I listened to an audiotape of Searle&#x27;s chinese room lecture some years ago. It was excruciating. The obvious retort is <i>the room speaks Chinese</i> (the &quot;Systems Reply&quot;), which Searle rejects with a weak aesthetic argument. Searle doesn&#x27;t like the idea, but that doesn&#x27;t make it invalid.<p>If a strong AI ever emerges, I expect that future generations will look on this argument the way we today look at phrenology and the ugly history of attempts to justify slavery as some sort of natural order. ST:TNG&#x27;s Mr. Data, who spends every other episode agonizing over wanting to be human, is equally offensive. How arrogant are we as a species to assume that every thinking thing in the universe would want to be us?