A fine line separates approximation from simulation, and developing a model is the better part of assuming control. So as not to shoot down commercial airliners, the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system that developed out of MIT’s Project Whirlwind in the 1950’s kept track of all passenger flights, developing a real-time model that led to the SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Related Environment) airline reservation system that still controls much of the passenger traffic today, Google sought to gauge what people were thinking and became what people were thinking, Facebook sought to map the social graph, and became the social graph. Algorithms developed to model flucutuations in financial markets gained control of those markets, leaving human traders behind. “Toto,” said Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”           What American termed “artificial intelligence” the British termed “mechanical intelligence,” a designation that Alan Turing considered more precise. We began by observing intelligent behavior (such as language, vision, goal-seeking, and pattern-recognition) in organisms, and struggled to reproduce this behavior by encoding it into logically deterministic machines. We knew from the beginning that this logical, intelligent behavior evident in organisms was the result of fundamentally statistical, probabilistic processes, but we ignored that (or left the details to the biologists), while building “models” of intelligence-with mixed success.           Through large-scale statistical, probabilistic information processing, real progress is being made on some of the hard problems, such as speech recognition, language translation, protein folding, and stock market prediction – even if only for the next millisecond, now enough time to compete a trade. How can this be intelligence, since we are just throwing statistical, probabilistic horsepower at the problem and seeing what sticks, without an underlying understanding? There’s no model. And how does a brain do it? With a model? These are not models of intelligent processes. They ARE intelligent processes.