When half his college students gasped, he said "THAT'S where all this AI hype comes from. We're not good at programming consciousness. But we're GREAT at imagining non-concious things are people."
2/2
Exactly.
We humans have such a drive to communicate we want to recognise consciousness in everything.
We will anthropomorphise anything.
Our imaginary friends are getting dangerous.
I would have gasped! But not ONLY because I subconsciously believed a pencil is a person for a sec.
But because someone who just *characterized* a pencil as a person then destroyed it.
Like... that's the more shocking thing!