Here is an interesting look at the question: What is real intelligence and what is merely a mechanistic imitation of intelligence? To address this, I say let's look at colony of bees.
Bees are amazing creatures. They build nests with complex structures. They harvest food from the surroundings. They communicate with one-another, pointing out the location of food. They defend the nest against other bee species that attack it. They heat or cool a nest during temperature extremes. Is this intelligent behavior? I say yes, it is. I think it is probably driven entirely by instinct, meaning it is mechanistic, or pre-programmed, like the Watson computer. The colony of bees as a whole can change its response to environmental conditions, but it cannot invent novel responses not driven by instinct. This is deterministic behavior, but not purely deterministic. It probably includes behavior that cannot be predicted even if you know all of the relevant conditions that give rise to it. Random behavior, in other words. The colony as a whole exhibits far more intelligence than one individual bee does. This gives you a sense of how intelligence might emerge from a giant network of purely deterministic von Neumann machines, in MPP architecture, or the Google servers, which work in coordination with one another as a giant supercomputer. You might call this distributed intelligence. Individual bees have only a small amount of brain tissue, but by various mechanisms such as the communication dance of the bees (discovered by Karl von Frisch) they manage to coordinate and amplify the intelligence of the individual bees into something larger. This resembles what human society does with language. The nature of bee colony intelligence is totally alien to human intelligence. It is as alien to us as extraterrestrial intelligence might be. I doubt that it has anything remotely similar to our emotions, other than the will to live, and aggressiveness towards attackers and threats, which you will experience if you poke a bee's nest. Computer intelligence may also be totally alien to us. It may seem unsympathetic. I assume it will have no emotional content, unless someone programs in "artificial" emotions. That might be a dangerous thing to do! As I mentioned, Arthur Clarke felt that emotions may be an emergent property of intelligence. He discussed this with leading experts. Some of them agreed it might emerge, and other did not. I am no expert, but my guess is that the "no emotion" side is probably right. By the way, the colonies of other social insects such as ants have qualities similar to a bee colony. - Jed
