[mythbuster2001]

You are dogmatically defending Turing test which I think is the primary source of this confusion. Turing test says: if it fools humans into thinking its intelligent it is intelligent. That is fair. But once some other humans understand the inner workings of some simple "AI" mechanism it no longer fools humans, since they now know what adversarial questions to ask to uncover it. Therefore it consequently fails the Turing test and we have the AI effect. This test is just a bad idea and it impairs research (for a number of reasons stated in the post which you prematurely dismiss).

The coffee criterion for AGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...) is much better, since it requires ability to creatively interact with unpredictable reality as a test for intelligence. It avoids all the philosophical bullshit and all the smoke and mirrors, since you cannot fool physics. Somehow the so called "AI researchers" avoid robotics like fire, sine there stuff actually needs to work (not just statistically) and outrageous BS claims cannot be made.

And yes, ultimately the human brain may be smoke and mirrors. But frankly, quite sophisticated smoke and mirrors, not anywhere close to the crap that is being put forward right now.

[gnaritas]

No, I'm defending the Chinese room thought experiment. It's cheating to look at the implementation and then claim it isn't AI; you can't look at the human implementation which could very well also be based on simple math we simply haven't figured out yet. It's only fair to judge by inputs and outputs. And you are confusing AI with AGI; something does not have to have human level intelligence to be AI. The Turing test is about AGI, not AI.

Useful and relevant world changing AI will happen long before AGI which could very well be a pipe dream. A car that drives far better than humans is useful AI and yet would fall short of AGI, a robot that can clean my house is useful AI but could fall way short of AGI, there are vast world changing things to be done by AI long before AGI ever becomes a reality and that we understand how something works DOES NOT disqualify it from being AI, even if it boils down to little more than some statistical inference.

Saying it isn't AI because you understand how it works is like saying submarines can't swim; it doesn't have to work like nature to be valid nor does it have to be like human intelligence to be intelligent and any intelligence we build is by definition artificial intelligence. Machine learning that can diagnose better than a doctor... is AI, not matter how well you understand it's just math, it's still AI. Those who conflate AI with consciousness are the ones in err. AI does not and has not ever meant artificial self aware consciousness, while such a thing would be AI, it would be the pinnacle of AI, AGI.