Nice post, i think i got your idea, please correct me if i'm too far from it: basically you think that our notion of knowing something is a cartoon reality of other higher reality or, the real reality, therefore we don't know that we don't know it, therefore our notion of AI is a cartoon of a cartoon because is very much based on what we perceive to be our own experience, which is a cartoon. Added with the fact that exists this Toxoplasmosis phenomena that one thing that exposes how fragile our brain can be, a virus can intervene in our thoughts and alter it.
Certainly is an interesting and complex subject. I have a couple of formal studies in AI and in fact logic as well, i would like to make a contribution to this post.
You wrote: However, our getting a grasp on 'AI', is not synonymous with its existence.. I believe that interacting with something is synonymous with its existence. Let me put it this way, if we can arrange a bunch of millions of transistors very well and encapsulate them in a clever manner, we will have sufficient to perform complex calculations no human can perform, and then connect various of those things and form a computer so we can "Teach" it a set of very basic rules, then expose it with millions of examples to learn from and finally win a human competition that is based more on "intuition" that calculating every single option of action. Yeah i think that is pretty much artificial, people create it, and make no mistake, is in some level "Intelligent". Well, you can argue that our intelligence is a joke perception of what intelligence is, but if we remain in this level of existence, our own, i think we have created Artificial Intelligence. That game, that proof of work is AlphaGo this AlphaGo and the future of Artificial Intelligence
Great subject. In fact i am motivated to make a couple of posts with this ideas. feel free to follow me and learn / discuss more of this. There would be the simple and short cases and some more much complex and detailed ones.
Sorry, maybe 'cartoon' was the wrong word :), I just mean, that because we don't understand all the intricacies of the human condition, we fill in the blanks with an idea of what we are and what makes us tick, we don't/can't actually know. In this same way, we 'decide' what AI might be ... without actually knowing.
'getting a grasp on 'AI', is not synonymous with its existence', by that I simply mean, that it does not necessarily require our knowledge or understanding of it, for it to exist. It might easily occur independently of that condition. Like Toxoplasmosis, we had no knowledge of its existence, yet there it is, for hundreds of thousands of years, doing its thing. As far as Toxoplasmosis is concerned, it simply demonstrates, the subtlety of our conditioning.