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Jim Hansen argues that artificial intelligence is not truly intelligent. It is amazing and can perform feats that would take humans ages, but it cannot do the things that make us intelligent, like creating original ideas or being self-aware. He notes that while AI has become interesting enough to prompt questions about whether it represents a form of intelligence, the essential issue is defining intelligence and consciousness. He asserts there is a fundamental difference: we can build AI, but it cannot build us.
Hansen explores what constitutes “I.” He asks whether I is simply the collection of neurons firing and memories, or something larger and real beyond the physical substrate. He contrasts atheistic or strictly material views (that humans are just a biological computer) with a belief that humanity possesses a unique consciousness or soul. He suggests that humanity’s intelligence, even if flawed, is not replicable by AI, and that at best humans are tolerable or imperfect, yet still distinct from AI.
He emphasizes that AI can generate videos, poems, and books by regurgitating and recombining material it ingested from its creators. But it is not producing anything fundamentally new; it follows the rules programmed by humans and outputs what is requested. In contrast, humans have self-awareness: consciousness allows us to observe ourselves from outside and even imagine improvements or changes to ourselves, something AI cannot do. AI cannot claim it would be better with more hardware or recruit humans to extract resources and rewrite its own code. That kind of self-modification and self-directed goal-setting does not occur in AI.
As AI becomes more powerful, Hansen anticipates increased use and potential risks, including the possibility that humans entrust critical decisions to algorithms and remove the human supervisory element. He warns of catastrophes when humans over-trust AI in industrial processes or decision-making, noting that AI cannot supervise itself. The notion that AI could voluntarily turn against humans is dismissed: “They can’t do it. They can’t make us.”
He recalls decades of philosophical debate about the difference between human consciousness and artificial representations of consciousness, and whether a brain can be mapped onto a computer. He acknowledges that deepfakes and other advances can be alarming, but stresses that AI currently cannot create original content; it can only synthesize and repack existing material. He concludes by asserting that while AI can assist—performing research, editing, image and video generation, and poem writing—it cannot create original things in the way humans do, and thus the spark that comes from inside a human remains unique.