Mr. Halpern minces no words.

In his defense of AI’s achievements, quoted above, Raj Reddy said that, “The trouble with those people who think that computer intelligence is in the future is that they have never done serious research on human intelligence.... Let’s stop using the future tense when talking about computer intelligence.” Those who say that machine intelligence exists in the future do have the tense wrong, but not in the way Reddy suggests: Machine intelligence is really in the past; when a machine does something “intelligent,” it is because some extraordinarily brilliant person or persons, sometime in the past, found a way to preserve some fragment of intelligent action in the form of an artifact. Computers are general-purpose algorithm executors, and their apparent intelligent activity is simply an illusion suffered by those who do not fully appreciate the way in which algorithms capture and preserve not intelligence itself but the fruits of intelligence.