Dear human philosophers, it's true: Machines are catching up

The above are excerpts from a long reply to a few questioning letters written by nine eminent philosophers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Cambridge University and others. These letters asked questions like: Can artificial intelligence (AI) be truly conscious--and will machines ever be able to "understand"? How does technology interact with the social world, in all its messy, unjust complexity? How might AI and machine learning transform the distribution of power in society, our political discourse, our personal relationships, and our aesthetic experiences? The questions were addressed to the most recent arrival in the world of AI, called GPT-3.