A decent video that covers the state of recent AI developments. It presents capabilities a bit more advanced than the ground-level truth, but it’s a good summary. This video doesn’t even touch on some of the more interesting/frightening deep-fake technologies that can create nearly undetectable faces, facial animations, and chat, forum, and news writing bots (GPT-3).

I do not, however, like the recent trend of this sort of AI coverage that claims there is any ‘consciousness’ to these systems. Even after thousands of years we still don’t even know what makes us conscious, or if that is even a real thing. Despite our advancements, we don’t even have a good definition of life. AI systems are all run on standard Turing based computers operating on nets of what usually break down to linear regression models. Yes, they achieve really amazing feats but technical achievement doesn’t indicate consciousness or intelligence. Your pocket calculator can calculate values better and faster than the best person in the world, but nobody would say their calculator was conscious because it exhibits abilities better than a human’s. Even a single cell found on Mars would be considered ‘life’ – despite the fact it might not be capable of doing more than moving a bit, ingesting minerals from dirt, and splitting.

I have no doubt that AI based systems will be able to match human behaviors so well that they will be indistinguishable from living humans on all fronts: speaking, writing, singing, movement, making art, etc. However, that is not the same as arguing for consciousness or having life – a nut that we haven’t even cracked in the thousands of years we have tried to understand it in ourselves.