Are we the larval form of Artificial intelligence?

I'm less bullish about AI than a lot of people are, simply because of how I suspect the amount of required neurons scales with the complexity of the task(s).

Most of the modern progress in AI is done with artificial neural networks, and these are extremely intensive to simulate such that even the largest artificial neural networks involve orders of magnitude fewer neurons than a fruit fly brain. The wonder, really, is how we can get any useful intelligence out of such simple network.

And that's where it doesn't entirely add up to me - brain tissue is expensive energetically, so evolution wouldn't increase the amount of neurons in a brain unless there was a clear survival benefit that outweighed the cost, it's difficult to believe that the difference in neuronal complexity doesn't serve some purpose that's not entirely known yet.

It's also worth considering that improvements in chip tech are slowing down now - how complex chips can be is mostly determined by how fine a manufacturing process is used on the chip, but each tech generation requires dramatically more money to equip the factory than the previous ones, and the yields are typically lower because with finer features, it doesn't take as big an imperfection to ruin it. I've seen analyses that suggest it won't be economic to manufacture chips below 5nm minimum feature size.

I see we have three optimistic upvoters!

Consider this: Whilst I agree about the number of neurons required to duplicate the wonderous thing we have going on in our heads, said duplication would require about a planetary sized array of texas instruments 1973 DTL chips to duplicate, if indeed it is possible to do this in silicon, but, most people will accept a fake if it's offered to them. An ersatz duplication of the human mind with a polished presentation just like a real human psychopathic leader will have the masses eating out of their hands, (or exterminatng the unbelievers) should be possible to implement on a desktop computer quite soon. God knows, they're working hard enough to do it!.

What A.I. will do, is make human's decisions many times faster and drawing on more information to do it than a human mind can manage. First they will kick our butts at chess. Then they will make battlefield decisions, in that there "netcenric" warfare thing they have already implemented. And then when we have made darn sure they haven't gone all "skynet" on us, we will start to trust AI to out perform doctors and other learned proffesionals. Because after all who doesn't want a doctor who is up to date with EVERYTHING, and NEVER MISSES A TRICK? OR a lawyer who can calculate ALL the angles in sixty nanoseconds?

A.I. could give that alright, and a population that already is filling its lives with devices that give real time monitoring and "feedback" to the web (Alexa, cortana, et alia) would just wholesale outsource more and more of it's mental activity to AI. It won't replace us because it decides to, it'll be what we leave behind, if we keep on our current path...

Already most of you youngsters seem to prefer playing video games to having babies!

Don't take any of this to heart though, after all I declined to seek out the MRNA jab. So by any metric, that makes my kind of thinking very "suspect" indeed.

But to be fair, I am living through the plot of a Phillip K *** dystopia sci-fi novel right now...

I see we have three optimistic upvoters!

Consider this: Whilst I agree about the number of neurons required to duplicate the wonderous thing we have going on in our heads, said duplication would require about a planetary sized array of texas instruments 1973 DTL chips to duplicate, if indeed it is possible to do this in silicon, but, most people will accept a fake if it's offered to them. An ersatz duplication of the human mind with a polished presentation just like a real human psychopathic leader will have the masses eating out of their hands, (or exterminatng the unbelievers) should be possible to implement on a desktop computer quite soon. God knows, they're working hard enough to do it!.

What A.I. will do, is make human's decisions many times faster and drawing on more information to do it than a human mind can manage. First they will kick our butts at chess. Then they will make battlefield decisions, in that there "netcenric" warfare thing they have already implemented. And then when we have made darn sure they haven't gone all "skynet" on us, we will start to trust AI to out perform doctors and other learned proffesionals. Because after all who doesn't want a doctor who is up to date with EVERYTHING, and NEVER MISSES A TRICK? OR a lawyer who can calculate ALL the angles in sixty nanoseconds?

A.I. could give that alright, and a population that already is filling its lives with devices that give real time monitoring and "feedback" to the web (Alexa, cortana, et alia) would just wholesale outsource more and more of it's mental activity to AI. It won't replace us because it decides to, it'll be what we leave behind, if we keep on our current path...

Already most of you youngsters seem to prefer playing video games to having babies!

Don't take any of this to heart though, after all I declined to seek out the MRNA jab. So by any metric, that makes my kind of thinking very "suspect" indeed.

But to be fair, I am living through the plot of a Phillip K *** dystopia sci-fi novel right now...

Can't. I have attachments. 

Move to the Sticks. :)