Searle's 'experiment' is silly. Searle is trying to make readers empathize with the 'person in the box'. Let's concede, for the moment, that the person in the b

Searle's 'experiment' is silly. Searle is trying to make readers empathize with the 'person in the box'. Let's concede, for the moment, that the person in the box doesn't understand Chinese in any meaningful way. That says nothing about whether or not the SYSTEM on a WHOLE understands Chinese. Given the constraints of Searle's example (that every input produces a 'correct' output, but does so via this labour-intensive process), it seems there IS intelligence going on there at the SYSTEM level. Ultimately, the point of that story is saying 'the cpu isn't smart'. Fine, that's not the argument behind AI/PI. And the whole 'there's nothing going on that isn't in the person already' also misses the point: what if, instead of a slow human translating, we had a fast human doing the lookups at the magnitude of a trillion lookup operations per second? They'd be able to do substantially more 'translating' work than the author of the software. So now, say that we program 'learning' instead of 'translation'. Sweet, now the computer can't learn any BETTER than the human, but it can learn FASTER, and there may be some substantial benefit to that. His own argument is self-refuting: "in fact it was doing exactly what I had told it to do and nothing which I couldn't have done myself longhand given the time." Right. But you're limited by death, and a computer isn't limited in the same way. So say AI never makes it to 'smarter than human given enough time'. Fine. If it does in 30 seconds what it would take me 17,000 years to complete, I'm pretty happy. The FAR more interesting question (to me) and probably one that can't be solved until we 'get there' is this: will computer intelligence be subject to the same foibles and hangups as a human? So, for instance, could "Google AI" respond to my search request by saying, "Wow, what a boring question, stop bothering me."