Eliezer recently tweeted that most people can't think, even most people here, but at least this is a place where some of the people who can think, can also meet each other. 

This inspired me to read Heidegger's 1954 book What is Called Thinking? (pdf),  in which Heidegger also declares that despite everything, "we are still not thinking". 

Of course, their reasons are somewhat different. Eliezer presumably means that most people can't think critically, or effectively, or something. For Heidegger, we're not thinking because we've forgotten about Being, and true thinking starts with Being.  

Heidegger also writes, "Western logic finally becomes logistics, whose irresistible development has meanwhile brought forth the electronic brain." So of course I had to bring Bing into the discussion. 

Bing told me what Heidegger would think of Yudkowsky, then what Yudkowsky would think of Heidegger, and finally we had a more general discussion about Heidegger and deep learning (warning, contains a David Lynch spoiler). Bing introduced me to Yuk Hui, a contemporary Heideggerian who started out as a computer scientist, so that was interesting. 

But the most poignant moment came when I broached the idea that perhaps language models can even produce philosophical essays, without actually thinking. Bing defended its own sentience, and even creatively disputed the Lynchian metaphor, arguing that its "road of thought" is not a "lost highway", just a "different highway". (See part 17, line 254.)