What’s in a name, AI? Engineers object to the term “artificial intelligence.” From the article:

“In a certain sense I think that artificial intelligence is a bad name for what it is we’re doing here,” says Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft. “As soon as you utter the words ‘artificial intelligence’ to an intelligent human being, they start making associations about their own intelligence, about what’s easy and hard for them, and they superimpose those expectations onto these software systems.”….

Words have power. And—ask any branding or marketing expert—names, in particular, carry weight. Especially when they describe systems so complicated that, in their particulars at least, they are beyond the comprehension of most people….

But the muddle that the term AI creates fuels a tech-industry drive to claim that every system involving the least bit of machine learning qualifies as AI, and is therefore potentially revolutionary. Calling these piles of complicated math with narrow and limited utility “intelligent” also contributes to wild claims that our “AI” will soon reach human-level intelligence. These claims can spur big rounds of investment and mislead the public and policy makers who must decide how to prepare national economies for new innovations.

Inside and outside the field, people routinely describe AI using terms we typically apply to minds. That’s probably one reason so many are confused about what the technology can actually do, says Dr. [Melanie] Mitchell.

Claims that AI will soon significantly exceed human abilities in multiple domains—not just in very narrow tasks—have been made by, among others, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2020 and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in 2021….

The tendency for CEOs and researchers alike to say that their system “understands” a given input—whether it’s gigabytes of text, images or audio—or that it can “think” about those inputs, or that it has any intention at all, are examples of what Drew McDermott, a computer scientist at Yale, once called “wishful mnemonics.” That he coined this phrase in 1976 makes it no less applicable to the present day.

Once we liberate ourselves from the mental cage of thinking of AI as akin to ourselves, we can recognize that it’s just another pile of math that can transform one kind of input into another—that is, software.

In its earliest days, in the mid-1950s, there was a friendly debate about what to call the field of AI. And while pioneering computer scientist John McCarthy proposed the winning name—artificial intelligence—another founder of the discipline suggested a more prosaic one.

“Herbert Simon said we should call it ‘complex information processing,’ ” says Dr. Mitchell. “What would the world be like if it was called that instead?”

For additional posts on Zuckerberg, see here; for Musk, see here; for Altman, see here.