My intellectual strategy to get to the bottom of these grand questions is very straightforward: look at my own life and evaluate what’s important.

In my life, I have found the answer to these questions. Telling a joke and making a colleague laugh. Looking at my 1yo niece crawling toward me. Hanging out in the garden with my wife and my dogs.

I look at these things, and it’s just so obvious. AI boyfriends? Ai email readers or AI taxi drivers or AI app makers? I can talk to a Tesla robot behind the counter at Wendy’s instead of a bored teenager? And that’s gonna ~transform~ my life? What?

You are right to point out that these questions are not adequately resolved. They never will be, not in the abstract and certainly not by technology. In some sense this dialogue has been happening for thousands of years, starting with Plato or before. “What is the point?”

When I was younger I used to wonder a lot intellectually about this stuff as many do but I’ve realized pretty recently that the answer is right here in my own short life and it has god damn nothing to do with technology.

I like solving puzzles and programming and I have a half built robot in the garage. But I will never confuse that with my living breathing niece. They just aren’t the same, my god isn’t it obvious!?

> now we're trying to create AGI by turning humans into robots

Very succinctly put.

  > look at my own life and evaluate what’s important.

I also love to watch my cat play. I spend countless hours wondering about how she thinks. It helps bond us as I train her and play with her. I love to watch the birds sing, to watch them fly in their elegant dance. They way they just know. To watch them feed on my balcony, at first nervous of my cat who is not half as sneaky as she thinks, and watch them acclimate, to learn she just wants to watch. I could go on and on. There are so many beautiful things hidden in plain sight.

What I've learned is that the most human thing, is to look. That it is these connections that make us. Connections to one another. Connections to other animals. Connections to inanimate objects. We've thought about these questions for thousands of years, can it really be as simple as "to be human is to be able to look at someone you've never seen before, with just a glance, without words spoke, but to share a laugh that can't words cannot explain." It just seems so complex.

I still wonder, as I did as I was younger. But I wonder in a very different way. Not all questions can be answered, and that's okay. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ask them, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't ask more. It just means that the point of asking is more than about getting the answer.

And that's exactly what I hate about AI these days. It's why they have no soul. We created a button to give us answers. But, we forgot that wasn't always the point of asking. It feels like we are trying to destroy mystery. Not by learning and exploring, but through religion.