What would be a safe way to opt out, though? One that people can't easily be tricked into taking, to installalwate? I don't think Doctorow has thought that through.
Don't know about rhe US, but in my country, unions abs their members get special rights (afaik). So it wouldn't simply be a matter of rejecting the contract if Amazon doesn't like it. It's a back door for government intervention.
Otherwise, "union busting" wouldn't make much sense, you can't prevent people from acting as a group.
It definitely is the culture of some of them. I'm in a country with social security, but there are groups of them in organized begging (also stealing by word of shop owners, but that is less visible to non-shop owners)'. I wouldn't claim "they" are all like that, but unfortunately the beggars are the most visible group.
The organized begging definitely is a kind of culture that family members grow into.
Just a reminder that even before social media, people sometimes became hateful towards each other, belueved conspiracy theories, and even started wars and revolutions. I'm not convinced that social media is to be blamed for social unrest.
What does "embodied in the world as a living organism" even mean? Being embodied as a machine wouldn't be sufficient? Living organisms are "just" machines. I also don't see any reason why embodyment should be a prerequisite for thinking.
I don't feel answering your questions would help much in making progress towards creating intelligent machines.
Being able to create machines with human level intelligence would be amazing. I took AGI as a shortcut for meaning that. If it doesn't, ok, whatever - I think human level intelligence should be the next goal, no matter how you call it.
Many people contest that human level intelligence is impossible for machines to achieve. Imo existence of humans demonstrates it is possible.
We know that machines with AGI are possible - humans are such machines.
Maybe you could discuss whether classical computers could achieve AGI, but I think overall the quest is to build machines with AGI, not necessarily in the form of classical computers.