Various euphemisms for AI

*What Ian Bogost says here is true, but no matter how people attempt to reformulate it, the same semantic ooze creeps in. It's like trying to jaw and argue somebody out of Aristotelian physics.

*I happen to think that "sensor-driven, data-backed machine learning systems" are a pretty big deal without the drawbacks of a metaphysical notion like "artificial intelligence," but we lack a clear language that would allow us to say that convincingly. So it's griping. It's been griping for decades on end. More griping to come. You'd think we'd be able to get out of the conceptual box on this because it's something we pride ourselves about nowadays, but it's beyond us. Calling it "science fiction" doesn't help; this isn't science fiction, we're in the grip of myth.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/what-is-artificial-intelligence/518547/

(…)

Griping about AI’s deflated aspirations might seem unimportant. If sensor-driven, data-backed machine learning systems are poised to grow, perhaps people would do well to track the evolution of those technologies. But previous experience suggests that computation’s ascendency demands scrutiny. I’ve previously argued that the word “algorithm” has become a cultural fetish, the secular, technical equivalent of invoking God. To use the term indiscriminately exalts ordinary—and flawed—software services as false idols. AI is no different. As the bot author Allison Parrish puts it, “whenever someone says ‘AI’ what they're really talking about is ‘a computer program someone wrote.’”

Writing at the MIT Technology Review, the Stanford computer scientist Jerry Kaplan makes a similar argument: AI is a fable “cobbled together from a grab bag of disparate tools and techniques.” The AI research community seems to agree, calling their discipline “fragmented and largely uncoordinated.” Given the incoherence of AI in practice, Kaplan suggests “anthropic computing” as an alternative—programs meant to behave like or interact with human beings. For Kaplan, the mythical nature of AI, including the baggage of its adoption in novels, film, and television, makes the term a bogeyman to abandon more than a future to desire….