Between the Booms: AI in Winter

Observing the tsunami of artificial intelligence (AI) hype that has swept over the world in the past few years, science fiction writer Ted Chiang staked out a contrarian position. "Artificial intelligence," he insisted, was just a "poor choice of words … back in the '50s" that had caused "a lot of confusion." Under the rubric of intelligence, verbs such as "learn," "understand," and "know" had been misappropriated to imply sentience where none existed. The right words, he suggested, would have been "applied statistics." Chiang was correct that AI has always been a fuzzy term used to market specific technologies in a way that has little inherent connection to cognition.