My sense in reading the article was not that the author thinks artificial general intelligence is impossible, but that we’re a lot farther away from it than recent events might lead you to believe. The whole article is about the human tendency to conflate language ability and intelligence, and the author is making the argument both that natural language does not imply understanding of meaning and that those financially invested in current “AI” benefit from the popular assumption that it does. The appearance or perception of intelligence increases the market value of AIs, even if what they’re doing is more analogous to the actions of a very sophisticated parrot.

Edit all of which is to say, I don’t think the article is asserting that true AI is impossible, just that there’s a lot more to it than smooth language usage. I don’t think she’d say never, but probably that there’s a lot more to figure out—a good deal more than some seem to think—before we get Skynet.

And I only subscribed because the one-time purchase was not available at that moment, so I assumed no such option existed. But honestly, I’ll continue to pay the subscription. It’s still less than a year’s worth of my monthly donations to the developer of Tasker.

Ain’t that the truth. People act like charging for software is evil no matter what. There’s a huge difference between a lone dev trying to earn a living and a huge corporation trying to wring every last ounce of profit out of their users. And there’s probably degrees of nuance between those.

Especially if they seem like a reasonable person, wanting reasonable amounts for good work.

And that’s the important context in this discussion. You’ve got a dev who’s active in the community and who builds an app not only with great features and UI but with stability too. And he has a not insignificant user base that is familiar not just with his work but essentially with this exact app… It’s reasonable for him to assume we’ll see the value and be willing to pay. And he is correct.

I’m personally averse to subscription models, but again context matters. Reasonable rate and you know what you’re getting. And I say this as a huge fan of both FOSS and socialism. I could have easily just let my DNS continue to filter out the ads, but I appreciate quality and believe it should be appropriately compensated.