Artificial general intelligence (AGI), or strong AI—that is, artificial intelligence that aims to duplicate human intellectual abilities—remains controversial and out of reach. The difficulty of scaling up AI’s modest achievements cannot be overstated. However, this lack of progress may simply be testimony to the difficulty of AGI, not to its impossibility. Let us turn to the very idea of AGI. Can a computer possibly think? The theoretical linguist Noam Chomsky suggests that debating this question is pointless, for it is an essentially arbitrary decision whether to extend common usage of the word think to include machines. There is, Chomsky claims, ...(100 of 5093 words)