The Illusion of Intelligence

The article as a whole never defines what "human intelligence" is -- which enables the author to use the "no true Scotsman fallacy" whenever a counterexample is brought up (see the comments).

> "science knows that we make decisions before the rational parts of our brains activate"

How true is this? Always? Sometimes? Who did this study? What were the controls?

> math skills are real, for example. But a computer can do math.

Doesn't cover all math skills -- just the easy ones. Using math != creating math. Could a computer create, say, set theory or proof theory?

> Language skills are real too, but a computer can understand words and sentence structure.

Again, the example doesn't cover all human language skills -- just the easy ones.

Maybe the biggest problem is the implicit assumption the author makes that everything that humans do depends on human intelligence. If you make that assumption, and it turns out to be false -- if humans do lots of things that don't require human intelligence -- then, obviously, it's very easy to cherry-pick examples of things humans do that don't require human intelligence. But that doesn't have anything to do with whether human intelligence exists or not, or whether we can duplicate it with computers.

When I heard people say things similar to " 'they' say that in 20 years, computers will be smarter than people - do you think that's true?" I reply with "they're already 'smarter', and artificial intelligence already exists".

I follow up with the assertion that when AI is, if it's not already, a fully developed reality it won't take the form we're expecting, much in the same way that "artificial flight" did not take the form of humans flying like birds.