Let's not call it AI

We need a more accurate term

I lament the term AI, or artificial intelligence. It’s utterly, completely misleading. I propose Aggregated Input. Or All Internet. How about Advanced Integration?

First of all, we all know these two words — artificial and intelligence. What do they mean?

Artificial? Not real. Unnatural. Fake. Simulated. A facade, an artifice. Artificial is something that looks familiar and mimics reality but is just some kind of recreation of it. It’s a Potemkin village. You don’t need to consult a dictionary. In fact, don’t. That’s the point here. When you ask people what a word means, normally they answer you with their definition, either learned or inferred and move on. Sure, we can all pull out our phones and look things up, but normally, we assume we know. Artificial? It means not real or fake.

Intelligence? I daresay for most of us, our first answer would be smart. Or, more accurately, smarts. We’d say more but we are inclined to personalize everything so we’d probably think of comparing ourselves to the smart kid in class. Or maybe we were the smart kid. We think of intelligence as a *human* attribute — first. We may go on to widen our scope to include the intelligence of animals or plants, both living things, but we aren’t likely to think of the intelligence of rocks or electricity or windows. No, for the most part, I’d bet that people think of themselves and other people they know when they first hear the word intelligence.

So putting these two common words together in a phrase that has captured the attention of the planet sets us on the wrong path. Artificial = Unnatural, Not Human. Intelligence = Smarts, Smarter Than (or not as smart as) Me. Artificial Intelligence = Some machine is a lot smarter than I am.

You see the problem?

Words matter and we think in shortcuts.

I’m not opposed to progress; AI holds enormous promise in what it can do. But we thick-skulled humans need to remember to use our soft brains to think critically and carefully about *who we are* and what we can do relative to artificial intelligence. So, let’s stop calling it Artificial Intelligence. I gave a few alternatives in the first paragraph. Here are a few others that might set us on the right path — only based on the initials AI:

• Augmented Information

• Absolute Integration

• Annotated Imagination

• Augmented Iterations

I’m sure you can come up with others, lots of them. Have some fun and let me know what you come up with. But meanwhile, let’s get it right, people, or we risk winding up as Amnesic Idiots who forgot how to be human.