I do a lot of writing on AI but have never gathered it into a cohesive essay or collection. This is the beginning of loosely collecting my thoughts and saved references for that.

• On Emergence and actual intelligence:People are talking about current technology, which relies on matching statistical profiles of strings of words, like true intelligence could emerge from it.I look at it this way: AI video generation is getting really impressive. You could feed it tons of video of basketballs bouncing, and pretty soon it would be able to generate videos of basketballs bouncing realistically through all kinds of extraordinary scenarios, because it had seen enough visual, external data to create incredible simulations of how a basketball bounces. It would truly, profoundly have a grasp on how basketballs appear to bounce.And never, in any of that, would it have even a glimmer of a clue as to the physics of how a basketball bounces or why.
• “It doesn’t write code, it writes ‘snippets’. AI has no idea about integration.” —Owen Rubel
  To which I replied: “BINGO. That’s an excellent distinction.¶There’s no actual domain knowledge involved, no broader context or awareness of pitfalls, just a quick little “I calculate that this will produce the narrow effect you are requesting within the parameters you have given.” It’s entirely on you to provide adequate parameters to get what you want. “