The One Percent Rule

Many of my students refer to AI as “he” or “she”. Some of them clearly get ‘emotionally’ attached. I remind them that the belief that computers think is a category mistake, not a breakthrough. It confuses the appearance of thought with thought itself. A machine mimicking the form of human responses does not thereby acquire the content of human understanding.

Artificial intelligence, despite its statistical agility, does not engage with meaning. It shuffles symbols without knowing they are symbols. John Searle, who is now 92 years old, pointed this out with a clarity that still unsettles mainstream confidence in the computational theory of mind.

What Searle Reminds Us
Searle’s provocation, then, is not a Luddite lament. It is a reminder: the question is not whether we can build machines that simulate intelligence. We already have. The question is whether we understand what it is they are simulating, and whether in confusing the simulation for the thing, we risk forgetting what it means to think at all.

If we forget, it will not be because machines fooled us. It will be because we preferred the comfort of mimicry to the burden of thinking and understanding.

Stay curious