An explosion of interest in artificial intelligence is irking a lot of people concerned about the encroachment by computers into human domains such as visual arts, music, and literature. More recently, even the terms we use to describe these systems don’t sit well with some who take issue with digging up old words for new uses or anthropomorphizing machines.
Both phenomena were already common well before electric circuits started writing poems, so much of the recent drama is based on fear rather than logic. Which is suitable: Machines don’t feel fear, and human logic often fails.
Even the term artificial intelligence is taken as an affront by sentient beings when it’s ascribed to non-living objects. It’s a valid point, one that’s been argued for centuries even as philosophers struggle to define “intelligence.” To that end, computer scientists such as Alan Turing, famed for helping crack German cryptography during World War II, have speculated how we might test whether a machine could mimic humans well enough to fool us, and devised The Imitation Game for that purpose.
