>"I encounter people online and in person who pose logic puzzles involving such a hypothetical entity." I'd see that as a valid thought experiment, but one tha

>"I encounter people online and in person who pose logic puzzles involving such a hypothetical entity." I'd see that as a valid thought experiment, but one that had very little basis in reality. The level of invasiveness needed to bring about anything close to that would make it highly improbable, you'd basically need a swarm of sensors at the nano-scale covering the entire planet just to have enough raw data to work with, and the processing power required to interpret that raw data would be ridiculously high. >"I also encounter people online and in person who engage in futurist thinking about where humans would fit into a world with such entities." You probably do, but considering that there's plenty of online discussion from the same communities about basic income and suchlike, there clearly are those who are attempting to come to terms with the expected impact of AI on humans. >"In "The Matrix" and sequel movies, human beings seem to react to machines in a way analogous to how we have historically reacted to different ethnic/religious groups. I hope "ignition" isn't apt." Ignition? Aside from that, the changes in our society that AI is due to bring us soon will be resisted, that's completely understandable, it's happened numerous times in our past when human work has been replaced by a machine. Unfortunately, it's not something that can be effectively resisted without changing centuries of conditioning about the role that new technology plays in shaping our future. The best we can hope for in the near term is damage limitation.