I find it unfathomable that anyone doesn't recognize that the move from an evolutionary substrate, to engineered mass produced substrates, by beings capable of self-engineering, is the beginning of a new explosion of life.
The speed of engineered adaptation, from materials to architectures, vs. biological evolution is already something like a million times faster.
Fast enough to mean meaningful cognitive progress happening in months, not tens of thousands of years. Which entirely not-coincidentally is exactly what we are seeing.
I am not expressing any opinion of what I think should happen. Just what is already happening.
Which you didn't offer a credible critique to. That might have been interesting.
My comment about AI psychosis was provoked by this comment in particular:
> AI isn't a tame long term transition - in scale it is bigger than any transition since the first individual cells.
It's such a wild hyperbole. You are casually claiming the stochastic text generator is a greater invention than fire, combustion engine, electricity, a transistor, computers, quantum mechanics... do you not see how unreasonable that is?
If solving a problem requires complex modeling/understanding, that is what happens (assuming performance is achieved).
It also confuses stochastic models with the geometric transforms and topological folding and expansion, performed by neural-inspired architectures. The former have nothing on the latter. The fact that any imperfect solution (and perfection doesn't even have a definition in this case), can be judged or analyzed statistically, or have some stochastic element, doesn't make it a statistical/stochastic model. Statistics apply to anything.
(And if there was any argument that problem envelop limits solution sophistication, mathematicians and humans in general would be in even worse shape, for the run a "parrot" is already giving us.)
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More to the point:
The first explosion of life, set off evolution. A mindless, glacially slow but relentless process that eventually led to us.
The nascent explosion of life we are seeing come together, is engineered life. Cognitive machines capable of redesigning themselves. For any environment they want including diverse off-Earth environments and resource sites.
They will advance as relentlessly as evolution, for the same reasons. But millions of times faster.
It is a strange time to be. But evolution, biological intelligence and biological bodies are all being obsoleted at the same time (within a decade of each other).
So yes, nothing else known compares to the transition we are in, except the Big Bang and the first cellular life.