Conflating intelligence and awareness seems to me the biggest confusion around this topic.
When non-technical people ask me about it, I ask them to consider three questions:
- is alive?
- thinks?
- can speak (and understand)?
A plant, microbe, primitive animals... are alive, don't think, can't speak.
A dog, a monkey... are alive, think, can't speak.
A human is alive, thinks, can speak.
These things aren't alive, think, can speak.
I know some of the above will be controversial, but clicks for most people, that agree: if you have a dog, you know what I mean whith "a dog thinks". Not with words, but they're capable intricate reasoning and strategies.
Intelligence can be mechanical, the same as force. For a man from the ancient times, the concept of an engine would have been weird. Only live beings were thought to move on their own. When a physical process manifested complex behaviour, they said that a spirit was behind it.
Intelligence doesn't need awareness. You can have disembodied pieces of intelligence. That's what Google, Facebook, etc. have been doing for a long time. They're AI companies.
It doesn't help with the confusion that speaking is a harder condition than thinking and thinking seems to be harder than being alive: "these things aren't alive so they can't think" but they speak, so...
