Abstract: In human cognition,intelligent machines belong to advanced tools that have certain characteristics of human beings and play a certain role of human beings.They play the dual role of tool-subject,that is,cooperative cognition subject and relatively independent cognition subject;Artificial intelligence is empowered by people,not self generated and independent intelligence.Moreover,the understanding of intelligent machines has the following characteristics and limitations:thequantitative analysis of many external world and social phenomena by AI is far from enough to reflect the nature of these things;AI has the characteristics of unit,homogeneity,module and flat,and cannot grasp the complex and changeable external information;AI carries out formal representation without implicit experiential knowledge.

Key words: artificial intelligence, intelligent machine, tools, cooperate to understand the subject, relatively independent subject