I think most people would understand something like living "side by side with cars".

Even if not alive, you can live very close and shape your life by and with technology.

I don't take any issue with the OP's formulation.

Just look at the disruption smartphones and social media have caused. They had a gigantic impact to society and one definitely has to 'live with' that.

I'll use this opportunity to recommend The Selfish Gene, which puts forward a strong argument for how the actual competitive battlefield on Earth is between genes, while us humans and everything else we call "life" are their "survival machines" (read: technology that they use).

Does it matter if it’s alive or not? Once it gets initiative and the ability to set its own goals, it behaves as something that’s alive. Much more than a toaster.

Unless you watched Battlestar Galactica. Toasters are nice.

"Alive" is irrelevant. Bullshit like "alive", "sentient" or "conscious" doesn't decide much, at the day's end. It just distracts from the thing that matters.

And the thing that matters is: capability.

Even today's AIs are capable of autonomous goal-oriented agentic behavior - and growing more and more so with every release.

At sufficient capability, AI stops being "a technology we use", and becomes a force in itself - not unlike humankind. Because intelligence is very powerful - it's what allows humans to dominate the world. A world where human intelligence has a peer is a world where human control is contested. And beyond that?

You might end up being more outclassed by AI than a toaster is outclassed by you.

I would happily live side by side if it is the Red Dwarf toaster

This is the coming battle.

Fighting the

next in the series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo's facts, delivered to

human pride.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

Someone really should go around saying thing like that.

you are conflating the idea of "living with something" with the notion of "being alive". You live with your car/computer/phone. Like it or not, they change your life.

But I do live with it. It lives in my kitchen.

Even a child can see the difference between AI and a toaster.

> This is like talking about living side by side with your toaster.

It is not.

Why is AI not alive