You have to keep in mind, this whole exercise is not meant to probe the nature of consciousness, or to create an intellectual helper that will work with us to do our jobs better. The whole point of AI is to make it easier to replace expensive, smart people with dumb, cheap robots. And if the final result isn’t quite as good as we’d hoped…well, I’m sure someone, somewhere calculated the tradeoffs.

I’m sorry to be such a cynic about all this, but I’ve been spending a lot of time lately navigating telephone ‘bots and automated customer service trees.
These people really don’t give a shit about us. They have another agenda. Why pay a human operator when the customer can do all the waiting, and enquiring and explaining…for free?

Please listen carefully, because our options have changed.