The goal posts keep moving. Win at chess, that’s just programming. Win at go, more programming. Natural language processing, still more programming.
(Of course it is just programming, that’s the point!)
The general public wants R2D2 and Commander Data.
Computer scientists just keep making progress. And now I can speak into the air and have the lights turn on. And people are having conversations, with apparently useful results, with LLMs. But it is just discounted as “fancy random number generators”!
Although to be fair, Minsky et. al. grossly underestimated the difficulty of the problems to be solved. Not unlike those nuclear fusion folks. To say nothing of the flying car folks.
Intelligence is hard to define. That’s why IQ tests are not objective measures of a person’s intelligence. They have all sorts of hidden biases that embed cultural knowledge, etc. I recommend the book The Mismeasure of Man that goes into this in detail: The Mismeasure of Man - Wikipedia
This technical definition sets such a low bar and is so limited that it is no wonder the non-tech world prefers a more colloquial definition. AI today is, at best, like a very precocious child who still needs to be fed and have his diapers changed. A truly intelligent machine will be able to take care of and provide for itself without human keepers. For example, the development of an artificial brain, or an intelligence that arises within a communications network, may not require us to supply programming for it to learn and grow. Past science fiction tales reveal that we often fall far short in our imagination of what is actually possible and achievable.
I see no reason that human level intelligence (and beyond) need be constrained to a biological substrate. I do not know who said this originally (it’s not original with me), but we often overestimate what is achievable in the short term and underestimate what is achievable in the long term.
Some day folks (or AI’s!) will think of ChatGPT and its ilk in the same way as kids today think of landline telephones or LP records.
