This article could have been written by an AI. It leads with a begged question of God, and goes on to summarize conventional definitions of "intelligence", for which the preferred definition happens to also to be begged with the term "artificial intelligence": you can't have artificial intelligence if you don't already have intelligence, right?

> ...“Nimbus” the cloud found a corner of the sky and made peace with a sunny day. You might not call the story good, but it would certainly entertain my five-year-old nephew

There's no comparison between a class of phenomena that might entertain a five year old nephew and the phenomena of an actual five year old nephew. So what's the point of this anecdote?

> “The only truly linguistic things we’ve ever encountered are [xxx things that have minds xxx] ourselves. And so when we encounter something that looks like it’s doing language the way we do language, all of our [xxx priors get pulled in xxx] our genetic endowment is aroused, and we think, ‘Oh, this is clearly [xxx a minded thing xxx] like me.’”

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"It is forbidden to make a machine in the likeness of the human mind."
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If you are willing consider AI in first principles as a transformer that takes a linguistic plane as its input and tranduces it to a linguistic output plane— in other words it's a linguistic filter with some novel ingress/egress properties for the system operator— you can take a sign of relief that it's merely one more form of computation, and because we have no theory of mind and therefore substitute computational models for the theory we lack, then the only danger we face is incompetent people applying filters where human judgment is required, which is a problem for cybernetics and systems theory.

The author makes a pathetically weak effort to look back into history, but only as far as the 1990s.

While 18th century artisans may how wowed high-society with automatons that screedled coresspondence or emulated a duck's digestive tract, they never put one in the role of a doctor applying leaches, bloodletting or balancing the humors.

The Turing Test is evoked for the 10,000th time while failing to note Turings most important observation, and its in the first paragraph of his paper:

//I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with
definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a
statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is
expressed in relatively unambiguous words.//

IOW having no conception of what it means to think, he decided to completely obviate the question.

Has any progress been made on a definition? If so it's remarkable that it's never discussed, whereas everyone with a perspective on AI rushes to the "imitation game" as primary reference.