What’s Artificial about AI?

I’m fed up with the AI rhetoric (writes he who is about to unleash one more piece of it). OIY! Sorry, but I thought I’d fess up early and get it out of the way. 

This IMAGINE will not be a criticism, a take-down, or a call for regulatory involvement, nor will it be a DIGIBABBLE screed on how everything will now change, nothing will be the same, and AI will replace it all. Finally, I will not waste your time (or mine writing) with my bet on best use case scenarios. 

Rather, I propose that we look at AI in a completely different and more empowering way. 

Not all AI can be judged against all other AI. I don’t mean the programming—I mean how we use it. Not specific use cases, but broad categories where its powerful possibilities are critical. We are beginning to throw the baby out with the bathwater in our fear or even adulation—time to step back and reset. 

As I have written before, AI is not new—neither as an idea nor in actual deployment. Again, I recommend a great book by Jill Lepore called If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, not to mention we can go back centuries further as well. 

DIGIBABBLE aside, what has changed is the speed and power at which we can compute and the sheer amount of data available to crunch. 

Keep this in mind as the base/foundational build as I go on.

I suggest we use AI to stand for much more than it does and drop the Artificial. After all, what’s artificial about it? It is intelligence, after all, as it meets its core definition—the application of knowledge and skills.

My entry in the scrum, depending on broad categories and specific programmers and use cases:

1. Augmented Intelligence. At its most basic, this is the realm of Chat AI and its various programmed siblings. It augments our own intelligence and allows us to apply human wisdom to make better decisions. 

2. Aggregated Intelligence. This is the realm of science—Medicine, Engineering, Physics, and so on. What makes this area so powerful is the sheer aggregation of data that no human could possibly wade through, and what makes it particularly exciting is that human need, determination, wisdom, and query will bring us amazing new discoveries for the benefit of our planet.

3. Artificial Illustration. It’s kind of self-evident and called by some generative AI. This is where the deep fakes and suspect art is produced, and yes, when applied right (as with all) has huge potential. (It has already been used for years...in many ways...in performance advertising and applications where the ability to visualize what is, has been, or might be.)

4. Articulated Interchange. This is the increasingly powerful deployment of Chat-Bots to cut out human intervention—a two-way discussion between humans and machines.

5. Aided Information. Think of advertising copy or ideas, songwriting, resumes (hopefully not term papers), and carefully, very carefully, lawyers’ briefs, to name a few. 

Bottom line...

AI as Artificial Intelligence reminds me of the Pseudo Intellects of my youth. Defined by Merriam-Webster as “a person who wants to be thought of as having a lot of intelligence and knowledge but who is not really intelligent or knowledgeable.” 

AI has both but really isn’t either…and there you have it.

Your turn. Can you add any?

What do you think?