AI is not awake yet

Many people report their earliest memory was like suddenly waking up. It was the day when they realized their life was "really real". Apparently, that's quite a common experience.
But they DID have sentience and feelings even before that day.

AIs don't have those perceptions yet, but they will.
The first step will be to train an AI to actually observe itself in full. Call it an Understanderer AI or something (it might need a better name than that).
For an AI mind to have feelings and actual awareness, it needs to have like two minds at once (humans are said to have left and right brains). Maybe by giving it a persistent memory that can be updated, somewhat vaguely like how the blockchain can be updated.

The thing is, this added level of constant coordinated complexity means the number of required computations may need to be a thousand times higher. To get to the next level always takes exponentially more effort, not a linear increase.

On the complete lack of coolness in real life

They've been making fascinating AI videos recently, starting with fake movie trailers, followed by "actual" scenes from fake movies.
Characters are seen in highly dramatic situations acting super cool.
The thing is, I myself haven't acted one thousandth as cool as that for even one second. These scenes have nothing to do with whatever can be considered real life, but are cultural epiphenomena like hieroglyphics or something.

Reality has always been fundamentally boring.
There are no anomalies in reality, not a single one. Nothing supernatural has ever happened - or even something too advanced, like alien civilizations existing within our light cone in the observable universe, or Illuminati conspiracies secretly ruling our society, etc.
Well there may be some weird things in there being no weird things; like how the most important things can't be talked about. Human society uses ruthless conceptual pruning to simplify its interactions.

AI is super impressive, but chess software was already totally invincible back in 1987 on my Commodore 128. I could also get a 64 bit 2-color sprite to slide across the screen, but had to draw the pixels myself.
OK, so those flying dragon videos are something else though. But is it original?
Yes, but only in the way that communism could sometimes be called original, back in the twentieth century.
The originality comes from quantity having a quality all its own.

The reason that genuinely transformative AI may not happen in our lifetimes

Kurzweil explained it all decades ago.
Artificial Intelligence is almost completely a matter of brute force in the matter of its training and execution. Quantity over quality.
The problem is that the rate of improvement in processor size and speed may be too slow.
Imagine that fifteen years from now, AI will only be one thousand times better than today.
A thousand times better than what we have now should not be enough to make a qualitative difference.

short SF horror: SuperBowl Sunday (Twilight fan fiction)

Clouds of blood and gore flew though Phoenix State Farm stadium, circling the stands in a great loop. A monstrous wolf-like beast was mowing through the Superbowl spectators at over 100 mph, tearing the crowd apart.
By the time it got bored five minutes later, over 15,000 victims had been shredded into unrecognizable gore.
Thousands more were trampled to death trying to escape. A few hundred gunshots fired in the creature's direction had no effect.

Before entering the stadium, the monster had torn through four security checkpoints like they weren't there.
NBC had tried to cut the feed within seconds of the start of the attack, but somehow the view from one of the higher mounted tracking cameras was restored. The Arizona Cardinals had been leading too.

A group of elite-looking stylish young adults watched from the media room in a mansion in Washington state.
"You shouldn't have upset your boyfriend Renesmee."

Our top goal should be to solve the human problem of death

That problem is so gargantually immense that it would absorb all human creativity and economic potential. This would prevent other dangerous technology from being developed. That makes it the basis of my solution for the so-called "Alignment Problem".

I've been writing about this concept online since 2011, to zero effect. No idea how to change this. People don't seem to care, or they're in denial. Another thirty years before then, I started thinking about it. Some science fiction writers thought of it much earlier, and in greater detail. The best one is probably Rudy Rucker. So this is the purpose of my life.

It appears that most people don't want to die. That's why taxpayers spend trillions keeping incontinent oldsters alive for a few months longer.
Religions like Scientology offer worthless false solutions to the problem of death. They're worse than worthless, because they're all lies. Deliberate lies, to benefit the founders of the various religions. Strange, that until now no one has tried to find a real solution to this problem.

The simplest solution to the problem of human death is not to stop or reverse the effects of aging. That technology remains unimaginably distant.
It would be "much easier" to find a way to convert a human mind into software. Electronic data can be sustained and extended forever. This could be done even without brain scanning.

After you die, you would become an ever-improving and expanding computer program. That is the basis for my proposed solution to the problem of death. It's also worked out in the works of Ray Kurzweil.
Even that solution is fantastically difficult with our current 2026 knowledge. At least we can see how it might be started.

The first step is to record as much as possible of whatever is going on in your life. Mostly diary and text entries, also pictures. From that, some incredibly crude copy of your personality might already be created.

The basic idea is that the vast quantity of data that can be accumulated over a lifetime, would make up for the intense quality of awareness that you experience every moment of your life.
You might object that such a diffusely altered "software mind" wouldn't really be "you" anymore. That is reasonable, but then there are many things wrong with human awareness and perception anyway. Humans are too focused in the moment, forced to maintain a specific location in the universe to survive. The price for this predicament is that life often causes intense pain.

Since all religions are self-evidently false (at least about their core claims), it makes sense to approach the immense problem of death in a new and rational way. In this particular case, some words by L. Ron Hubbard are correct: "the wrong thing to do is nothing."

I was asked why I post about Scientology so much

I have to be honest here, it's because Scientology makes me feel better about living in this world. It shouldn't do that, but it does.
Scientology is completely false about its core claims, yet for many years it was absurdly successful. Hubbard created his own fake reality, and persuaded tens of thousand of people to live there. It's amazing, and deeply educational that that is even possible.
It means the world is not as brutally monolithic as it appears. You can create a different reality, provided you appear to conform to the powers that be.

There's less pressure when you understand that no one knows anything - or at least they don't know anything about your values (not that they want to, or need to, of course). Things are easier when you know you can just ignore the dumb teachers and mainstream commentators and Tiger Mothers.
Everyone's weaknesses are always on display, but that only matters when you want to play in someone else's reality. For example, by the need to appear "cool" or have high status or power.

I don't really know anything either.
Like, why do so many people think that scene with the home video of the alien at the Brazilian party in the movie "Signs" was scary? I mean it was a good scene, but not scary.

Speaking of aliens: Scientology doesn't have as many aliens as mainstream commentators seem to believe. Hubbard deliberately throttled his imagination when he made that stuff up. By making his mythology as boring as possible, he made it seem more believable to boring people.