From a great Lunch with the FT interview with Ted Chiang:
โThere was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, โWhat is artificial intelligence?โ And someone else said, โA poor choice of words in 1954โ,โ he says. โAnd, you know, theyโre right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the โ50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that weโre having now.โ
So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.
โItโs genuinely amazing thatโ.โ.โ.โthese sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,โ he says. But, in his view, thatย doesnโt make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, โbut no one wants to use that term, because itโs not as sexyโ.