Interesting. Artificial does have a negative connotation to it, I never considered that.

Synthetic sounds more neutral, aside from bringing microplastics to my mind.

I guess the field of artificial life has the same issue.

As another comment pointed out, you don't necessarily need consciousness for intelligence. And you don't need either of those for goal oriented behavior.

My favorite example is the humble refrigerator. (The old one, without the microchips!) It has a goal (target temperature), it senses its environment (current temperature), and takes action based on that (turn cooling on or off).

A cuter example is the dandelion seed. It "wants" to fly. Obviously! So you can display goal directed behavior as the result of natural forces moving through you. (Arguably electricity and glucose also fall in that category, but... Yeah...)

LLMs, conscious or not, moved into that category this year, in a big way. (e.g. Opus and Codex routinely bypassing security restrictions in the pursuit of the goal.)

Does it really have goals, or does it merely appear to act as though it has them? Does it appear to act as though it has consciousness?

(I forget who said it: it won't really disrupt the global economic system, it will merely appear to do so ;)

Also, here I am! :)