Fair criticism of the USSR, but some the United State's success comes from taking a large chunk of land from the native populations and then using it's resources and geography to build an economy and military capable of enforcing it's policies in the Americas and eventually around the world. Some of which was sanctioning communist countries and fighting an expensive cold war against the USSR.

How do Indians feel about rule under the British East India Company from the 17th-19th centuries?

Politically wealth inequality is a problem as the wealthy have more means available to them to influence votes, candidates and appointments. So you have a society that's partly democratic but with a lot of unequal influence at the top.

We do need to include the vast human pre-history when makings sweeping claims about the natural state of human society. There might be something about civilizations that concentrate power which wasn't seen nearly as much among hunter-gatherer groups. If so, there might be steps that can be taken to counter it (indeed the past several centuries would strongly suggest so).

Depends on how democratic the Society is. The less so, the more it's a powerful minority at the top. How much say did the average US citizen have in starting this war with Iran? It's not something the current administration ran on to get elected. It's not very popular in the polling.

Conversely there's a massive amount of money being thrown around biased in favor of inflating what LLMs can do compared to humans.

Because a claim was made about a group of people.

Exactly. Does it matter if one member of that class does not follow the trend?

No, but no-one said that. It's far more likely that this "group" of people doesn't even exist, and it's yet another case of treating "strangers on the internet" or "other people" as one person and being upset when that "person" is being inconsistent.

There's an important distinction between chatbots people go to on websites or download from the app store versus a product downloading without their consent. There's also a massive difference from large power and water hungry data centers being built near people. I don't think those are particularly popular across party lines regardless of ChatGPT usage.

So yeah in general AI as a helpful tool people use online is popular. AI to replace jobs, build data centers and do unknown things on your device without consent, not so much. AI to potentially replace workers, not popular at all.

I'm not sure you understand the distinction you are making.

The model Google is shipping with Chrome runs on device. ChatGPT does not. The people that dont like data centers should love this feature. Same with people who are concerned about privacy.

It certainly makes me uncomfortable given the current capabilities of AI and what the tech CEOs have said about what they see AI becoming. It's not just like any other feature. Am considering uninstalling and no longer using Chrome on principle now.

> but Daniel Dennett’s idea that the most straightforward (possibly only practical) way to create the external appearance of consciousness is a real internal consciousness does float around in my thoughts.

Pretty sure Daniel Dennett has been adamantly opposed to any sort of theater in the mind when it comes to consciousness. He views it as biologically functional. For him, to make a conscious robot, you need to reproduce the functionality of humans and animals that are conscious, not just an appearance, such as outputting text. Although he's also suggested that consciousness might be a trick of language. In which case ... that might be an older view though. He used to argue that dreams were "seeming to come to remember" upon awakening, because again he his view is to reject any sort of homunculus inside the head.

You might be mixing up some of Dennett and David Chalmer's views. David Chalmers is a proponent of the hard problem, but he's fine with a kind of psycho-physical-functional connection for consciousness. Any informationally rich process might be conscious in some manner.