>>107624
Sooner or later someone's gonna build a medical kiosk with built-in equipment to take and analyze blood samples, CT scans, etc., to perfect the concept. You could probably find a lot of willing guinea pigs in sub-Saharan Africa. Maybe the only reason they aren't already doing it is that the locals would decide they had spirits in them and smash them open to demand a wish from the genies inside.
Maybe AI is at its limits. Maybe it isn't. But, see, in the near term, the direction and form of the economy are going to be dictated by what "the investors" (read: Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Gates, and maybe about a hundred less famous guys) think it can do, not by what it actually can do.
I don't have a crystal ball or a wooden leg and I don't know what the future holds. I know a lot of extremely powerful people, the kind who can call up Senators on the phone and dictate bills to them, are very enthusiastic about AI. They are trying very hard to sell us visions of a Star Trek future, but these are the exact same people who brought you H1B visas, NAFTA, and Most-Favored-Nation trade status for China, all to pad their bank accounts, so we already know their intentions are anything but altruistic, much less patriotic.
Speaking of China, I know the Chinese Communist Party is all-in on AI and can't write blank checks or build data centers fast enough. The CCP are many things but they are not fools, even if they don't fully understand the stolen Western technology they're fumbling around with. See also, Wuhan. They are convinced with a religious fervor that AI is about to become a bottomless cornucopia of exotic, never-before-conceived-of new weapons with which to take a final revenge upon the rest of the human race. They're still butthurt about the Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion the way the Moslem world is still butthurt at Charles Martel for not rolling over for them twelve centuries or so back, and they are not going to get over it any time soon. They want us all impoverished and enslaved forever, if not exterminated down to the last infant, and they have mortgaged their entire economy and their entire country for the next hundred years on this bet that AI can make it happen. I have to respect the drive.
Maybe it's all nothing. Maybe AI won't deliver and the whole exercise will leave them unshaven, wearing barrels, with cartoon stink lines rising above them, on streetcorners, holding signs that say "will work for food." Or insert the equivalent geopolitical caricature. Maybe not. We ignore it at our peril.