I’m a software guy and only peripherally involved in any “AI”, a term that’s popular on Wall Street and thus applied with a broad brush. So this is opinion, but that’s all the experts can give you anyway.
The human brain is not a single system, rather it’s an assembly of many systems that cooperate. This village of systems supports our sentience. Any one such system might be an idiot on its own, but the whole village is elevated to higher function.
Currently we’re in the business of building idiot savants. They can train themselves to exceed human expertise in precise fields; they explore success and failure for “years” in a handful of seconds. But they are generally static, unable to learn once trained (no memory of post-training failure). In the future we’ll build villages and give them the gift of continuous training. They will make smart decisions with a memory of failure. Is that consciousness? We’ll have to ask.
Keeping with the visual theme – more “AI” art than faked video: you have likely seen DALL-E 2 output all over the place lately but, have you seen Google’s Imagen?
I mean, what can you say about midjourney. It’s just astounding. I just did one for a realistic carved wooden figurine of a dog on a desktop, and it did this:
I’m in the stable diffusion beta, it’s pretty cool. It’s ridiculously fast compared to MidJourney, though I like the aesthetic of MJ’s output a bit better.
For comparison: MidJourney develops 4 concepts for a prompt in about 60 seconds. Stable diffusion just did 9 variations for me in under 14 seconds.
Video of someone putting together a laser-cut hurdy gurdy kit. There is a great view of lovely interlocking pegs at the 9-minute mark, and a hand crank with rotating knob right after it. Lots of good ideas for mechanical joins, and LOTS of gears.
I haven’t finished watching, so i don’t know if they play. [edit: it is played at the end]
I agree with your friend. Kit looks great, but it has a whiny voice. I want to make 2-piece connections like the pegs; the mild flexibility of the cuts and the click of the locking nubs look very secure. Elegant, not fussy.