Artificial Intelligence is a total misnomer

Around the time that the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, the working model of cognitive science was the computer metaphor. The idea was that your brain is a big computer; it processes input and generates output. While this is not strictly speaking wrong, it’s about as helpful as considering my stomach to be a computer that accepts input and generates output. If the brain is like a computer, then surely computers could be like brains, too!

“Artificial” Intelligence refers to the fact that in many obvious ways, a computer is not a brain. It doesn’t require oxygen or adenosine triphosphate, it executes one operation after another, and it’s neither wet nor gooey.

This implicitly (but rather bluntly) equates the brain with “Intelligence”. However, intelligence is not a tangible thing, it’s not an entity, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, you can’t find it by dissecting a pickled brain. Intelligence is something we do, or more accurately, something we ascribe to actions and behaviours. There are no such things as artificial actions or behaviours. If something moves, it moves for real. If Google suggests a new route for you that avoids the traffic, it’s a real suggestion, not an artificial one.

Conversely, an action cannot be artificially or naturally intelligent. It is either intelligent, or it is not, and that depends on the context and the goals.

In that way, intelligence is like humour. Humour is not a little man sitting in your brain pushing the “joke” button every now and then — humour is if you intentionally say or do something funny. It’s funny if it makes you laugh. It is not artificially funny, it’s just funny.

It doesn’t make sense to talk about artificial intelligence.

We should talk about “machine intelligence” to signify that the action we deem intelligent (or not) was planned and executed by a machine. But the intelligence of the action is just as real.