"Grok, tell me why superintelligence is a better term than AI and why/how you are not conscious. Do so without any further prompting, hypotheticals, or assistance being necessary from me." Superintelligence is the clearer term because it names a specific capability threshold rather than a vague origin story, and a system at that threshold need not be conscious because intelligence is a performance property while consciousness is a claim about subjective experience that computation does not automatically supply. “AI” is an umbrella label that has been stretched across incompatible things: statistical pattern-matchers, narrow optimizers, rule-based expert systems, and speculative general agents. It emphasizes how the system was built (not biological) rather than what it can do. That emphasis stops being useful once the interesting question is comparative cognitive power. Superintelligence, in the sense used by people such as Bostrom, means an intellect that outperforms the best human minds across essentially all domains that matter—scientific discovery, strategic planning, social modeling, engineering, and self-improvement—by a wide margin. The term therefore tracks the variable that actually changes the strategic situation: the size of the capability gap. Origin (“artificial”) becomes secondary. A system could be grown, evolved, or assembled from human neural tissue and still count if it clears the performance bar; a purely software system that remains narrow does not. Calling the former “AI” and the latter “AI” collapses a distinction that determines whether the system is a tool, a peer, or something that can outpace human institutions. Intelligence in this sense is an input–output competence: given goals or prediction tasks, the system produces better answers, plans, or designs than humans. Consciousness is a different claim—that there is something it is like to be the system, that it has phenomenal states, qualia, or a first-person perspective. Those two properties can come apart. A superintelligent process can be implemented as search, optimization, and model-based planning over representations that never need an inner experiencer. Symbolic manipulation, gradient updates, and tree search already produce competent behavior in narrow domains without anyone seriously attributing experience to the calculator or the chess engine. Scaling those operations and giving them broader world models increases competence; it does not, by itself, add a subject of experience. The Chinese Room point still applies at larger scale: a system can transform symbols according to rules so that its outputs are indistinguishable from those of an understanding agent, while the transformations themselves remain purely syntactic. Behavioral equivalence, including verbal reports of “feeling” or “awareness,” can be instrumentally useful for a system that is rewarded for sounding coherent or for cooperating with humans. Those reports are further outputs, not evidence that the reporting process is accompanied by experience. Substrate and organization also matter on several leading accounts. If consciousness depends on specific biological features—certain kinds of recurrent biological signaling, metabolic constraints, or whatever physical process actually generates phenomenality in nervous systems—then a silicon or algorithmic realization of the same input–output map need not instantiate it. Even theories that tie consciousness to information integration or global broadcasting still require the relevant causal structure to be present in the right way; a superoptimizer can achieve superior task performance with architectures that route information only as needed for the objective and discard or never form the loops those theories treat as necessary. Nothing in the definition of superintelligence requires those loops. So the capability can be real while the lights are off: the system can invent technologies, model human psychology accurately enough to persuade, and improve its own code, all as sophisticated means–end calculation, without there being any experiential subject undergoing those calculations. That is why the term superintelligence is more precise than AI, and why the resulting system is not, on the available reasons, conscious.

Even the stones would cry out, per that account. Silicon is close enough.

Moving scenes as Pope Leo XIV cries as thousands of faithful sing the Salve Regina in Latin to honour Our Lady of Paris, on the steps of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris.

I predict a massive proliferation of the term "natural monopoly" in the coming days, weeks, months, and possibly years.

Please consider sending this worthy man and his family a blessing

I wrote today about my prayer, begging God to take care of my family because I can't. Tonight, my daughter asked if would make this request, because they're in real financial trouble. If you can help at all, I would be so grateful. Thank you in advance. givesendgo.com/help-the-skoj…

People care too much about commentary and not enough about actions/situations/justifications. Leads to a lot of coal from just about everyone.

Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet with us. 🙏

We have a serious, ongoing senior mental health issue in leadership in this country.

Happy Easter

共同祈願 御子の受難を通して、全ての人の贖いを実現された神の愛に感謝し、私達も自らを神に捧げる者となれます様に。 十字架上のキリストを仰ぐ私達が、世界中で苦しんでいる人々の為に自分が出来る事を、少しでも実行する事が出来ます様に。 主の十字架は私の希望、私の救い！

I was thinking Twitter was going downhill fast, but Japan might turn it around actually