Artificial Intelligence? Eh, Nope.

We've mentioned that "AI" is not intelligence.  It cannot (and will not) ask "Why?"  But that's just the beginning, as mentioned here.

 ...[A]s sober-minded people know... artificial intelligence is not intelligent. Large language models scour pre-existing texts and are highly efficient at pattern recognition. But they entirely lack the capacity for judgment or an experience of reality allowing them to engage in those second-order reflections typical of rational entities to see if a statement corresponds in any meaningful sense with primary reality as reality presents itself for our understanding and judgment. The so-called “hallucinations” of AI are good indicators of this fact....

But yes, there is reason to be concerned.

... It isn’t so much that AI is failing, but that the materialist, physicalist, and reductive visions of intelligence, which guide and govern AI boosters and coders, fail as an account of consciousness and intelligence.

As Adam Frank notes, “the current discussion about consciousness has a singular fatal flaw” infecting not only AI but most of the relevant disciplines, namely, it has overlooked “our experience.” Modern science, he argues, has swiveled between two competing accounts of consciousness – physicalism or idealism – with physicalism reducing consciousness to the “physical mechanics occurring in the neurons” that (supposedly) generate consciousness itself. Idealism, on the other hand, attempts to free mind from matter and allow it a free-floating existence.

For anyone formed in the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, these are not, and cannot be, live options. As rational animals we are entirely animal and entirely rational; we are not two distinct substances of body and self, nor do we simply have bodies or have minds. Instead, we are one being with two distinct principles, body and soul. And while the soul is the form and act of the body, it isn’t a distinct entity from the body, and certainly the body cannot explain its own existence, operations, or life....\

The concern?  That some (many?) will understand AI as definitive, and--worse--that they will accept te materialist-reductionism behind the cult.