Comment by mrsilencedogood

I don't think we understand consciousness, thought, and what we generally consider to be "intelligence" even nearly well enough that we can start getting hopeful that what works for us is going to work for a computer. Philosophers have been working on this for literally millennia and despite electron microscopy, MRIs, our entire standard model of physics, etc etc etc... we're basically no closer than the ancient Greeks, despite continuous opining on the topic.

Luckily for planetary overlord hopefuls, you probably don't need the whole package to become overlord. Just machines that can build machines.

I will remark that I don't really understand why any of the current idiot overlord hopefuls even want the job. The entire world is _already_ functionally their slaves. The only thing jeff bezos doesn't have that I can imagine he wants is the world to not think he's an asshole. But short of complete genocide of the human race, I don't think even overlord status will make progress on that. Might even be counterproductive.