Artificial whatteligence?

It’s funny how an entire sphere of human knowledge can become completely obsolete — or expire — just because of a misunderstood word.

Let me give you an example: SRS. A nice piece of writing we see every day in our lives. Not many people know what SRS stands for; thus, not many of them understand what “SRS Airbag” actually means. Hence, we have idiots who put a dud belt buckle into their seats just so they don’t have to wear a seatbelt.

SRS means “Supplementary Restraint System.” And for most of those lunkheads, you really need to check the definition of the word supplementary. It’s essentially an explosive charge that’s going to detonate to prevent your head from crushing into the dashboard. And if you are not buckled up, it will most likely detonate in your face — quite literally ripping you to shreds.

So we have people dying over a word they misunderstand.

(Another picture of an electronic brain. Where no one knows what this brain is doing and how it is to have anything to do with the mind or intelligence)

Now, can you imagine how much misunderstanding we have in the world of “Artificial” and “Intelligence”?

Let’s start with one simple fact. If the word artificial can be more or less defined, there is currently no science on the face of planet Earth that defines intelligence.

Psychological science does not have a single, universally accepted, exact definition of intelligence. It is a latent construct, so definitions vary by theory and by how researchers choose to measure it.

Seriously. This is laughable.

Ask any good engineer what a transistor is. He’ll give you a definition, and it will match the definition given by an engineer on the other side of the planet. We know what a transistor is.

Ask a psychologist what intelligence is — he won’t be able to answer. Ask an “AI engineer” what intelligence is, and he’ll go on a long walk through pseudo-invented terms describing what he thinks the mind is.

If we don’t know what we’re talking about, what do we expect to happen?

Do you realize that on this planet we have eight billion definitions of the word intelligence? It’s different for every single one of you.

So what do you expect to see when you hear “Artificial Intelligence”?

Is it a thing that generates porn? Or writes poems? Is it something that thinks about cats? Or pretends to be your late grandma? Or maybe it’s a thing that generates puppy videos for you? Or something that teaches your kid how to squabble?

So when another prick on LinkedIn starts talking about the “future of truly artificial intelligence,” stop his barrage of nonsense with a simple question:

“Define intelligence.”