have you ever had a conversation with someone like a friend or a coworker or something, and thought "wow I might as well be talking to a robot"?

Yea, but short exchanges only, esp at work w customers
Otherwise i don't really talk to people all that much in the first place

@Shark: Ah, that's a good way of looking at it.

@Kcalb: In a optimistic version of a black mirror esque future, those exchanges will be handled by machines so us humans have to do only the human things like being emotional and thinking about our and other people's thoughts.

@Glume: Sure. But is that a reflection of the slow decline of humanity or the technological progress we've made?

@Glume: The refusal to change seems like a natural consequence of age, to a degree. It's easier for younger people to change their opinions and behaviours after new information at least partly because they have a smaller database of information they've collected already. In that way, the new information that comes out is more influential to younger than older people. In that way I think younger people have that advantage, but it's also not ideal all the time.

For example, we can be really optimistic about new AI and robotics technology, especially young people. But I think it's useful to have the skepticism of the older generation for new tech.

I appreciate the older generation's skepticism for new technology, for example. As machines become better at approximating humans, and considering advances in science that allows us to have a more mechanistic understanding of our own biology, it's interesting to me how people will experience both people and machines differently (or not) depending on their previous knowledge. And that, I think, adds another layer of nuance to the very existential idea that we're all robots.

@Glume: I appreciate you taking the time. This has been a really interesting discussion and not robot-like at all. lol

I agree with you about the skynet thing. But whether we like it or not, advances in AI Are ensuring that machines can now do more and more (with a limit unless a massive paradigm shift happens, thank goodness). That's a fact, and you and me both have to live in a world with more and more pervasive AI tech. We can avoid it as much as we can, but, especially as a budding young careerist, it's extremely difficult to be out about functioning in society without partaking in it.

I'm not really familiar with the idea that thoughts are out there in the world and we just summon it with our minds. Seems preposterous at first glance, not gonna lie, but I'll watch that video and maybe it'll seem less absurd. Plato thought that about human knowledge too, (iirc).

But as for the collective consciousness, I think it exists too, kind of. I liked to think it's more like a shared cultural/societal understanding, and because it includes a collective, it has to be the lowest common demoninator and necessarily contains more garbage than brilliant ideas just because we are varied and the things that connect all of us get more and more 'basic' as more and more people are included in the collective. Evetually, ar the heart of it are pretty basic things like hunger, sleep, love for our kin, some shared recognition of value, etc. I think the trash is okay. Not good, just okay.

@Glume: Interesting! Will you tell me about what it means to be a chaote or should I google it?

There's no possible way we can measure subjective experiences directly, even if we turn away from science and look to the spiritual. So I think it's safe to say that we have no idea if my percept of this delicious sweetcake is same or different from yours. But it's probably different. Chaos and entropy and whatever. I believe it.

Well, AIs are around in the work force now but our world has not collapsed because people get jobs programming and maintaining AIs now. They'e definitely not the Same people that were replaced by AI, the poor souls, but, there are new jobs that weren't there before. I don't think humanity be useless for the capitalist world for a lonnnggg while.

Google did just build an AI that can build other AIs and it's more efficient than human programmers, but it's still requires a lot of human intervention in many ways. Mainly contribution from data monkeys.

Ha. Good one about the flashy thing.