>I struggle to understand how people can just dismiss the possibility of artificial intelligence.Human cognition was basically bruteforced by evolution-- why would it be impossible to achieve the exact same result in silicon, especially after we already demonstrated some parts of those results (e.g. use of language) that critically set us apart from other animals?

I haven't seen many people saying it's impossible. Just that the current technology (LLMs) is not the way, and is really not even close. I'm sure humanity will make the idiotic mistake of creating something more intelligent than itself eventually, but I don't believe that's something that the current crop of AI technology is going to evolve into any time soon.