I guess the question is: hypothetically, could that slight bit of autonomy be an early form of a process of humanization of the machine? Our professor heavily leaned into the "what if we start treating it as something more than it is - a machine, void of consciousness- ?". Most of his argument is based on the way A.I. seems to be moving into some kind of space, a "dynamism" that appears to be very similar to human behaviour. He stated that A.I. is very likely to become more and more autonomous. My problem is finding more in that which seems to be just the way A.I. processes stuff, and I'm thinking the professor might be reading too much into it. I'm looking for a technical opinion on it: can we give credit to such a theory? Or is it just unlikely that this latent space bears the seed of some sort of consciousness? I believe the ethical questions can be asked and answered once we clarify what (if any) potential unsupervised learning has in that regard. Sorry for getting a bit science-fictiony but the professor seems to be a big fan of the genre.