A Speccie reader (Greg) has asked me to say something about the expression ‘AI’, meaning artificial intelligence. The expression is not new – it’s been bandied around by the nerds since 1955 as something they hoped their bits and bytes could pull off. What is new is the capitalisation of the two words, and the abbreviation to AI. That has happened only over the past two years. The raised awareness comes from the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, and its explosive growth in popularity from early 2023. I know the use of the term ‘AI’ is unstoppable – but it is wrong. What these machines do is very fast (blindingly fast) calculations (massively complex calculations), but they are not ‘intelligent’ in any coherent sense of that word. Revealingly, dictionaries define ‘AI’ as computers that ‘simulate’ human intelligence. It is a simulation, not the real thing. Real intelligence requires consciousness, self awareness and understanding. Computers do not have these. The illusion they have is fostered by another mistaken expression – ‘machine learning.’ They don’t ‘learn’ in any accepted sense of that word; they accumulate (massive reams of data, and code for processing that data). That is accumulation, not ‘learning’. None of this reality will change the boffins (and the mindless journalists who, unthinkingly, repeat their words). They will go burbling about ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘machine learning’. When they do so, you should quietly mutter to yourself, ‘abuse of the English language’.

The entirely admirable Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) is using two words to describe the mess our world is in today: ‘permacrisis’ and ‘polycrisis’. One of those has been around for a while, but the other they seem to have coined themselves. ‘Permacrisis’ originated in 1975 in an essay by Stephen Cohen and Charles Goldfinger about what they call ‘the limits of normal politics’. The definition the Oxford gives us for ‘permacrisis’ is quite a mouthful: ‘A situation characterised by constant and significant turmoil or instability… one that is widespread across a society…’ Yep! That’s us! While ‘polycrisis’ means ‘the simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events’ (Collins Dictionary). The suffix on both words (‘crisis’) means ‘a turn for the worse’. It helps, I believe, to have words that concisely name the problems we face. It’s only when we know them and name them that we start to solve them. And Arc points us towards the solution with their adjective ‘responsible’. When we all take ‘responsibility’ (and the younger generation learn the meaning of the word!) we will be back on the right track.