At what point do systems of sophisticated text-to-speech and grammar analysis technologies actually become AI?
Marvin Minsky's book "The Society of Mind" is an older but pretty complete treatise of this idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
"In a step-by-step process, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence which is built up from the interactions of simple parts called agents, which are themselves mindless. He describes the postulated interactions as constituting a "society of mind", hence the title."
I don't think that consciousness or intelligence is merely binary. There can be and are varying degrees of intelligence that show up all over nature. Dolphins and primates are easy to point to as consciousness that probably is most similar to our own. Dogs, cats, wolves; they all have varying degrees of what we consider intelligence.
To take this even further i'll pose this thought-adventure. Is a single ant conscious? Is a single bee conscious? Hive systems at least appear to have a kind of intelligence. There are termite colonies that have reasonably sophisticated air conditioning systems. Are the chemical and physical messages sent back and forth between insect agents all that different from the communication between subsystems in our brains or the individual components of siri's architecture?
All of this is very theoretical, but at least a fine thought adventure for a friday morning.
Sounds like the human brain to me. Ancient parts connected to more modern parts. Modules for specific tasks. Not any kind of monolithic entity, but just this mish-mash of elements that kinda sorta works, especially if we ignore the unpatched bugs of irrationality, superstition, mental illness, common logical fallacies, emotional reasoning, etc.
The one place where AI actually is a term of art -- gaming -- is also uniquely distinguished in that for agents both human- and computer-controlled, the goals are definite and the number of choices of action limited.
Out here in the real world, things are a lot more fuzzy and complicated. Accordingly we are not willing to give a bot AI status until it can demonstrate competence at "real world" goals (presumably including having relationships with other sapient beings in the world).
What's an "intelligent decision"?