Maybe I’m being a bit judgmental. From the news as reported by the Belfast Telegraph:

Bristol TED Talk by robot named Bob is world first

A humanoid robot avatar called ‘Bob’ gave the first ever TED Talk to be delivered by an android in Bristol.

In other headlines:

Television delivers State of the Union Address

Car radio sings song

Public address system praises graduates

Cell phone orders pizza

Bob is really pretty cute and perhaps most of the folks at TED don’t really think Bob is the source of the talk, but in our blinkered world that embraces scientism and all manner of metaphysical gibberish, a clarification is wise.

Robots don’t deliver addresses, except in an instrumental way — as a tool used by programmers. Robots can’t think, nor can they create speeches. A robot can be said to give a speech only in the way that a pencil can be said to write a play.

People give speeches, using robots (or public address systems, or televisions, or radios, etc.). The process of programming a robot to deliver a human speech (human speech is the only kind of speech there really is) can lead to permutations and unexpected outcomes, but the only intelligent agent involved is the human being. The robot is a tool, nothing more.

And you can’t escape this by invoking the pleonastic fallacy — that while one little electronic device can’t think, if you have an enormously complex machine with parallel processing and multiple integrated circuits etc., etc. … then you can get a machine that thinks! Nonsense. The pleonastic fallacy boils down to this: multiplying nonsense doesn’t get you sense. Neither simple nor complex machines can think.

At least within the paradigm of modern mechanical philosophy, emergence — the variant of the pleonastic fallacy most often invoked in artificial intelligence — is a psychological misapprehension of the observer, not an ontological change in the observed.

In a sane world one wouldn’t need to offer this clarification. Folks with a modicum of insight understand that machines can’t think, and when they seem to think, it’s only because they have been cleverly designed and programmed by the people who really do the thinking.

But it is an unfortunate fact that for many in our intelligentsia even a rudimentary truth like the fact that machines can’t think is difficult to wrap the mind around. Basic metaphysical facts about the mind and about machines are opaque to a culture immersed in crude scientism.