[jmatthews]

I appreciate the thoughtful commentary. I couldn't disagree more with you more of course.

There are 2 instances where AI breaks the mold you've cast.

Executing rote tasks that no humans need do, and relatedly, while there does seem to be a tough hurdle when it comes to "better than human" execution there is also an inverted survivors bias. Once a technology is production ready it is no longer AI. Cars aren't robots, antilock brakes aren't AI, Once a system outperforms a human it's technology, not intelligence.

[motohagiography]

Our disagreement might be subtle. An old saw of mine is that the Turing test thought experiment is covered by prior art in economics, where the idea of an indifference curve describes the points between amounts of things where people are indifferent to substituting between them.

I agree these things you state aren't intelligent, but nor are computers, or can they be - people just become indifferent to whether we are dealing with a human or a computer.

My assertion is that we are highly sensitive to substitutes when the downside risk is large, but largely indifferent to them and even like them when they resemble a lottery with good upside at low cost or risk.

Self driving cars are a good example, where someone asked me whether, if I had kids, would I send one to school in traffic in an autonomous vehicle. I told them it would depend on how many kids I had.

But this pretty much describes the dynamic.

[nl]

Self driving cars are a good example, where someone asked me whether, if I had kids, would I send one to school in traffic in an autonomous vehicle. I told them it would depend on how many kids I had.

Pretty sure that answer is much less convincing than you think.

Infact, I thought you were right until that, then realised that was an answer no parent would ever give which made me realise there's a lot missing in your hypothesis.