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We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the truth: it possesses none of those qualities. It is not human. And presenting it as if it were? That\u2019s dangerous. Because it\u2019s convincing. And nothing is more dangerous than a convincing illusion.<\/p>\n
In particular, general artificial intelligence \u2014 the mythical kind of AI that supposedly mirrors human thought \u2014\u00a0is still science fiction<\/a>, and it\u00a0might well stay that way<\/a>.<\/p>\n What we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn\u2019t changed much since it was\u00a0discussed here<\/a>\u00a0five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence \u2013 based on the data it\u2019s been trained on.<\/p>\n This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance \u2014 nothing more, and nothing less.<\/p>\n So why is a real \u201cthinking\u201d AI likely impossible? Because it\u2019s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn\u2019t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition \u2014 not a shred \u2014 there\u2019s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.<\/p>\n Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the\u00a0\u201chard problem of consciousness\u201d<\/a>. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal,\u00a0mental states<\/a>\u00a0with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).<\/p>\n Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to \u201chappen\u201d, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.<\/p>\n Before you argue that AI programmers are human, let me stop you there. I know they\u2019re human. That\u2019s part of the problem. Would you entrust your deepest secrets, life decisions, emotional turmoil, to a computer programmer? Yet that\u2019s exactly what people are doing \u2014 just ask Claude, GPT-4.5, Gemini \u2026 or, if you dare, Grok.<\/p>\n Giving AI a human face, voice or tone is a dangerous act of digital cross-dressing. It triggers an automatic response in us, an anthropomorphic reflex, leading to aberrant claims whereby some AIs are said to have passed the famous\u00a0Turing test<\/a>\u00a0(which tests a machine\u2019s ability to exhibit intelligent, human-like behaiour). But I believe that if AIs are passing the Turing test, we need to update the test.<\/p>\n The AI machine has no idea what it means to be human. It cannot offer genuine compassion, it cannot foresee your suffering, cannot intuit hidden motives or lies. It has no taste, no instinct, no inner compass. It is bereft of all the messy, charming complexity that makes us who we are.<\/p>\n More troubling still: AI has no goals of its own, no desires or ethics unless injected into its code. That means the true danger doesn\u2019t lie in the machine, but in its master \u2014 the programmer, the corporation, the government. Still feel safe?<\/p>\n And please, don\u2019t come at me with: \u201cYou\u2019re too harsh! You\u2019re not open to the possibilities!\u201d Or worse: \u201cThat\u2019s such a bleak view. My AI buddy calms me down when I\u2019m anxious.\u201d<\/p>\n Am I lacking enthusiasm? Hardly. I use AI every day. It\u2019s the most powerful tool I\u2019ve ever had. I can translate, summarise, visualise, code, debug, explore alternatives, analyse data \u2014 faster and better than I could ever dream to do it myself.<\/p>\n I\u2019m in awe. But it is still a tool \u2014 nothing more, nothing less. And like every tool humans have ever invented, from stone axes and slingshots to quantum computing and atomic bombs, it can be used as a weapon. It will be used as a weapon.The master<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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