
GETTING SMART
INTELLIGENCE HAS BEEN artificial since people invented a word for it. How could a single term accommodate attributes as far apart as knowledge retention and logic, organizational skills and self-awareness? And yet the misnomer “artificial intelligence” persists, reifying that obscure quality “intelligence” and aggrandizing the divide between human and nonhuman cognition.
Bad phrases can be good catalysts for collective hallucinations, and lately there’s been a quickening in our hopes and anxieties around AI. Early last summer, my Instagram lit up with strange three-by-three grids of images that