I have been working in AI broadly for a long time. I got interested in "Strong AI", what we now call "Artificial General Intelligence," back in the 1980s when it was basically just a science fiction topic. I have been trying to create something like johnny5* since 1986 and am proud to say, that remains my goal.
Now that AGI is a hot topic, there are a lot of people asking a lot of questions about AI and AGI and how I view it.
The key challenge discussing these topics is having to deal with what I call "Embedded Dualism."
Embedded dualism is my term for philosophies that have as a presupposed truth that humans, or "life" generally, has some "spark" or "soul" or something non-material and non-measurable that is transcendent, immortal or at least "special" such that this claim creates a category distinction between objects. Inevitably of course nobody can tell you how to measure this "soul" "spark" etc... and of course it's just right around the corner or just below the surface of our current understanding. As of 2026 "quantum" is now where this magical spark lives, where previously it was the homonculus, neuroscience unfortunately killing that millenia old immeasurable counterfactual.
This is a fundamental roadblock to any serious (or often even casual) conversation, or discussion about reality, and the intersectionality of human modeling of reality. This is why I do not debate dualists: there is no possible common ground if there is fundamental disagreement about the configuration of the universe and what constitutes reality.
* Johnny 5 famously became conscious after a lighting strike, demonstrating exactly the kind of dualist embedding that is taken for granted, and is reasonable for children to believe
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Kemendo