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Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and mathematician, explains why we should stop calling it AI and start calling it "artificial cleverness":
He believes the entire field is mislabelled, and the label itself is doing damage.
His objection is simple but cuts deep:
"The name is wrong. It's not artificial intelligence. It's not intelligence. Intelligence would involve consciousness. Well, if it's a machine, it's not conscious."
For Penrose, people have confused raw computing power with genuine understanding.
"People have lost the plot. They've lost it in the power of computing. The thing is that computers have got so powerful that they've lost the thread of what they're doing. But I think consciousness is something different. It's not computational."
He believes the term itself has hypnotized people into a category error:
"People are so hypnotized. The trouble is that AI is a bad term. It means artificial intelligence. Now intelligence in my view is conscious. That's what intelligence is about."
So he proposes a rename. Artificial Cleverness. AC instead of AI.
To illustrate the distinction, Penrose draws on his experience teaching mathematics:
"You have mathematics students. Some of them understand what they're doing. Some are just clever. They can repeat what they've learned. They know how to do it very cleverly. They can calculate very well, but they don't necessarily understand what they're doing."
That gap, between calculating well and actually understanding, is the gap Penrose sees between today's machines and genuine intelligence.
Cleverness can be manufactured. Consciousness, in his view, cannot.
So the question worth sitting with: when we call a system "intelligent," are we describing what it does, or quietly assuming something about what it is?
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