If Computers Are Intelligent, Climbing a Tree Is Flying

As Smith observes, a computer can be programmed to detect instances of the word "betrayal" in scanned texts, but it lacks the concept of betrayal. Therefore, if a computer scans a story about betrayal that happens not to use the actual word "betrayal," it will fail to detect the story's theme. And if it scans text that does contain the word, but without deploying the concept of betrayal, the computer will erroneously classify it as a story about betrayal. Due to the rough correlation that exists between contexts in which the word "betrayal" appears, and contexts in which the concept is deployed, the computer will loosely simulate the behavior of someone who understands the word--but, says Smith, to suppose such a simulation amounts to real intelligence is like supposing that climbing a tree amounts to flying.