What if AI had another name?
By Rich Heimann
How different would we think about artificial intelligence if AI pioneers Allen Newell and Herbert Simon had won support for the seemingly less hype-prone term of “complex information processing,” rather than “artificial intelligence,” which was ultimately adopted by the field?
On the surface, this thought experiment is interesting because it asks if artificial intelligence is intrinsically hyped. That is, is the word alone enough to get us in trouble? This was the focus of a recent Wall Street Journal article where columnist Christopher Mims asks experts in artificial intelligence whether the name alone produces confusion and hype?
Mims quotes Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, who quips, “What would the world be like if it [AI] was called that [complex information processing] instead?” Unfortunately, Mims uses Mitchell’s thought experiment as a punchline at the very end of the article, not as a counterfactual. Therefore, we will explore what facts surround the rhetorical question and answer whether the world would be better without artificial intelligence.
Read the full article on TechTalks.
More articles by Rich:
AI has one advantage in communication: everyone seems to know what it is. It also has a problem. It is a shibboleth that evaded analysis for years, a catchphrase covering everything and explaining little.
The beginnings of AI are rooted in philosophers' attempts to describe human thinking as a symbolic system. Catalan theologian Ramon Llull and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz proposed an alphabet of human thought, the first around 1300 and the second in 1666. Leibniz claimed all ideas are combinations of a small number of simple concepts.
The catchphrase wasn't coined until three hundred years later. In 1955 “artificial intelligence” appears in a proposal for a study by notables John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. The resulting two-month workshop in 1956 is the official birthdate of the field. Minsky believed the problem of creating AI would be solved within a generation. He was wrong, obviously, but the complexity of the issues is not a simple function of the chosen rhetoric, with the exception of overly optimistic predictions leading to the first so-called AI Winter.