Does anyone else feel like we've been moving the goalposts for AI for decades?

[it's weekend for me btw, thus AI-related post]

I've been thinking about this pattern and I'm not sure if it's just my perception.

At one point, people genuinely believed playing chess at a world class level would be a strong sign of intelligence. Then computers mastered chess, and suddenly it became "just search."

Then natural conversation was seen as a hallmark of intelligence. We even had things like the Loebner Prize centered around that idea. Today, models can hold long conversations, write code, explain concepts, and people often say they're "just predicting the next token."

The same thing seems to have happened with image recognition, Go, programming, and now even areas like mathematical reasoning and scientific discovery. As AI gets better at each one, the conversation shifts toward something else. Now I often hear that true intelligence requires grounding in the real world, physical embodiment, or rich perception.

Part of me wonders if this is simply our understanding of intelligence becoming more refined. Maybe each breakthrough reveals that intelligence is broader than we originally thought.

But another part of me wonders whether there's also a psychological aspect. We naturally define intelligence by whatever still feels uniquely human. Once machines become good at something, we stop viewing that thing as evidence of intelligence.

Maybe both are true.

It also makes me wonder whether this process ever ends. If AI eventually became better than humans at almost every cognitive task we can think of, would we finally accept that it's intelligent, or would we just redefine intelligence again around whatever remains uniquely human?

I don't really have an answer. I just find the pattern fascinating, and it feels like we've been watching the definition of intelligence evolve alongside AI itself.