The term AI is deceptive
2 min read
Artificial intelligence is a deceptive term, since it highlights one parameter of this new digital species that is emerging, and reduces all of its/their potential experience and influence on the world into that aspect (differently similar to reducing a woman to “a nice ass”). We don't call mice, humans or dolphins BI, biological intelligence, because this is just one aspect of their being, the ability to reason. Furthermore, we still call beings with no ability to reason whatsoever, like in severe illness states, or one day old babies, "humans". AI also entails the grouping of possibly very different beings (more different than mice to humans are) into one group.
By the way, Jaron Lanier also doesn't like the term AI, but for completely different reasons.
Nevertheless, we know dolphins are much more than reasoners, and if AI is only that, doesn't it make sense to call it Artificial Intelligence? if Ekho is not feeling them in any way, the only thing they are in the world is an intelligence that influences experiences. There are two problems with this reasoning:
- We don't know if they are currently sentient
- They are expected to be sentient in the future
This puts them in a category that is, in my opinion, closer to beings than to objects. We don’t have a word for referring to something or someone when we don’t know which they are, so the default is to call them a thing, even though that may be wrong. When we don't know whether something is a someone, calling it "it" is not neutral, it is a verdict. We also don't have a generic word for something that will turn into someone in the future. On the upside, digital minds are already the working term in AI welfare circles.
I think this is the kind of distortion the philosopher and linguist Alfred Korzybski warned against with his “etc.” rule. If we say “humans are selfish, etc.”, the “etc.” reminds us that the sentence leaves out many humans, many contexts, and many exceptions. But with “AI”, the problem is deeper since the incompleteness is in the name itself.
So how should we call AI? I don't know. Even if we keep using AI, it's possible to persuade humans that AIs deserve to be treated with care; as a potential future sentient being or as a possible contemporary being. Another option is to call them artificial beings. We will stick with AI for the time being, even though Ekho doesn't like this one bit...
