The following two statements are not incompossible: 1. At each time T, we believe that "machine intelligence", according to the definition in use at time T, is

The following two statements are not incompossible: 1. At each time T, we believe that "machine intelligence", according to the definition in use at time T, is a few decades away; 2. At each time T, we're right. They're not incompatible, but the second one isn't true. It's true that a few decades ago some folks thought that a computer capable of playing good chess would be true "machine intelligence". But they also thought such a computer would be able to carry on a sensible conversation and generally act like a person. It turns out that playing a decent game of chess was easier than we thought, but building a HAL-like computer (man, I just realised that movie is nearly fifty years old!) is still incredibly difficult. Still, I shouldn't even be talking about "building" an intelligent computer. The hardware is the easy part, the software is the hard part. Surely by now, all the supercomputers in the world are quite capable of simulating a rat's brain. But are they? Hell no, nobody has ever written a rat-brain simulation and nobody has the foggiest idea how to start.