When I was in college, for one of my classes, one of our assignments was to use a circuit design language to produce a working, Turing-complete computer from basic components like 1-bit registers and half-adders. It really takes the mystique out of computation and you really see just how basic and mechanical computers are at their core: you feed signals into input lines, then the input gets routed, stored, and/or output depending on a handful of deterministic rules. At its core, every computer is doing the same thing that basic virtual computer did, just with more storage, bit width, predefined operations, and fancier ways to render its output. Once you understand that, the idea of a computer “becoming self-aware and altering its programming” is just ludicrous.
AI bros are the absolute worst.
When I was in college, for one of my classes, one of our assignments was to use a circuit design language to produce a working, Turing-complete computer from basic components like 1-bit registers and half-adders. It really takes the mystique out of computation and you really see just how basic and mechanical computers are at their core: you feed signals into input lines, then the input gets routed, stored, and/or output depending on a handful of deterministic rules. At its core, every computer is doing the same thing that basic virtual computer did, just with more storage, bit width, predefined operations, and fancier ways to render its output. Once you understand that, the idea of a computer “becoming self-aware and altering its programming” is just ludicrous.