Many see AI as a new and potentially frightening form of intelligence, and the very language of AI lends this technology an aura of mind and agency. But critics argue that these machines don’t think, they compute; they don’t learn, they extract patterns; they don’t understand, they have outputs. Furthermore they maintain the name 'artificial intelligence' is the greatest misnomer in modern science — a category mistake that confuses computation and pattern-matching with intelligence, turning a mechanical process into a myth of mind. Behind the grand talk of 'the dawn of thinking machines', they contend, lies a glorified abacus, crunching numbers at lightning speed which we mistake for thought.
Is the term 'artificial intelligence' a remarkably successful marketing trick — a linguistic sleight of hand that confuses the output of a dumb machine with cognition? AI helps us with certain tasks, but so does a calculator, or a clock or an abacus — are they also intelligent? Or is there something profoundly different about large language models that enables the transition from machinery to thought?
Is the term 'artificial intelligence' a remarkably successful marketing trick — a linguistic sleight of hand that confuses the output of a dumb machine with cognition? AI helps us with certain tasks, but so does a calculator, or a clock or an abacus — are they also intelligent? Or is there something profoundly different about large language models that enables the transition from machinery to thought?
