Sensei Jordan gets grumpy about the term “AI”

As I have remarked, the term “Artificial Intelligence” has long been loosely defined.  While originally coined to describe the idea of creating human like “intelligence” in computers, the term has been an umbrella for any technology that replicates (or exceeds)  human level performance in any fragment of human behavior:  speech and text recognition, for example, or visual analysis, or locomotion (i.e., robotics).  Anything that’s “magical” is usually called AI, at least until it becomes ubiquitous (and therefore less magical).

The thing is, these technologies, however magical and clever, aren’t particularly “intelligent” or human-like.  In fact, some are definitely not human-like, such as Markov based speech recognition, which works amazingly well, but has nothing to do with how humans do it—probably.

(And don’t get be started on what the term “intelligence” might mean—that’s another giant semantic mess.)

This spring Kathy Pretz discusses these issues with old gray-head Sensei, Michael I. Jordan [1]. He’s been doing this stuff for a long time, so he knows what he is talking about.  In particular, there is a lot of technology (which he helped invent) that is clever about pattern recognition, and, of course, a who galaxy of machine learning techniques.  These technologies aren’t especially “intelligent”, and aren’t really even supposed to compare to human behavior.

So “Stop Calling Everything AI” he says!

“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.”

“While the science-fiction discussions about AI and super intelligence are fun, they are a distraction,” he says. “There’s not been enough focus on the real problem, which is building planetary-scale machine learning–based systems that actually work, deliver value to humans, and do not amplify inequities.”

(Quoted in [1])

My own view is that the term AI has long ago escaped from its technical and academic origin, now running free in the wider culture where “AI” means “magic”.  As Humpty Dumpty said in Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” 

It’s not really a mystery why AI has become a staple of advertising and popular fiction .  It is used to evoke—and embody–fantasies, both pleasant and unpleasant. Essentially technologically realized angels and demons.

Sigh.

So, Sensei Jordan is right, but there is nothing that can be done. I think the only way to cut down on the abuse of the term is to come up with a replacement term.  Which I don’t know how to do.

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1. Kathy Pretz, Stop Calling Everything AI, Machine-Learning Pioneer Says, in IEEE Spectrum – IEEE Member News, March 31, 2021. https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-institute/ieee-member-news/stop-calling-everything-ai-machinelearning-pioneer-says