And another section trying to offer a useful way forward: Let’s tell people it’s “not AGI” instead
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/call-it-ai/#not-agi-instead
... OK, I'm cutting myself off now - I added one last section, "Miscellaneous additional thoughts", with further thinking inspired by the conversation here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/call-it-ai/#misc-thoughts - plus a closing quote from @glyph
@glyph Added this just now, a thing I learned from https://social.juanlu.space/@astrojuanlu/111714012496518004 which gave me an excuse to link to https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/ (I'll never skip an excuse to link to that)
![Juan Luis pointed me to this fascinating little snippet tucked away in the references section on Wikipedia’s History of Artificial Intelligence, quoting John McCarthy in 1988:
[O]ne of the reasons for inventing the term “artificial intelligence” was to escape association with “cybernetics”. Its concentration on analog feedback seemed misguided, and I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert (not Robert) Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.
So part of the reason he coined the term AI was kind of petty! This is also a neat excuse for me to link to one of my favourite podcast episodes, 99% Invisible on Project Cybersyn (only tangentially related but it’s so good!)](/proxy/post_attachment/144076/1b490c3cd0.png "Juan Luis pointed me to this fascinating little snippet tucked away in the references section on Wikipedia’s History of Artificial Intelligence, quoting John McCarthy in 1988:
[O]ne of the reasons for inventing the term “artificial intelligence” was to escape association with “cybernetics”. Its concentration on analog feedback seemed misguided, and I wished to avoid having either to accept Norbert (not Robert) Wiener as a guru or having to argue with him.
So part of the reason he coined the term AI was kind of petty! This is also a neat excuse for me to link to one of my favourite podcast episodes, 99% Invisible on Project Cybersyn (only tangentially related but it’s so good!)")
Edited 1y ago
Casual thought: maybe a good term for "artificial intelligence" that's actually intelligent... is intelligence!
@simon @glyph this is well covered in the older Norvig books (I just looked because I am sitting next to them). PAIP has a very humorous chapter on “GPS" the general problem solver, and AI: A Modern Approach covers the history very well in Section 1.3 (~page 17), and mentions escape from cybernetics, but not the personal stuff.
(I have a bunch of these books, as I would buy anything I could find that would tell me “what computers can do”, and the Internet really wasn't any good yet)
Edited 1y ago
@simon I’ve yet to hear rigorous definitions of either artificial or intelligence.
@simon A problem I see is that the colloquial use of “intelligence” implies conscious agency, and brings with a whole host of assumptions that are not warranted with artificial system, and that can cause huge problems.
@simon we began debating this on the Safe Network forum and it quickly became obvious that it is incredibly hard to define. There are so many ways to look at phenomena that could be called intelligence, so many timescales and scopes.
Really the first step is to clearly specify your terms. Anything ambiguous is pretty useless.