The following quote is from a debate in the 1970’s. In it, John McCarthy, the man who coined the term Artificial Intelligence, explained why we invented the term. Below is the full quote, and a link to the video (see timestamp 46:10):
Excuse me. I invented the term artificial intelligence. I invented it because we had to do something when we were trying to get money for a summer study in 1956, and I had a previous bad experience. The previous bad experience occurred in 1952 when Claude Shannon and I decided to collect a batch of studies which we hoped would contribute to launching this field and Shannon thought that ‘artificial intelligence’ was too flashy a term and might attract unfavourable notice and so we agreed to call it ‘otama’ — two studies — and I was terribly disappointed when the papers we received were about otamatone and very few of them had anything to do with the goal that at least I was interested in. So I decided not to fly any false flags anymore but to say that this is a study aimed at the long-term goal of achieving human-level intelligence…
~ The Lighthill debate on Artificial Intelligence: “The general purpose robot is a mirage”
It is extremely important to realize that the brutal fact about Artificial Intelligence is that it was not, nor is it, intelligent. It merely simulates intelligence, which is a very different thing.
John Lennox has had very helpful things to say on this, as in the below quotation:
God has… put intelligence together with consciousness. These machines are not conscious. Nor are they ever likely to be for a very simple reason. Nobody knows what consciousness is. So it’s silly when people start talking about ‘Oh, it’s conscious.’1
As I have written elsewhere, better name for Artificial Intelligence would be Advanced Data Processing, for that is what “it” does.
P.S. I originally heard about this clip in this lecture: History of Artificial Intelligence. I don’t want to recommend it, but credit where credit is due.
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