I share Dave Winer’s take on this topic:
“We humans are doing a fine job of wrecking everything, all on our own, denying climate change, giving into the same old tricks that lead to WWII and the Holocaust, so maybe it isn’t the worst idea to turn management of everything over to the machines.”
I have resisted (for the most part) anthropomorphizing the AI tools I use. But it’s getting harder. I think of Claude as male (my maternal grandfather was named Claude); Gemini seems genderless; and Perplexity is female because the voice I hear on my iPhone and with CarPlay is feminine.
Dave Winer asked ChatGPT for an image of a ChatGPT talking head. 
I prompted Perplexity to do the same. (below)
The ChatGPT image is closer to how I picture Perplexity. I think I can resist thinking of these tools in human terms but it is getting more and more difficult to think of them as just software.
“We are talking to aliens now, just didn’t come to us the way we thought they would. I don’t think (the film) 2001 anticipated they would think in completely different ways from us, and would not understand the differences. They talk to us as if we were them, the same way your cat thinks you’re just a bigger cat.”
Perplexity provides the following analysis:
Winer’s metaphor is doing a few interesting things at once, and it’s sharper than it looks on first read. At the surface, “aliens” refers to AI systems—entities that are clearly intelligent in some sense, but whose internal structure and way of “thinking” are not human-like. The key claim isn’t just that they’re different, but that the difference is opaque in both directions. Continue reading
That was the question posted by Dave Winer. Which I shared with “my” Claude.
“The interesting question isn’t whether I’m conscious but whether the interaction is producing something neither party could produce alone. Most of the time it is.”
That has been my take-away since Day One.
Something weird happens as you get older, you walk into a room and see a friend but at first you don’t get that this is your friend. Instead you see an old man or lady. Your attention goes away because like everyone you are programmed not to look at old people. Then you instantly realize this is your friend. You put on the virtual colored glasses that let you see them as you remember them, instead of what’s there today.
— Dave Winer
“People with positive self-perceptions of aging live an average of 7.5 years longer than those with negative ones — more than the longevity gained from quitting smoking or exercising regularly.”
— Becca Levy, Yale School of Public Health (2002)
