But taking into account that range of probability is just where the new AI excels. The only chink in the armor of AI is that word “vast”; human possibilities, thanks to language and the culture that it spawns, are truly Vast.!° No matter how many patterns we may find with AI in the flood of data that has so far found its way onto the Internet, there are Vastly more possibilities that have never been recorded there. Only a fraction (but not a Vanishing fraction) of the world’s accumulated wisdom and design and repartee and silliness has made it onto the Internet, but probably a better tactic for the judge to adopt when confronting a candidate in the Turing Test is not to search for such items but to create them anew. AI in its current manifestations is parasitic on human intelligence. It quite indiscriminately gorges on whatever has been produced by human creators and extracts the patterns to be found there—including some of our most pernicious habits.'! These machines do not (yet) have the goals or strategies or capacities for self-criticism and innovation to permit them to transcend their databases by reflectively thinking about their own thinking and their own goals. They are, as Wiener says, helpless, not in the sense of being shackled agents or disabled agents but in the sense of not being agents at all—not having the capacity to be “moved by reasons” (as Kant put it) presented to them. It is important that we keep it that way, which will take some doing. One of the flaws in Weizenbaum’s book Computer Power and Human Reason, something I tried in vain to convince him of in many hours of discussion, is that he could never decide which of two theses he wanted to defend: AJ is impossible! or Al is possible but evil! He wanted to argue, with John Searle and Roger Penrose, that “Strong AI” is impossible, but there are no good arguments for that conclusion. After all, everything we now know suggests that, as I have put it, we are robots made of robots made of robots.