Are humans special? #Vergecast

a lot of the people pushing the hardest towards AGI and and this thing that is coming next, there is underneath kind of a foundational belief that there is not something uniquely important about humans and humanity. And I think I didn't realize the extent to which a a lot of people believe this and b a lot of people believe it fervently and gleefully and are betting their careers on it. I had just honestly never in my life spent a lot of time encountering or thinking about that worldview. >> Me neither. And and there's another idea that is very powerful in these circles which is the idea sometimes called computational functionalism which is basically everything that we experience as consciousness as intelligence. All of the emotions that we feel the experiences that we have our dreams or memories that is all just like computation going on in the brain. It is like neurons firing, synapses firing, things converting inputs to outputs. And so this is a big belief of uh of a lot of the AI leaders is that there is no kind of special you know sauce of human cognition. It is just a computer program and so you can build that therefore in digital form and replicate the powers of the human brain. That's that's how they think about it. >> Interesting. And in the same way that's interesting there there are a couple of mentions near the beginning of the book about the human brain in particular and the way that they think about it next to growing up AI and it is very much the same idea where like we don't totally understand how it works but we trust that it is knowable. The brain is just a bigger version of the same thing. So we we can eventually build our way up into it and once we've done we will have created something on equal footing with humans. Yes. >> Uh boy is there an entire set of life values in that one statement.