
Ghost labor, erosion of the rights of artists, costs of automation, the climate impact of data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems.
GPT4 ironically fails the Turing test by possessing such a wide knowledge on variety of topics that it’s obvious it can’t be a human. Basically it’s too competent to be a human even despite its flaws
This is my problem with the conversation. It doesn’t “posses knowledge” like we think of with humans. It repeats stuff it’s seen before. It doesn’t understand the context in which it was encountered. It doesn’t know if it came from a sci-fi book or a scientific journal, and it doesn’t understand the difference. It has no knowledge of the world and how things interact. It only appears knowledgeable because it can basically memorize a lot of things, but it doesn’t understand them.
It’s like cramming for a test. You may pass the test, but it doesn’t mean you actually understand the material. You could only repeat what you read. Knowledge requires actually understanding why the material is what it is.