Indeed no fluke. Probably sci-fi led the way and captured the public imagination, then it was an easy meme for researchers to latch on to as they try to gain no

Indeed no fluke. Probably sci-fi led the way and captured the public imagination, then it was an easy meme for researchers to latch on to as they try to gain notariaty, funding etc for their work. The nature and capabilities of these systems are a very long way from anything else we consider intelligence. If they didn't contain a 'neural net' I suspect the connection would not really occur to anyone - anymore than people consider Google search to be intelligent.