Debates are everywhere about the power and limitation of AI. Some fall into wild hype. Others are too conservative. Here, phenomenologist Harald Wiltsche, and philosopher and lead for Responsible AI at Microsoft Ken Archer, argue that AI is doing something truly powerful and is really intelligent — just not in the way we usually think. Language, maths, logic, and code, allow the structures of thought and meaning to exist outside of the organisms that produce them — and there, they take on a life of their own. AI continues this trajectory, extending the relational power of meaning out into the world outside the human head. 

Most people’s experience of artificial intelligence is one of genuine confusion. They find themselves impressed, sometimes even startled, by what these systems can do, and at the same time, unconvinced that what they are witnessing is really thinking. And their confusion is understandable. On the one hand, we routinely experience AI systems as clarifying our thoughts, drafting arguments, doing our tax reports, even sharpening our own understanding. These are not trivial achievements. They are hard to describe as anything other than intelligent.

On the other hand, these same systems make mistakes that seem almost absurd. They fail at tasks that a child would perform effortlessly. They hallucinate basic facts, lose track of simple contexts, or produce confident nonsense where even minimal understanding would suffice.

This tension is not new. It was articulated decades ago by the roboticist Hans Moravec, who observed that what is hardest for humans—abstract reasoning—can be relatively easy for machines, while what is effortless for humans—perception, motor coordination, common sense—remains extraordinarily difficult for AI. Today, this “Moravec’s Paradox” has become a feature of everyday life. A language model can help draft a philosophical argument or talk you through the quantum symmetrization postulate. Yet it fails to reliably count the number of objects in a simple image, or explain why you can’t push a ball through a wall.

This dissonance is not an illusion to be dispelled. It reflects something real: there is genuine intelligence at work, and yet it is not intelligence in the way we ourselves think. To understand how both of these can be true, we need a different perspective. Phenomenology—the philosophical investigation of experience and its structure—can show us why.

We can begin not with machines, but with our own experience. Consider something that seems entirely simple: perceiving a car. At first, perception unfolds as a continuous flow. As we move around the car, we encounter shifting appearances—shades of red, variations of smoothness, changing contours. There is no explicit thinking here, no deliberate judgment. There is simply the ongoing presentation of the object through changing perspectives. Yet this flow is not chaotic. It is structured. The different appearances cohere as appearances of the same thing. The car maintains its identity across variation.

Now suppose something interrupts this flow. We notice an abrasion on the surface. Our attention shifts. We no longer simply move through appearances; we pause and reflect upon them. We grasp the car as a whole in relation to its properties: the car is red, smooth, and damaged. This shift is decisive. What was previously a continuous perceptual synthesis has become articulated into a thing and its properties—a structure that can now be expressed in language. Where before there was simply the unfolding of appearances, there is now something that can be said. But language did not create this structure. It merely expresses it.