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Guest Essay

By Barbara Gail Montero

Dr. Montero is a philosophy professor who writes on mind, body and consciousness.

Not long ago, A.I. became intelligent. Some may dismiss this claim, but the number of people who doubt A.I.’s acumen is dwindling. According to a 2024 YouGov poll, a clear majority of U.S. adults say that computers are already more intelligent than people or will become so in the near future.

Still, you might wonder, is A.I. actually intelligent? In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing suggested that this is the wrong question to ask because it is too vague to merit scientific investigation. Rather than try to determine whether computers are intelligent, he argued, we should see if they can respond to questions in a manner indistinguishable from that of human beings. He saw this test, now known as the Turing test, not as a benchmark of computer intelligence but as a more pragmatic substitute for that benchmark.

Instead of presuming to define intelligence and then asking whether A.I. meets that definition, we do something more dynamic: We interact with increasingly sophisticated A.I., and we see how our understanding of what counts as intelligence changes. Turing predicted that eventually “the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”

Today we have reached that point. A.I. is no less a form of intelligence than digital photography is a form of photography.

And now A.I. is on its way to doing something even more remarkable: becoming conscious. This will happen in the same way it became intelligent. As we interact with increasingly........

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