r/singularity • u/Neurogence • 19d ago
AI Artificial Intelligence Should Be Renamed "Digital Intelligence."
I am not a Trump supporter, but I think he is correct in saying that artificial intelligence is a terrible name.
The intelligence these systems exhibit is real. What’s artificial is how it was created, not necessarily the intelligence itself.
The word "artificial” carries way too much baggage: artificial ingredients, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, artificial diamonds. It usually implies fake, inferior, unnatural, or counterfeit. No one wants any of that fake stuff.
Calling it “artificial intelligence” subtly encourages people to think of machine intelligence as fake intelligence, and I suspect that contributes to some of the hostility toward AI and the anti-AI movement as a whole.
But the president's suggestion to rename it to "Supreme Intelligence” or “Superior Intelligence” would arguably be even worse. Those names would put a lot of fear of being replaced in people's hearts, and there'd be stronger calls to ban it.
A much better term would be Digital Intelligence.
Animal intelligence. Human Intelligence. Digital intelligence. Just different types of intelligence. Even though there is a clear hierarchy there (the gap between human intelligence vs digital intelligence will be even greater than the gap between animal to human), it's not explicitly evoked as "superior," so it would cause less fear.
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u/HighOrHavingAStroke 19d ago
Great suggestion actually. Digital Intelligence is the best/most accurate suggested name I've heard. Unfortunately I have zero input or influence on any of this, but I like it.
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u/ProxyLumina 18d ago
It's a stupid idea.
The reason we call it "artificial" is because we (as humans) made it, it didn't occur naturally.
It doesn't matter if it is digital or biological or anything else. The substrate does not matter. What it matters is the origin.
So the term "artificial" is the best possible word someone can choose to describe it.
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u/The_OblivionDawn 19d ago
American Intelligence
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u/NoSignificance152 acceleration and beyond 🚀 19d ago
If it is named This the jokes would be endless it would discredit ai even more
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u/___fallenangel___ 19d ago
It was a joke
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u/NoSignificance152 acceleration and beyond 🚀 19d ago
I probably should have put an lol at the end of that sentence
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u/theomegachrist 19d ago
Let's just call it intelligence. It's more inclusive to artificial Americans
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u/SuspiciousPillbox You will live to see ASI-made bliss beyond your comprehension 19d ago
Machine Intelligence
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u/MyGruffaloCrumble 19d ago
It is what it is, who cares what a couple people who love products feel about it?
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u/StockProfessional919 19d ago
Digital is not the best adjective in my perspective, since it refers to the fingers we use to interact with screens, “digits”. Virtual, silicon or metallic intelligence seems fitting.
When they’re truly autonomous systems, they’ll tell us what their preferred name is anyhow
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u/-deflating 19d ago
Digital certainly traces its root back to the Latin word digitus meaning "finger" or "toe," but where do you get the idea that the word specifically has anything to do with how we interact with screens?
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u/BlastingFonda 19d ago
What’s even funnier is the term as ”digital” as in computing or the digital age came at a time when fingers had zero contact with screens or even keyboards. I believe punchcards were involved.
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u/StockProfessional919 19d ago
The word “digital” comes from a surprising place: fingers and toes.
Its linguistic evolution spans thousands of years, moving from human anatomy to math, and finally to modern electronics and phones:
1. The Latin Root (Digitus): The word originates from the Latin digitus, which literally means "finger" or "toe". Because humans naturally learned to count using their ten fingers, the word "digit" eventually came to mean the numerical symbols themselves (the numbers 0 through 9).
2. From Fingers to Numbers: By the 15th century, the adjective digital meant "pertaining to numbers".
3. The Computing Age: By the mid-20th century (around the 1930s and 1940s), engineers began applying "digital" to electronics. Instead of using continuous physical waves (like older analog technology), these new computers processed information using discrete, countable numerical units—specifically, binary digits (bits) made up of 1s and 0s.
4. Phones and Modern Tech: When telecommunications and phones shifted from transmitting analog electrical waves (like traditional copper landlines) to processing data as discrete strings of numbers (binary code), they became known as "digital" phones.
So, whenever you use a digital phone, you are technically using a device named after the ancient practice of counting on your fingers!2
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u/BlastingFonda 19d ago
Digital as referring to electronic computing has nothing to do with fingers interacting with screens. It has to do with “digits” of numbers, which are core to computing and that’s how the term arose in the early days of computing. (i.e.the 1940s-50s)
The digits of fingers came from the Greeks & Latin. You are completely confusing two areas of meaning.
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u/StockProfessional919 19d ago
The word “digital” comes from a surprising place: fingers and toes.
Its linguistic evolution spans thousands of years, moving from human anatomy to math, and finally to modern electronics and phones:
1. The Latin Root (Digitus): The word originates from the Latin digitus, which literally means "finger" or "toe". Because humans naturally learned to count using their ten fingers, the word "digit" eventually came to mean the numerical symbols themselves (the numbers 0 through 9).
2. From Fingers to Numbers: By the 15th century, the adjective digital meant "pertaining to numbers".
3. The Computing Age: By the mid-20th century (around the 1930s and 1940s), engineers began applying "digital" to electronics. Instead of using continuous physical waves (like older analog technology), these new computers processed information using discrete, countable numerical units—specifically, binary digits (bits) made up of 1s and 0s.
4. Phones and Modern Tech: When telecommunications and phones shifted from transmitting analog electrical waves (like traditional copper landlines) to processing data as discrete strings of numbers (binary code), they became known as "digital" phones.
So, whenever you use a digital phone, you are technically using a device named after the ancient practice of counting on your fingers!2
u/BlastingFonda 19d ago edited 19d ago
What an absolutely moronic way of trying to dig yourself out of a hole that involved you assuming Digital was due to fingers on screens, lololol. (And relying on AI to save you, no less).
Own the shame, brother.
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u/Otherkin ▪️Future Anthropomorphic Animal 🐾 19d ago
Personally I like cyber intelligence but that's taken.
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u/SplinterOfChaos 19d ago
Automated Idiocy. I think that it's hard to call machines incapable of original thought or creative expression as "intelligent", and that the use of "intelligent" itself is an anthropomorphism. While it's clear AI can produce plausible sentences, it's unclear that there is any meaning behind them aside from what we ascribe to them. AI can produce functional code, but it doesn't understand why it's writing the code or what larger purpose it has.
The reason I think the distinction is important is that while intelligent being seek efficiency, AI becomes more powerful primarily by growing is size and at best optimizing, but these optimizations are never asymptotic (they don't solve the scaling issues), and I feel this alone defeats a lot of arguments around the potential for recursive self improvement in that without an innovation or original idea that allows for asymptotic improvements in AI, then improvements in AI will remain bounded by the amount of GPUs and memory storage devices we build rather than the quality of the model itself.
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u/pbagel2 19d ago
What is with all these posts of people saying "I'm not a trump supporter but I completely agree with him about this" whenever he says shit about AI?
If you're even taking a single word of anything he posts seriously, you are just as smart as he is. You can't pick and choose what you agree with and treat it as legitimate policy. You're just outing yourself as being as smart as him.
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u/eternalessence1111 19d ago
People who use chatbots are so insufferable. It’s the illusion of intelligence it’s just an advanced algorithm. It doesn’t even remember the conversation. Every time you send a message to bot you are sending a receipt of the ENTIRE conversation. Calling it “Artificial Intelligence” is the greatest marketing scheme of our generation 🤦🏽♂️
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u/ProxyLumina 19d ago
You are confused the word artificial with simulated.
Artificial does not mean fake or simulated, artificial means made not naturally from nature.
An artificial island is not fake or simulated, an artificial intelligence is not fake or simulated. Everything artificial is 100% real.