fred writes in a style commensurate with his audience and subject plus i've always liked his pov;

(these are deranged ramblings, perhaps of psychiatric interest. If pressed, Fred will deny authorship and possibly bring an action for defamation.) beware.

These days, not unreasonably I think, people wonder whether artificial intelligence will produce an electronic being superior to, well, us. Others of darker immaaginings ask whether we don’t face the arrival of a real-life Terminator. Science fiction? These days, it has a short shelf life.

Actually, the superior being  has probably already happened, if so far in bits and pieces. Let us consider what these bits are, and their assembly into a Terminator, whom we will affectionately call Arnold.

First,Arnold’s mental capacities. Then, is robotic physicality.

breadth of knowledge is usually thought a sign of intelligence. Arnold, with a Wifi link in his head, would know everything on the internet, books, history, quantum physics, the weather in Chengdu, geography, and just about everything else. Yes, I know, we are all used to this and it   looks like mere lookup and not intelligence. Wait a minute.

With his Wifi link, Arnold could translate fifty or sixty languages into each other, in seconds. If I could do that, you would think me quite a bright fellow. We are used  to it, and people are never impressed by what they are used to.

Computers have beaten the world’s best players at chess and Go and defeated the national Jeopardy champion. If the victorious machines are not online, they easily could be. These capacities are usually regarded as requiring intelligence.

Since all of these things happened at least three days ago, they are ho hum and not too interesting. But then we have to consider–drum roll, squalling of trumpets–Chatgpt and suchlike. Chat is the omnipotent humanizer, combining all the foregoing into a great Being. Chat can hold conversations, write essays and poetry often indistinguishable from those produced by humans and, weirdly, containing literary insight and psychological perceptiveness. So why is something–Arnold’s head in this case–that knows everything, writes business proposals and collegiate term papers, speaks fifty languages, does graduate-level mathematics, and plays championship chess–not– superior to the common run of humanity?.......more........