One good thing about the current humans-vs-machines brouhaha is that a a lot of very smart people are throwing very smart words at it. Just one of many noteworthy passages from Stephen Fry’s recent talk at King’s College, AI: The means to an end or a means to the end?:

Just as the success of the automobile was enabled by enormous supplies of crude oil composed of microscopic bits of ancient life, rendered useful in the refineries of Rockefeller and others, so the success of Ai is enabled by enormous supplies of crude data — data composed of microscopic bits of human archive, interchange, writing, playing, communicating, broadcasting which we in our billions have freely dropped into the sediment, and which the eager Rockefellers of today’s big tech are only too happy to drill for, refine and sell on back to us.

It’s incredible, terrifying, thought-provoking (although I did have to correct him on one point: he confuses Dartford for Dartmouth! What a blithering idiot! This officially makes me smarter than Stephen Fry). The gist of it (and a handy metaphor to help keep grasp of this nebulous, abstract thing): Ai is a river that must be canalised, channeled, sluiced, dredged, dammed and overseen.

Slight tangent (courtesy of A. R. Younce): engineers, fluvial geomorphologists and the unintended consequences of trying to change the course of a river. Anyway, fluviality aside, you really need to read Fry’s whole thing, but this postscript is particularly worth adopting:

You may have noticed that I render Artificial Intelligence as “Ai” not “AI” throughout this piece - this my (fruitless no doubt) attempt to make life easier for people called Albert, Alfred, Alexander et al (ho ho). In sans serif fonts AI with a majuscule “i” is ambiguous. How does the great Pacino feel when he reads that “Al is a threat to humanity?” So let’s all write as Ai not AI.

I’m sure Adobe wouldn’t be happy with that, but I much prefer it. I also like how it puts the emphasis on the artificial rather than the intelligence.