Artificial thoughts

Just to reprint a comment I left at this site.

I see the growing hatred towards AI as similar to the emergence of anti-evolution movements. Just as they feared being considered just another animal, people are just afraid of finding out that a "mere" computer, a bag-of-bits, can have "soul" or consciousness. They don't want to become "just another dynamical system". Its just like people that feared that a picture of them taken with a photographic camera was "stealing" his of her human essence somehow. Someday people will stop giving that much importance to things like free will and the idea of personality, and then we will finally start moving forward again.