Genuine apologies for being combative. I got a little worked up at the insinuation that I am somehow trying to dispose of ethics. I do think that you could stand to be less combative yourself; even if you think I have absolutely nothing to offer you, you must think there's some value to having this discussion if you've gone this long, and I have to choose to continue as well.

Let's stop down and discuss your rhetorical strategy real quick, then.

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I know what I'm talking about. You're welcome to disagree; regardless of your opinion of my knowledge, you have to acknowledge that I think I know what I'm talking about, and that should inform your conversation with me. On the other hand, you don't know what you're talking about. This isn't my observation, this is your profession: against my knowledge, you have presented your naivete. But more than that, you imply our positions are equal: my dozen books' worth of casual reading on the subject of artificial intelligence has no more weight than your choice to presume it's unknowable.

Could I stand to be less combative? Always. Are you baiting me into combat? Irrefutably. You are disregarding my knowledge, you are discounting my experience, you are putting forth the maxim that what I know is worth nothing, since you know nothing and we're on equal footing here.

You should also know that I was trained to survive depositions. As a hired, professional expert, it was not uncommon for someone in my position to be made to look like an idiot in front of a jury. This is easier than one might think because you don't need to mock and ridicule expertise, you only need to mock and ridicule the expert. You comment on how he tied his tie. You ask him about his suit. You point out the non-existent fleck of breakfast on his lapel. You read a section of his report and ask if he deliberately left out the apostrophe; you read another section and painstakingly work through a complicated phrase to mutually dumb it down into the simplest possible terms, then you ask him in front of the jury why he used such complicated words if the simplest terms are the equivalent.

These are the strategies the uneducated use to discredit the educated. It's archetypal Reddit-speak; you spend two minutes googling something that you don't understand and don't want to and then you dangle it in front of the person who actually knows what he's talking about and say "somewhere in here is something that disagrees with what you said." And since the audience is also made up of people with no expertise who always want to feel smarter, you'll get the upvotes you need to score the points to "win" the debate.

Here's the problem. The expert knows you're wrong. He's never stopped being an expert. And you're not debating him. You're not attempting to learn anything from him. You're trying to score useless internet points off an unseen audience of equally uneducated individuals because the actual experts left the forum long, long, long ago.

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Fundamentally? I have nothing to learn from you. Theoretically? You're acting like you think you might have something to learn from me. Yet you're coming at me from a position of innocence, you aren't reading your own sources closely enough to understand them and you're putting forth the fundamental argument that since you (think) you scored a rhetorical papercut or two I'm going to go "gee, you're right, this is all fundamentally unknowable". Why would I do that?

Ultimately, you're arguing that something I understand innately - ME - should not be considered superior to something else that I understand through effort and study - chatbots - because since you don't understand it, there's no way I can. Here, watch:

ChatGPT is not a brain, but I don't think you can reasonably claim it has nothing in common with one.

That's quite clear. You, personally, don't think that I, personally, can reasonably claim ChatGPT has nothing in common with a brain. I'm five comments deep in responses to your hypothesis but you can't let go of what you think having equal merit to what can be known. And whether or not I'll be kind to your dog is not all that really counts: what counts is you wish to accord rights to a computer program without bothering to understand why experts think that's a bad idea.