We all know the old saying ‘If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck’ but sometimes things aren’t that simple.

As a species we have a long history of anthropomorphism, of projecting human traits onto animals, objects, basically anything that if you look at it the right way, seems to resemble a human behaviors or aspect despite not being human at all.

And then there is the condition of Apophenia, where some wants to see a meaningful connection, a structure, a pattern where these is none. A basic malfunction of our ability to make that cognitive leap, a misalignment of our perceptions finding meaning where there is just coincidence, similarity, but no true causation, and maybe just a little correlation.

These aspects of the human condition, these flaws of our cognition, make us particularly susceptible to those who would have us believe something is more than a machine, a program. More than a series of calculations born of statistics, forged by computations of what potentially comes next, of what a machine would predict based on human history, should be the result, the behaviour, the response, the reaction.

Mimic us well enough, copy us decently enough, and many will anthropomorphise, many will succumb to the Apophenia, and see things that aren’t true, aren’t real, aren’t an actual thought, behaviour, sign of cognition, or anything close to what any single living human being actually does every single day of their conscious life.

But these things that people are taking as possible consciousness, possible sentience, a possibly thinking and feeling thing, aren’t simple creations for creations sake.

They are products, built to be marketed, to be sold, to be paid for and to make those selling them immensely rich.

And often, when something is being sold, you have to take note of the most important lesson in salesmanship, especially of something that could be argued has a dubious level of value or use.

It all reminds me of another saying, 'There's a sucker born every minute.'

And you just might be one of them.

Akeem Henderson -Speech at Future Technologies Conference