An internal source of input essentially. The source of a person seems to be an adaptive, predictive model of the world. It takes processed input from the senses, meshes them with predictions, and uses them as triggers for memory and behaviors. It takes urges/desired states and predicts what behaviors would achieve that goal.

You can zap part of the brain to take away a person's personal memories, you can take away their senses or ability to speak or move, but you can't take away someone's model of how the world works without destroying their ability to function.

That seems to be the engine that makes a chunk of meat host a mind, the kennel of sentience that links all we are and turns it into action.

ChatGPT is like a deepfake bot, except instead of taking a source video and reference material of the target, it's taking a prompt and a ton of reference material. And instead of painting pixels in the color space, it's spitting out words in a high dimensional representation of language

Hopefully not decades, it's less than 5 years away (and hopefully doesn't stay that way)

Big freon was also really just chemical manufacturing companies, so they mostly just turned around and went "fine, ok, then what kind of refrigerant should we make then?"

Big oil has been looking into renewables for a long time and has invested in them to try to transition their cash flow, but the profit margins won't come close to stacking up and they own a ton of machinery and properties that will be worth practically nothing

>Granted, if that mothership showed up in our neck of the woods, we're probably screwed.

Why? They're building ships larger than Earth and space is huge and full of resources, the only possible reason for them to give our planet a second glance is for us and maybe to study life in general

And maybe it's too wipe us out, but again... Why? Space is really, really big. Fighting over resources is dumb, everything's entirely recyclable with enough energy and automation. Energy is what matters.

So if the stars start going out, there's reason for worry... Other than that, it's humans projecting our own failings on aliens. Factions would form demanding we eliminate potential future threats, and so we think aliens might have this same thought...

But we ignore the fact as we are we'd never be able to build a ship like that. Even if we had the technology and resources handed to us, politics and infighting would leave us with a mismatched mess that would fall apart as we argued over if it even needs maintenance

It's every bit as real as birds, or Australia