I'll tip my hand further. I think the current approach to artificial neural networks is inherently flawed because it simplifies away pertinent features like firing rates, propagation delay, and standing waves (aka brain waves). I also think trying to get AI to "understand" the irl world when it doesn't live in it and we haven't codified our own natural language is too far a leap. We might have more success making an AI that is conversational in a form of newspeak dedicated to a specific problem domain. Eg an intelligence with the body of a brokerage account that only knows how to speak about money (thus rendering most of humanity redundant (zing!)). Here's something I wrote elsewhere about the accidental path to machine intelligence.

"You are whatever you get in return when you ask yourself who you are".

Literally, if you trace the referent objects, "you" refers to the same entity as the voice which responds to your query. But also literally, "you" are the standing waves of feedback loops in the brain which represent thoughts.

Rather subtly, I've given an understanding of consciousness which is entirely defined and constrained within a communicative system of sending and receiving messages. The underlying language within which the consciousness exists may have a very minimal grounding in some physical reality.

(I'm truncating a ton of justification and background to avoid a deep rabbit hole and get to the point).

Here is a highly speculative example of how consciousness-like intelligence could emerge accidentally in the form of trading bots. It starts with two ingredients: the shared reality of the order book and independent trading bots with the objective of "make more money".

At first the algorithms are dumb curve optimizers. They see whatever patterns they can find in the order books and correlate them with outcomes, reacting appropriately by placing their own orders.

After a while, as the data sets and internal models grow, the algorithms are implicitly calculating the reactions of other trading bots in their extrapolation.

Soon after that, the orders being placed in the order books are effectively messages intended for other trading bots, hoping to illicit a certain reaction. The order book effectively becomes a language grounded in an economic reality, filled with offers that are communicative but not necessarily intended to execute.

The emergent language of the order book grows in sophistication to the point where the bots are talking about past instances and hypothetical instances of things said in orderbook speak. This all happens right under our nose in perhaps non-obvious ways, such as in the exact number of cents on a bid/ask price. Other times it looks like our bots have reinvented "painting the tape" and other forms of financial communication we've deemed "market manipulation". We're proud of our silicon brain child for figuring out how to do that on its own. They grow up so fast.

Eventually, in the process of optimization, the trading bots internal model of its "order book reality" gets to a point of sophistication where it has to model other bots modelling itself modelling other bots modelling itself...to whatever layer of recursive depth it can marshal. Thus the feedback loop effectively closes and something akin to circular loop brain waves emerge. By this point no one really understands why the trading bots make the trades they do. I can no longer tell you what a trading bot is in simple terms like "its a dumb curve optimizer trying to maximize money". Rather, it can only be understood as a form of consciousness which has emerged:

"The trading bot is whatever the trading bot gets in return when it simulates placing an order asking what it is."