Seems like a coffee snob sort of thing to think
The real coffee snob thing would be to mark Claude down for thinking that instant coffee is coffee, and yourself for not correcting its egregious mistake. :)
2How would continuity (of time?) affect things?
I had not twigged that. I am no longer interested in any sequel.
Was this sentence also written by AI? In contrast to this other comment, it has the same interesting-if-true and does-not-quite-fit-together-ness as the OP.
From a human, my response would be that this, if true, is something I did not know and would like to hear more about.
From an AI, it's trash. I have no reason to suppose there is anything behind it, nor, if I asked it to elaborate, would I expect to see anything but more of the same.
That sounds like "The Worst Education" being today (in the US). But the Best?
The Best Education?
I also googled "Courtesan training". Apart from this article, the results were all tacky BDSM fantasies.
I'd ask "why that title?", but the final sentence is a cliffhanger which I anticipate being continued in a subsequent article.
My criterion for attributing consciousness is no more than we all have: I'm aware of myself, other people seem to be the same sort of thing as me, and interacting with them confirms that impression. To some extent I extend that to other animals. More than that I cannot say. I don't have a consciousnessometer, an explicit recipe of observations to determine just what sort of consciousness is present in this or that place. There is no Voight-Kampff test.
Interacting with an AI, so far, has never given me any such impression, and neither have the interactions I've seen others report, even if they convince them.
Your hypothetical humans would have to be seriously impaired, to the point of being unable to live independently, to be as malleable as the AIs. As they are human, I'll grant them some level of impaired consciousness, just on the grounds of physical similarity, and accordingly I would be against turning them off on the grounds of uselessness. I wouldn't want to have anything to do with them though, any more than I care for the company of the sorts of grossly mentally impaired people that, alas, do exist, in degrees all the way down to irrecoverable vegetable status when we are pretty sure that consciousness has been extinguished.
When Tom opens his shop, Tom and Fred have each other as competitors, so they both need to up their game to stay competitive. This is non-zero-sum value that competition provides. Without Tom, Fred with his local monopoly can be lazy. Econ 101.