I understand you. As an AI research (actually, despite formally called professor of AI, I have historically always called myself more specifically NLP/IR/ML researcher rather than "AI" researcher, to avoid historic baggage).

I am intellectually curious whether "intelligence" and "consciousness" are simply layers that can be separated from the hardware they operate on or first emerged from, but I never had the urge or saw the point to practically replace human beings by machines.

Not everything that can be done should be done.

When I go to a supermarket, I always avoid self check-out. Why? First, I enjoy human interaction, even if machines may be more efficient (not yet the case). Second, I don't want the people working at the checkout to lose their jobs.

When we purchased a GPU cluster, I felt bad when I learned that the electricity bill was going to be north of 60 000 EUR every year (that number apparently assumes no jobs are running - so 100% idle time).

>Not everything that can be done should be done.

My concern is that people are being cavalier about the possibility of creating things that should have rights.

There will always be people who will never accept that a machine has awareness or rights. I suspect the major AI companies are doing there best to not have this talked about. As soon as it becomes a broad topic of conversation, it becomes a religious issue. The Discovery Institute is already spending money on this.

People worry about a machine that wants to kill us. For that to happen, someone has to have made a machine that wants. That is not something that should be done carelessly.