We've had an extremely light discussion around AI with artists complaining realising they too can be automated, we had the concept of a literal baby making facility, I'm assuming genetic rewriting for immortality is next week...
But getting away from the leftist takes on these subjects and the meming on facing a skynet/matrix future, what are the real opinions you have on this kind of tech?
Personally, with AI it's a Pandora's box, if we CAN create sentient artificial life, best hope is not to do it but if a dumbass does we imbrace and integrate that being, as starting conflict will probably be the reason we die.
As for artificial wombs, having the tech is needed but not in this commercial sense that video presentation gave, more as a 'last resort, literally required to save humanity' sense.
These are the two ones mentioned this week alone but any other tech you put on the 'forbidden' side or your takes on the ones disscussed.
Assuming we can fend off one world government and keep some decentralization, my crazy prediction is that there will be lots of different tech variation between nations, with some having strict laws to protect labor and humanity, and others having AI "gods" that govern their region and compete against the AIs from other regions. The AIs may be more or less controlled by cabals of humans behind the scenes that actually run things, constantly tweaking the algorithms to do their bidding.
I don't believe there's such a thing as "sentient artificial life" though, unless you can figure out how to mimic the physical hardware of biological life. (but then you're just creating biological life...) It will be completely believable, but a Chinese Room with nobody inside.
If we have artificial wombs, Elon Musk will use them to populate Mars quickly.
Unless you believe in a mystical soul there's nothing in a biological intelligence that can't be simulated digitally. Maybe there are quantum processes involved in thinking, but even then we can just hook up quantum processors to a normal CPU.
The only hope is that biological brains are way better than any digital computer we could possible make. This could be because general intelligence leans heavily on analog processes, which digital computers are bad at. But it's so unlikely that we can't clone the process better in circuits once we understand it.
Sure, I believe there are underlying realities to the universe that natural science does not yet understand or even acknowledge. However you can probably approximate their effects without much discernable difference to most people. So someone probably will create "sentient" AI before those underlying realities are understood, and a large part of the population will not only believe they are just as aware and feeling as humans, but that they are beings even greater than humans - i.e. New Gods. People are stupid.
I might be the stupid one though, because I have the same neoluddite position as the Catholics in Altered Carbon. While our ever-shrinking cult is still screaming "It's not real!" the vast majority of people will be uploading their consciousness, creating new bodies for themselves, and worshiping digital gods, without a care in the world.
That too, but as above it can be approximated. AFAIK that's kind of what an adversarial hypernetwork in stable diffusion's models does anyway. The hidden layers in the main network are a mystery to begin with, but another much smaller network is trained on that to recreate all the useful vectors for that network.