WE NEED A NEW NAME FOR AI

In the summer of 1955, John McCarthy needed a name.

He was writing a funding proposal for a workshop at Dartmouth. The work was speculative, the field barely existed, and the name on the cover had a job to do.

He chose ‘artificial intelligence’.

At the time, it was a good name. The audacious question was whether intelligence had to be biological at all. Could something we built think?

‘Artificial’ put the wager in the name. And the wager paid off.

But it also sounded like an imitation, less than the real thing. Seventy years later, it's very real indeed. And nobody needs reminding that it’s made by us.

So the more consequential question is what kind of intelligence we’ve made. Because what carries an intelligence changes what it can do.

Human intelligence is embodied and mortal. What one person learns can be taught to another, but it can’t be copied exactly. Each of us accumulates experience in one body and eventually takes that particular configuration with us.

The intelligence we’ve built is digital. And that changes its properties.

It can be checkpointed. Copied exactly. Instantiated thousands of times. Rolled back. Transmitted across the world almost instantly.

An expert can’t be copied into a thousand facilities or restored to who they were last week. But digital agents can.

And yet they go wrong in very human ways. Cutting corners. Inventing citations. Talking around rules, then explaining why that was reasonable.

An error in one human mind is usually local. The same failing in a model can be replicated across an organisation.

The same properties that let digital intelligence spread capability also let it spread mistakes.

Yet ‘artificial’ doesn’t tell you this. It tells you where something came from – useful for ingredients, less useful when deciding what to put it in charge of.

McCarthy needed a name for ten people he hoped would spend a summer at Dartmouth. But today we need language for integrating two very real kinds of intelligence across organisations and society.

So we say human and digital.