There Is No A.I.

In fact, I think it's misleading--maybe even a little dangerous. Everybody's already using the term, and it might seem a little late in the day to be arguing about it. But we're at the beginning of a new technological era--and the easiest way to mismanage a technology is to misunderstand it. The term "artificial intelligence" has a long history--it was coined in the nineteen-fifties, in the early days of computers. More recently, computer scientists have grown up on movies like "The Terminator" and "The Matrix," and on characters like Commander Data, from "Star Trek: The Next Generation."