AI and hoverboards

When I read Jeremy Keith’s post called The meaning of “AI” I found myself nodding along in agreement. I especially like that “AI” is in quotes, as I’ve been known to refer to it as “so-called AI”.

It reminds me of hoverboards.

As Jeremy points out AI used to mean sentient machines, then one day somebody decided a buzzword was in order. Enter the hype merchants and marketers who managed to come up with a word that already meant something else. Not a problem in itself, after all how would we manage to be productive without stand ups, spikes, epics, story points and scrums.

The problem with so-called AI is the name is deliberately misleading. It’s no more intelligent than a housebrick (unless if you’re a panpsychist, I guess, in which case the brick has more conciousness than the bytes).

The same thing happened with hoverboards. Once the impossible tech from Back to the Future, now a two-wheeled self-balancing axle for which nobody could invent a snappy name. To labour Jeremy’s point, the dangers of hoverboards are toxic waste and housefires. Imagine if politicians, tech pundits and toy sellers started believing they were going to kill children, take aircraft down, and chin unsuspecting pedestrians.