I think you're being a bit pedantic here. Neurons also don't "respond" to specific input either. They can't speak or provide an answer to your input. These ar

I think you're being a bit pedantic here. Neurons also don't "respond" to specific input either. They can't speak or provide an answer to your input. These are all just abstract metaphors and analogies. Literally everything in computer science at some point or another is an abstract metaphor or analogy. When you look up the definition and etymology of "input", it says to "put on" or "impose" or "feed data into the machine". We're not literally feeding the machine data, it doesn't eat the data and subsist on it. You could go on and on and nitpick every single one of these, and I don't think the use of "want" (i.e. anthropomorphizing the networks to have intent) is all that bad.