Public perception is growing that artificial intelligence is already smarter than people, and philosophers say this shift matters just as much as the technology itself does. As AI systems reply in ways that seem to mirror human reasoning, the long-running question of whether machines can think has evolved into a more pressing one: whether they may eventually be considered conscious, the New York Times reported.

Why intelligence was the wrong starting point

In 1950, Alan Turing countered that defining intelligence was too vague to be useful and suggested another test: if a machine's responses are indistinguishable from a human's, then for practical purposes, it should be considered intelligent. This view held that rather than build theories first, we learn what intelligence is through our

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