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> It actually quite the opposite: it's counter intuitive that you could program these or, for that matter, any intelligence.

Isn't that kind of what Pavlov proved with his dog? It happens to people all the time too. We are easily conditioned (on the aggregate) to give desired results.

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That's a pretty low level response. Pavlov demonstrated that you can do this for a specific outcome. Yes, humans can be conditioned to exhibit some desired results but not any desired result. Also, conditioning is teaching, not programming. Programming is defining a set of steps/conditions, and then transferring it onto the target system which will interpret and then execute on the program.

Yes, you could say that repetition is part of the transfer, but that wouldn't be too useful, it would just conflate teaching/training with programming.

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