I am in agreement with you that LLMs are lifeless regurgitation machines; what I'm implying isn't too far from how children learn/interact. One of the first concepts we teach children is word association to objects and once they've learned the term, they use it to describe whatever electrical signals are firing in their brain that made them decide "apple". If the difference is that LLMs use numerical representations to determine those "firings" in its decision making process, then would the numerical representations of an fMRI scanner hooked to a human be equivalent?
Of course not, because humans > robots. BUT, that does not discount the fact that humans learn through methods like memorization, which have their own reinforcement learning patterns. Many of the cognitive science* concepts have similar LLM infrastructure equivalents as well - "Mind Palace" is similar to RAG, the different relationships we have with others is akin to LLM role-playing, one/few-shot prompting is like templates.
I've recently been thinking about what types of discussions we'll have around AI in about 20 years - a new generation of young adults will leaving school, where we are currently introducing them to AI tutor avatars. Combined with things like Neuro-sama, the AI driven Twitch streamer, I'm curious about how the NEXT generation will perceive AI since they've grown up with it. This isn't a Futurama Marilyn Monroe Bot fantasy, its sort of a reality (whether I agree with it or not).
