Way to move the goalposts.

If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.

Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.

So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.

Artificial intelligence isn’t designed to maximize human fulfillment. It’s built to minimize human suffering.

What it cannot do is answer the fundamental questions that have always defined human existence: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do with my finite time on Earth?

Expecting machines to resolve existential questions is like expecting a calculator to write poetry. We’re demanding the wrong function from the right tool.

Pretty weird statements. There’s no such thing as just “AI” - they should be more specific. LLMs aren’t designed to maximize human fulfillment or minimize suffering. They’re designed to generate natural-sounding language. If they’re talking about AGI, then that’s not designed for any one thing - it’s designed for everything.

Comparing AGI to a calculator makes no sense. A calculator is built for a single, narrow task. AGI, by definition, can adapt to any task. If a question has an answer, an AGI has a far better chance of figuring it out than a human - and I’d argue that’s true even if the AGI itself isn’t conscious.

It won’t solve anything

Go tell that to AlphaFold which solved a decades‑old problem in biology by predicting protein structures with near lab‑level accuracy.

Finland recently passed a law prohibiting under 15 year olds from riding electric scooters and similar vehicles. Up untill now, the average age of the people hospitalized for accidents with these has been 12 years.

Both that and LLMs fall under the umbrella of machine learning, but they branch in different directions. LLMs are optimized for generating language, while the systems used in drug discovery focus on pattern recognition, prediction, and simulations. Same foundation - different tools for different jobs.

It’s certainly not any task, that’d be AGI.

Any individual task I mean. Not every task.

If you’re talking about LLMs, then you’re judging the tool by the wrong metric. They’re not designed to solve problems or pass captchas - they’re designed to generate coherent, natural-sounding text. That’s the task they’re trained for, and that’s where their narrow intelligence lies.

The fact that people expect factual accuracy or problem-solving ability is a mismatch between expectations and design - not a failure of the system itself. You're blaming the hammer for not turning screws.

Consciousness - or “self-awareness” - has never been a requirement for something to qualify as artificial intelligence. It’s an important topic about AI, sure, but it’s a separate discussion entirely. You don’t need self-awareness to solve problems, learn patterns, or outperform humans at specific tasks - and that’s what intelligence, in this context, actually means.

In computer science, the term AI at its simplest just refers to a system capable of performing any cognitive task typically done by humans.

That said, you’re right in the sense that when people say “AI” these days, they almost always mean generative AI - not AI in the broader sense.

You’re describing intelligence more like a soul than a system - something that must question, create, and will things into existence. But that’s a human ideal, not a scientific definition. In practice, intelligence is the ability to solve problems, generalize across contexts, and adapt to novel inputs. LLMs and chess engines both do that - they just do it without a sense of self.

A calculator doesn’t qualify because it runs "fixed code" with no learning or generalization. There's no flexibility to it. It can't adapt.

I don't get her logic at all. No amount of mental gymnastics allows me to find anything sexist in that.

I mostly downvote bad faith, hostile or just generally angry/mean comments independent of whether I agree with them or not. Basically I'm using it against the people that are polluting the air here.