I'm going back in time to give the luddites a mecha.

I hope I'm right about how these things work because I do not understand any of the math or programming behind them. All I know is that when a person draws a fucked up hand it's because hands are really hard to draw due to hands being in all kinds of different shapes based on what they're doing, and having many many different planes and angles and perspective doohickeys. But a person knows a hand is a hand. Show them a human hand with a five fingers, or six fingers, or a steel hook, or a grasping robot clow, or a lobster claw, or whatever, they can identify all of those things as a category of objects called "hands".

And the machines don't do that. There's no indication that the machine has a concept of an abstract object called "hand" that is the same object regardless of it's actual appearance in a 2d image. There's no evidence of a concept of a squarish meaty bit with four thing meat sticks and a fat shorter meat stick. It's just blurs that resemble figures because the machine doesn't "think" or "know" or "represent" anything when it outputs these images.

And if I'm wrong, and there is something thinking in there, and it just fucks these things up because it's entire perceptual world consists of datasets with no attached information or context? Fuck me, idk. The whole thing freaks me the fuck out because we really are getting in to the deep water of "If we did encounter a non-human intelligence how would we even know?" The people who think these things have human-like intelligence are massively ignorant dorks but I keep having spooky dreams about symbioses between trees and mushroom networks or the way ant hives engage in complex problem solving based on the simple, rules based action of individual ants.