The Turing Test says that if you can’t tell if you’re exchanging texts with a machine or a human being, then the machine has achieved cognitive ability—it’s thinking.

But based on that definition, and based on the evidence of the comment sections of various websites, then more than half the people posting online are not thinking. (And that may be a generous statistic. You can Google Sturgeon’s Law for a less optimistic assessment.) Too many people are just running tapes—canned responses. Automatic reflexes are simple mechanical operations. Press a button, run a program. There’s no thinking involved, just processing.

Thinking is reasoning ability. We see it in dogs, dolphins, chimpanzees, children, and even the occasional congressman—but that level of reasoning ability occurs at a primal level, it’s simple and direct. The higher functions of what we call rationality and sentience demonstrate themselves in profoundly different ways, recognizable but not easily definable.

Intelligence is generally able to recognize intelligence in action—and that may be one of the defining qualities of intelligence. Not every intelligent being can solve a Rubik’s cube or Fermat’s last theorem, but we can still recognize the intelligence at work in those solutions. The next step, actually designing and creating intelligence requires something else, call it meta-intelligence. We get to step back and think about thinking. We get to deconstruct thinking so we have a clear idea of what we want to build.

The term "artificial intelligence," however, is inaccurate.