Yeah precisely. Ever since the "brain as computer" metaphor was birthed in the 50s-60s the chief line of attack in the effort to make "intelligent" machines has been to continually narrow what we mean by intelligence further and further until we can divest it of any dependence on humanist notions. We have "intelligent" machines today more as a byproduct of our lowering the bar for what constitutes intelligence than by actually producing anything we'd consider remotely capable of the same ingenuity as the average human being.
I find this take strange. My observation has been the opposite. We used to say it would take human intelligence to play chess. Then Deep Blue came up and we said, no, not like that. Then it was go. Then AlphaGo came up and we said no, not like that. Along the way, it was recognizing images. And then AlexNet came along, and we said no, not like that. Then it was creating art, and then LLMs came along, and we said no, not like that.
I agree a narrowing has happened. But the narrowing is to move us closer to saying "if it's not implemented in a brain, located inside a skull, in a body that was developed by DNA-coded cells replicating in a controlled manner over a period of years, it's not really AI."
There's an emotional attachment to intelligence being what makes us human that causes people to lose their minds when machines approach our intelligence. Machines aren't humans. If we value humanity, we should recognize that distinction—even as machines become intelligent and even sentient.
And we should definitely think twice, or, you know, many many many many more times, before building intelligent machines. But I don't think pretending we're not doing that right now is helpful.
I think that's a great take and though they appear contradictory, I actually think both perspectives are correct.
I think what both viewpoints show is that, at the end of the day, intelligence is a broad, fuzzily defined thing, and attempting to claim that a single capability is evidence of intelligence always seems to be insufficient (from either direction).
I also think your points about our own emotional attachment and thinking carefully about intelligent machines are superb. I see a lot of people chasing certain tech right now and I see a far smaller number asking whether or not this tech is something we need or want. I personally don't need to live in a world in which robots are 1:1 emulations of humans (or better). I'd be just as content to live in a world of highly specific and highly optimized collections of robots or "intelligences" only capable of doing one thing really well (a unix theory of "agents", as it were)
This is called the "AI effect" - the constant shifting of goalposts when the term AI is used, which has been going on for 50+ years at this point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
