The Great AI Con
Artificial, but not intelligent
Let’s begin with definitions:
Intelligence: the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason.
Artificial: made by people, often as a copy of something natural.
Artificial Intelligence: the study of how to produce machines that have some of the qualities that the human mind has, such as the ability to understand language, recognize pictures, solve problems, and learn.
(All definitions taken from the online Cambridge Dictionary).
Now you will note the sharp difference between the definitions of the individual words and the definition of the two put together. So that in fact the proper definitions of the words make a nonsense of the phrase.
If one puts the two words ‘artifical intelligence’ together, paying respect to their actual definitions, one gets something like: “A thing made by people which has the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason.” However, by capitalising the words thus; ‘Artificial Intelligence’, those who work on such things can throw the actual definitions of the actual words right out of the window in the eternal search to sound ‘cool’.
