Why AI Doesn’t Think, Cannot Reason, Isn’t Intelligent and Will Never Achieve Consciousness
The Journal of Belligerent Pontification
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Why AI Doesn’t Think, Cannot Reason, Isn’t Intelligent and Will Never Achieve Consciousness<br>A Bundle of Algorithms is Like a Rock in Certain Respects
Rob Urie<br>Jul 02, 2026
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Recent public comments made about AI suggest that Americans have difficulty with the implications of linear time. This is odd given that its conception is largely Western and is centered on the clock time used to coordinate capitalist employment. The conceptual difficulty regards sequencing, or plans for future actions. But it also involves the distribution of profits. 100% of the capital equipment used in Western economic production was produced by workers. So, why does the resulting product belong to financiers rather than those who produced it?<br>To use a physical metaphor, if I 1) buy a car, 2) aim it in the direction of a cliff, 3) put a stone on the gas pedal and 4) put the transmission into drive, the car will move forward and plunge off of the cliff. Question: did I, through my actions, cause the car to plunge off of the cliff? Or did the car ‘drive itself’ off of the cliff? The answer depends on where you imagine that my own actions ended. In fact, I conceived and created a series of events that if carried through with competence would lead to the car plunging off of the cliff. The car is inert metal and rubber without human direction.<br>Thanks for reading The Journal of Belligerent Pontification ! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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Likewise, if I create and set in motion a three-hundred step algorithm, is the algorithm producing the output, or did I? The distinction is between intent and process. My intent guides the conception and creation of the three-hundred step algorithm. But the work from that point forward is carried out by the algorithm being run in a computing environment. So, the algorithm didn’t conceive of the project. I did. The algorithm didn’t plan (sequence) the project. I did. The algorithm didn’t code the problem. I did. So, who produced the output, me or the machine?<br>A similar conceptual problem applies to claims of machines ‘thinking.’ Physically speaking, AI is a bundle of algorithms housed within a large computing environment. AI didn’t conceive itself. It was conceived, if memory serves, at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1970s. AI didn’t build itself. It was built in fits and starts by computer scientists in academia and later business. AI didn’t code itself. It was coded by AI developers. And the massive physical infrastructure on which AI depends was built by workers. The point: AI is wholly produced by humans.<br>The question then is how it is imagined that AI output represents more than the human effort that was put in to creating it? What process makes AI output more than the product of algorithms? If the answer is that something does, are you aware of sequencing algorithms? This would be code that organizes other code to follow a series of steps to complete a task. I’ve conceived and coded sequenced algorithms that run through multi-step processes from a single set of instructions. The output looks like reasoning. And it is reasoning. I coded it. The models did what I coded them to do.<br>So again, if a series of steps are conceived, planned and launched by humans on equipment that was created by humans, at what point does their dimension shift from inanimate to animate? Or more simply, at what point does a bundle of algorithms housed on a computer think or reason or possess intelligence or consciousness? In fact, the claim that any of these describe AI is a category error. Is a rock rolling down a hill imagined to be rolling itself down the hill rather than being moved by unseen physical forces (e.g. gravity). So, claims that AI can reason emerge from either ignorance or misunderstanding of basic physical processes.<br>Back in the world, there has been a debate in the West since the early nineteenth century over whether factory automation produces the product of factory automation, or whether the people who automated the factory produced the output? On the one hand, automation creates the appearance that its product is self-generated. On the other, the automation process was created by humans and would not exist otherwise. With the current ability to ‘sequence’ the production process using algorithms, another level of abstraction has been added to this debate.<br>Having conceived and coded ‘sequencing’ models, most who haven’t find the concept difficult to understand. These models are instructions for how a model ‘thinks.’ Question: how is a model ‘thinking’ when it is just following instructions? Answer: it isn’t. It is just following instructions. What looks like reasoning to AI users is the reasoning coded into the model by human coders. It appears to be reasoning because the instructions it is following...