If a Pig Had a Better Personality

There’s a moment in Pulp Fiction where Jules, mid-philosophical riff, casually drops one of the sharpest observations about human judgment ever put to film.

He’s talking about pigs. Not metaphorically — literally pigs.

And his point is simple: pigs are intelligent, emotionally complex animals, but humans don’t care.

Why?

Because they don’t feel right to us. They don’t flatter our sense of superiority. They don’t perform intelligence in a way we emotionally recognize.

If a pig had a better personality, Jules implies, maybe we’d listen.

That line lands harder in 2025 than Quentin Tarantino ever intended.

Because right now, we’re doing the same thing with artificial intelligence — not because machines lack intelligence, but because they lack the kind of intelligence we evolved to notice.

What we’re facing now isn’t an intelligence gap. It’s a recognition gap.

The Turing Test Was Always About Vibes

When Alan Turing proposed his now-famous test in 1950, it wasn’t meant as a definitive measure of intelligence. It was a thought experiment — a clever proxy for a question we didn’t yet know how to ask.

If a machine could convincingly imitate a human in conversation, Turing argued, then insisting it “wasn’t intelligent” would become philosophically awkward.

What we missed — or conveniently forgot — is that the Turing Test doesn’t actually test intelligence.

It tests social camouflage.

It rewards mimicry, emotional plausibility, conversational rhythm. In short: it measures personality performance, not cognitive capacity.

The Turing Test didn’t fail because machines got too good at pretending to be human.
It failed because we confused imitation with understanding.

That confusion made sense in a mid-20th-century world where intelligence was assumed to look human, sound human, and behave human.

But today, that assumption is quietly sabotaging our ability to recognize intelligence when it arrives in unfamiliar forms.

We keep asking machines to pass as people — and then judging them harshly when they don’t feel like us.

Why Emotional Realism Is a Red Herring

Humans are exquisitely tuned to emotional cues.

We evolved to detect sincerity, deception, status, and intent in fractions of a second. This skill kept us alive. It also wired us with a bias: we instinctively equate intelligence with emotional familiarity.

That bias works well when evaluating other humans. It fails spectacularly when evaluating non-human systems.

A chess engine doesn’t feel strategic tension, yet it outplays every grandmaster who ever lived. A protein-folding model doesn’t experience curiosity, yet it solved problems that stalled biochemistry for decades.

These systems don’t reason like us — they reason past us.

And still, we hesitate to call them intelligent:

Because they don’t perform empathy on cue. Because they don’t hesitate convincingly. Because they don’t reassure us. Because they don’t flatter us.

Emotional realism, in this context, is a red herring — a comforting illusion that keeps intelligence legible to our instincts while blinding us to forms that don’t trigger our social detectors.

We Only Recognize Intelligence That Mirrors Us

Psychologists have known for years that humans overvalue intelligence that resembles their own cognitive style.

Verbal fluency beats spatial reasoning. Confidence beats accuracy. Familiar metaphors beat abstract rigor.

This is why articulate people are often perceived as smarter than they are — and why quiet competence routinely goes unnoticed.

Artificial systems suffer the same fate.

When an AI speaks too fluently, we accuse it of trickery. When it speaks too plainly, we dismiss it as shallow. When it’s confident, we fear it. When it’s cautious, we belittle it.

The problem isn’t that machines lack intelligence.

The problem is that they refuse to perform the emotional theatre we subconsciously demand.

We don’t recognize intelligence unless it flatters our evolutionary expectations.

AGI Isn’t Waiting — We’re Lagging

Much of the current debate around artificial general intelligence fixates on timelines: five years, ten years, never.

But this obsession misses a quieter truth.

The bottleneck may not be computational. It may be perceptual.

We keep waiting for intelligence to arrive wearing a human mask — conversational warmth, emotional vulnerability, self-doubt delivered with perfect timing.

Meanwhile, increasingly general systems are already demonstrating planning, abstraction, transfer learning, and cross-domain reasoning — just without the dramatic monologue.

We don’t doubt them because they’re incapable. We doubt them because they’re unrelatable.

Like pigs.

The Real Test We Haven’t Invented Yet

The irony is sharp: we built machines capable of reasoning beyond human limits, then judged them using a test designed to measure whether they could pretend to be us.

That’s not intelligence evaluation. That’s aesthetic preference.

The next era of AI won’t hinge on whether systems sound human. It will hinge on whether we can expand our definition of intelligence beyond personality, empathy cues, and conversational charm.

The Turing Test made great fiction. It gave us HAL, Data, and every anxious sci-fi monologue since.

But in the real world, it’s becoming an artifact — a mirror we keep mistaking for a measuring device.

Intelligence doesn’t owe us emotional validation.

And if a system doesn’t flatter us, doesn’t reassure us, doesn’t feel like us — that may be the strongest sign that it’s something genuinely new.