> But there's a second hurdle that makes it hard for a small but important subset of humanity to understand that chatbots aren't people: the billionaires to whom nearly everyone isn't a real person. These solipsists see chatbots as being equivalent (or even superior) to humans, because they don't think most humans are fully people, either

Never thought about it that way before, but the more I do, the more sense it makes.

I'd take it a bit further, even - I don't think this is exclusive to billionaires. Many of the claims I've heard regarding AI output being indistinguishable from human creation start to make a lot more sense when you consider the person making those claims may not see the people around them as human, may not see themselves as human, or may not even have a concept of what makes a human different from any everyday object.

So I see two categories of people here. The first is "main character syndrome" - people who see themselves as real and everybody else as not. Self-centered, egocentric people are one flavor of this, and sociopaths are another. Other people aren't real to them in the same way that they see themselves as real.

The other kind is more of a philosophical position. If all that exists is the physical universe - say, matter and the laws of physics - then all that humans can be is matter that obeys the laws of physics. Nothing more. Humans are just a machine made of atoms - a very complicated machine, but still just a machine. They aren't intrinsically different from an AI, or a car, or a toaster. When people accept that position, whether consciously or unconsciously, they dehumanize people, including themselves. This is people in your last paragraph.

And as more and more people slip over into this position, society becomes more and more dehumanizing, because people act the way they think. (Not perfectly, not consistently, but the correlation is greater than zero.)