Unfortunately, this is a dumbass metaphor. It’s inapt, inept, and inapposite. It makes no sense if you know even the first thing about cognition, the history of galvanism and the fact that several extremely important results were discovered thereby, or that whether or not AI is conscious is not particularly relevant. Conflating “conscious” and “AI” does not make sense, for a whole host of reasons. “AI1” has been the industry-standard term since the 1950s and encompasses many different technologies. I know that to most people AI is new, but it’s not at all novel to those working in computer-adjacent fields2.
This is intellectual stotting. But unfortunately to someone with an actual capable brain like the bad-ass motherfucker writing to you now, it merely seems like an antelope with three left feet glued to a food truck attempting aerial acrobatics. It only impresses co-dumbasses who haven’t read actual books and who do not know the history of anything at all.
The scientific debate in the era of galvanism was not whether or not the dead could be resurrected via electrical stimulation. That was fiction fodder and the equivalent of pop-sci sensationalism at the time, no different than watching the latest space robots movie and concluding that this represents our era’s science. What Galvani actually discovered was that animals possess what he called “animal electricity,” and though he didn’t understand it he believed it was somehow fundamental to how animals function. And he was correct. That insight alone was an important discovery. Involved in the debate was Alessandro Volta who believed that animal systems did not use electrical impulses to operate and that the frog was just detecting something external only.
Attempting to do more research for his side of this scientific dispute, Volta constructed what was called a “voltaic pile” in 1800. This was the world’s first battery. And, folks, if I need to point out how important that was….well, you’re probably on the wrong site.
Ok, y’all, time to pull it on back now. These people are just fundamentally dumb. Their pseudointellectual faux-superiority only impresses those who can’t completely mog them effortlessly. Luckily I can and I make no bones about it.
To think about it from a larger perspective, what is the point of what people like Meagan are doing there? I know, showing off for their also-moronic friends. But in a larger sense, what is the purpose of publicly looking like a dipshit for anyone with eyes to see? I just cannot make sense of covering yourself in ignominy and dishonor this way.