Is AI really ‘intelligent’? This philosopher says yes
Is AI really ‘intelligent’? This philosopher says yes
https://theconversation.com/is-ai-really-intelligent-this-philosopher-says-yes-271721
Publish Date: 2026-02-19 19:14:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s words, such systems display “competence without comprehension”.
The hype about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) from big corporations and their celebrity spokespersons has prompted a backlash, in which scepticism turns to cynicism, often tinged with paranoia about how “stochastic parrots” may start to control our lives.
“Intelligence” itself has become an overheated topic, one that calls for less assertiveness, more cool thinking, and refreshed attempts at a starting point.
Review: What is Intelligence: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds – Blaise Agüera y Arcus (MIT Press)
What Is Intelligence? by Google luminary Blaise Agüera y Arcus is the first book in a new series from MIT in collaboration with Antikythera, a think tank focused on “planetary-scale computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force”. A foreword from series editor Benjamin Bratton makes the bold claim that “computation is a technology to think with” and that the building blocks of our reality are themselves computational.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas.
Cmichel67, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Research on intelligence has a chequered history, tainted by eugenics, statistical manipulation and a banal obsession with metrics. Agüera y Arcas counters this by opening up the topic as wide as it can go. A physics graduate with a background in computational neuroscience, he is something of a polymath. He draws explanatory frameworks from microbiology, philosophy, linguistics, cybernetics, neuroscience and industrial history.
His book presents almost as a sequence of foundation lectures in these areas. Its…
