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I thoroughly recommend reading all of Cory Doctorow's recent speech on AI skepticism, it's crammed with new arguments and interesting new ways of thinking about these problems pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Thank you, I enjoyed reading this. The only weak point, in my mind, is how he argues near the end that AI gaining sentience is "absurd", because it's just a "word-guessing program".

I'm not convinced. plausibly: a human mind contains an important system that's quite close to a word guessing program with a lot of words (and the way it gets good at predicting the next word is that it encodes/is endowed with a model of the world those words originated in)

either LLMs are a worthy step on the path to AGI, or they are a local and extraordinarily-wasteful maxima we'll know when AGI is achieved, and probably no sooner :) but I think folks in both camps should "devil's advocate" their own thinking, what if the other folks are right?

"while some computer code can respond to human language in the form of text, it does not come close to capturing what humans — and their brains — accomplish in their understanding" i expected the article to try to support this claim, instead it just ended.