<i>> To suggest to the public (or – often more lucrative – to some gullible investors) that further development in this field will somehow result into a being that thinks for itself, has feelings similar to a human, has emotions similar to a human or to put it aptly: that it will result in something that experiences Being (in Heidegger sense), is always wrong, often a blatant lie and in some rare cases even straight-up fraud.</i><p>It is too strong a statement for my taste. And it smells of cognitive dissonance. How not a human can be a human? It is logically impossible, isn't it?<p>We have no satisfactory definition of a human being. So we cannot state that computers are not humans already. There are no satisfactory definition of 'sentient', 'consciousness' and all other things that demarcate a line between humans and others (ability to recognize myself in a mirror is a self-awareness? is it a fraud?). We just do not know. We need a strength to accept our lack of knowledge, and honestly admit that we do not know if computers are humans enough or no, and at the same time we deprive them of human rights. It is bad thing to do, but to not do it, to fix it, we need to aquire knowledge, and searching for a knowledge begins with acknowledgement of ignorance.<p>Don't be mistaken about me. I do not believe that computers are humans enough already. I do not believe that they become humans in a few decades. It is a long way for cognitive sciences to make a silicon sentient being. But I'm a strong believer in acknowledgment of ignorance. Failure to acknowledge ignorance leads to a rationalization, to a complete garbage in place where knowledge must be.<p>Moreover, maybe "here is no consciousness at the end of the road that we are driving on with AI" is true. We see consciousness as a some kind of magic, but there are no magic in AI, so there is not consciousness. The problem is we can destroy the very idea of consciousness by studying consciousness in humans: if we understood it, there would be no magic, therefore there would be no consciousness.<p><i>> imagine any other way we might be able to develop an actual artificial intelligence. Then what? How do we name this so it makes sense</i><p>It is General AI. Name is coined already. I see no problem here, it is not hard to invent a new name for a new thing. Or even more interesting: why we need a new name for a new thing, if it is indistinguishable from an old thing, from a human?