Fuck AI

Chess engines initially had the same stigma "they'll never be better than humans since they can just calculate, no creativity, real analysis, insight..."

I don't know if this is a great example. Chess is an environment with an extremely defined end goal and very strict rules.

The ability of a chess engine to defeat human players does not mean it became creative or grew insight. Rather, we advanced the complexity of the chess engine to encompass more possibilities, more strategies, etc. In addition, it's quite naive for people to have suggested that a computer would be incapable of "real analysis" when its ability to do so entirely depends on the ability of humans to create a complex enough model to compute "real analyses" in a known system.

I guess my argument is that in the scope of chess engines, humans underestimated the ability of a computer to determine solutions in a closed system, which is usually what computers do best.

Consciousness, on the other hand, cannot be easily defined, nor does it adhere to strict rules. We cannot compare a computer's ability to replicate consciousness to any other system (e.g. chess strategy) as we do not have a proper and comprehensive understanding of consciousness.