Remember When Wikipedia Was Considered Suspect?

[MineralMan]

48. OK. Definitions can be difficult when the subject is abstract.

Let me give you an example from my own life:

In my late 20s, I decided I'd become a freelance magazine writer. Why? Because I wasn't a bad writer and success in that job was widely considered to border on the impossible. That's how I am.

What will I write about? First question. So, I thought about my interests and publications that were familiar to me. I queried and wrote some articles for various magazines, on a range of subjects, from articles on how to choose your first car for Seventeen Magazine to cooking articles for a couple of other magazines. But, while I was able to place such articles and get paid for them, it wasn't going to be enough to make a career.

So, what else. One of my favorite magazines as I was growing up was Popular Mechanics. Maybe I could write for that publication. Maybe I could create projects people could make and then design, construct them, and provide instructions people could follow to duplicate what I came up with. I did a couple of those for that magazine and some others in the same subject line.

Once I had broken into Popular Mechanics, I decided to see if I could place an article that was like some of the ones I particularly enjoyed reading. Something off the wall and very different from their usual material. But what? I decided that I wanted to create a small pipe organ, suitable for children to play. It had to be made with materials that were easily obtained, and use only techniques familiar to the typical reader of the magazine. It had to be of good quality, look good, and sound good when played. I thought about the idea for about a week, and decided that, yes, I could make that and meet the requirements.

So, I queried the idea to the magazine's DIY project editor. He wrote back, "Well, that sound about as unlikely as any idea I've seen lately. But, go ahead. If you can pull it off, we'll publish it.

So, I got to work. I had never designed or built anything like that. So, I started planning. A couple of weeks later, the project was finished and worked just as I had imagined it. As I built it, I photographed the hands-on steps and explanatory images of various parts of the design. Very simple to build, although pretty intricate. I did the necessary design drawings, after the fact, as usual, created the materials list, all things obtainable at any hardware store. Lots of drawings, since each working part of the little organ had to have it's own working drawings. Then, I wrote the step-by-step instructions in the style of Popular Mechanics. I photographed the finished project, using the daughter of a friend of my as the model in the main photo. (She got the little pipe organ to play with afterwards.)

Two weeks from query acceptance to mailing the completed assignment to the magazine. I had to play the thing for the editor over the phone, since we didn't have video cameras in the early 80s. They liked it. They ran the article. People built the thing from the plans. I can't tell you all of the things I had to learn to pull that project off, but it was the start of my work on that type of article for a number of magazines.

Why am I writing this? Because that is an example of genuine human intelligence. Starting with nothing and doing what ever was necessary to successfully create a thing that had not existed before. As an intelligent organism, I could do that. And I'm not the brightest star on the planet, either. That project started with not even an idea to make something. It took a couple of weeks to do, maybe a month if you count waiting for decisions from an editor.

No computer intelligence will have the creative ability that went into that. Not even the idea to do something like that existed until I thought of it. And that's not even all that complicated a task. Can't be done by a non-sentient machine.

Evidence? https://books.google.com/books?id=-9kDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=calliope+%22popular+mechanics%22
More evidence? Here's one a reader made.

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