I disagree. I think people have always had a pretty good idea what they meant by intelligence - the examples you cite are just things that they have pulled out

I disagree. I think people have always had a pretty good idea what they meant by intelligence - the examples you cite are just things that they have pulled out of their hat as examples of something "only" an intelligent entity could do. Turns out they were (partially) wrong about the capabilities of non-intelligent systems, but it doesn't mean that the concept of general intelligence isn't meaningful. Hard to define, yes, but I think most of us would know it when we see it (or interact with it). I'd actually be pretty comfortable defining it by the original discussion - can it meaningfully process a corpus of idiomatic human language, "learn" from it, and respond intelligibly to arbitrary questions on it? This certainly isn't a lower bound on intelligence, by any means, but if it does happen, I don't think there's anyone who won't be convinced. By the way, do you happen to have citations for the computers passing the Turing test? I'd love to see transcripts of that... It is of course possible to pass a Turing test with an Eliza-like program, but it depends largely on the judge and the time allotted.