[fnl]

This. I still cannot forget the disappointment of my parents and some family friends, all retired scientist or MDs, when I explained them how deep learning and natural language processing works a few years ago. They were truly upset that all this was "nothing more than clever accounting and statistics" at the end of the day, and no trace of the "advertised intelligence" - with Hinton's RBMs maybe coming closest, but by the time I was explaining how you use MCMC to train a Boltzmann machine, they again were complaining that even this is just modeling "statistical likelihoods, not true intelligence"...

In essence, we are only modeling patterns and their transformations, even if rather complex ones. But even the most basic prokaryote can model patterns, that has nothing to do with intelligence or consciousness per se. (And please don't get me started on swarm intelligence now... :-))