language tokens &c
being able to produce language tokens doesn't remotely resemble thought or planningTrue enough, but machine sentience, when and if it arrives, won’t necessarily resemble thought or planning as we understand these. I still think that the 2014 film Ex Machina made this point brilliantly: the audience is prepared throughout, along with the protagonist, to see the fembot “Ava” as a human female analogue, and at the end the film makes clear that it—not her—is neither female nor human.
Even absent sentience and intentionality as we presently understand these, the (primitive, as measured by the standards we’ll apply before the end of next year, if not sooner) sundry iterations at large are beginning to simulate such elements, and the difference between the consequences of blind and of “directed” AI actions will, I predict, rapidly blur.
cordially, and I-told-you-so,
