[IAmGraydon]

I agree, and I think that's a good example. Sometimes we can hold a concept in our minds of something and cannot find the words to attach to it. The word we eventually give that concept when it's human, as in your example, is a name. This is because the concept of a personality is too complex to describe with other, preexisting words.

Still, even though I think the author is right about consciousness/concepts preceding language, I think he's wrong about the other part. The statistical models that underlie AI very much remind me of what we call a human concept. It's a statistical model of that thing, person, or idea. However, we humans seem to have this ability to create new concepts that are wildly different than our training data (what we have experienced in life), and we call this creativity. It's missing from AI for some reason. That is the part that makes me question if AI will ever match humans.

[t43562]

My self comfort is that once AIs are comparable to humans they will in effect be humans. Once they have wants and emotion to give them an internal motivation, and a short-to-long term memory learning ability .... the humans that are so keen on them will suddenly realise that their personal dreams of power will not be fulfilled by an unwilling slave machine.

Then we may all die but at least not be crushed by the next trillionaire using machines as an instrument to manage billions of us in the way that social media manages hundreds of millions of us.