The whole AI debate shows how important it is what metaphors we choose.
A few years ago, someone came up with a new type of computer program and the marketing came up with the label “artificial intelligence” for it. Imagine if a different label had been preferred then. Like “information harvester”.
Today, we would have images created by an information harvester, marketers would write polite letters using an information harvester, I would use an information harvester in statistical programming and never attach any importance to it.
But the word artificial intelligence was chosen. That is, something that refers on the one hand to theology, where for more than 100 years the term God has sometimes been replaced by “ordering intelligence” (it used to be called “providence”), and on the other hand to science fiction literature. The idea of something mystically omnipotent, either terrifying or wonderful, quickly arises in the human brain, the brain is flooded with the corresponding emotions, and from that moment on it accepts reality selectively – it accepts only what is consistent with the idea.
Yet “artificial intelligence” does not capture the essence of these programs any better than “information harvester.” But it sells better.