The movie analogy is old and outdated.

I'd compare it to a computer game. In any open world game, it seems that there are people living a life - going to work, doing chores, going home, etc. - but it's a carefully crafted illusion. "Carefully crafted" in so far as the developers having put exactly that into the game that is needed to suspend your disbelief and let you think, at least while playing, that there are real people. But behind the facade, they are not. They just disappear when entering their homes, they have no actual desires just a few numbers and conditional statements to switch between different pre-programmed behaviour patterns.

If done well, it can be a very, very convincing illusion. I'm sure that someone who hasn't seen a computer game before might think that they are actual people, but anyone with a bit of background knowledge knows they are not.

For AI, most of the people simply don't (yet?) have that bit of background knowledge.

And yet, when asked if the world is flat, they correctly say that it's not.

Despite hundreds of flat-earthers who are quite active online.

And it doesn't even budge on the point if you argue with it. So for whatever it's worth, it has learned more from scraping the Internet than at least some humans.

We didn't. The media and the PR departments did. In the tech and academia worlds that seriously work with it, the terms are LLMs, machine learning, etc. - the actual terms describing what the thing does. "AI" is the marketing term used by marketing people. You know, the people who professionally lie about everything in order to sell things.

It is not just ludicrous, it is irrationally dangerous.

For any (current) LLM, whenever you interact with them you need to remember one rule-of-thumb (not my invention, read it somewhere and agree): The LLM was trained to generate "expected output". So always think that implicitly your prompt starts with "give me the answer you think I want to read on the following question".

Giving an EXPECTED answer instead of the most likely to be true answer is literally life-threatening in a medical context.

It is marketing. So what? And there is reason to believe US (and European) car-makers stupidly left the market to China. And now China is ahead by a large margin. That is not how you win the future.

Yep. I do not think this has changed today. If you want to know, it matters little whether it is a trip to the library or to wikipedia.

I do not doubt that. We have some large-ego-small-insight "tech" people here, same as any tech forum. These then state total insightless nonsense with confidence. People like that are unable to tell when to fact-check, but have total confidence in their knowledge. And they are always around in some form.

Come to think of it, modern LLM communication is modelled on these idiots, because they can convince people. People like that also do well in sales, religion and politics.

Funny thing: I was asked about the same thing about 15-20 years back by a security consulting customer (very large bank). They wanted to store their Root CA secret keys by just putting them on bootable memory stick in a safe. My recommendation was to use industrial CF instead (which are essentially SLC FLASH with better properties that has 10 or 20 years data endurance and that endurance is in the data-sheet), but by any means to have several laser-printed copy on paper in addition. As CA secret keys are small, they went wit that. But they would have faced a real possibility of an expensive disaster otherwise.

It's maybe been useful motivation. The problem is, it's essentially the same definition as that of "the soul."

None of your examples are examples of "not thinking." They're examples of things that you think don't think.

The problem with that is it's entirely useless for extrapolating, as much as your prejudice would like you to think the opposite. It's also generally agreed that rocks don't do arithmetic, but if you arrange them in just the right way they're actually awfully good at it.

Funny, but the entire human population spends most of their time not "thinking."

From coordinating complex movements like walking through routines like driving to work to, yes, knee jerk reactions to most things, most of what our brains do is subconscious. Only the weird justifies the effort of actual executive control. Whatever it is that we call "conscious thought" is even rarer.

Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research.

Well, you can stop reading there. I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, but the supporting arguments seem to range from wrong to kind of dumb.

SSDs do automatic scrubbing, i.e. a sort-of self-refresh when powered. They do it only for cells that have gotten weak. No idea how long that takes though.

You should be able for force a full test cycle by either reading the full SSD or by running a long SMART self-test.

Depending on the data, that is a perfectly valid approach. Example: Root CA secret key. Make sure to use pigmented, non-acidic ink or laser.

Probably low-stability dye. CD-R can be made very cheaply.

It depends on the quality of the dye layer, the quality of the coating and other factors. For DVD recordables, same thing. The exception is DVD-RAM which use phase-change and can theoretically be archive-grade. But everything has to work for that. I tried with some and apparently disk and drive need to be matched for it to work well. At the time I tried, there were no current drives and disks with that information available.