Above: “computer brains” and “machine learning” doesn’t exist. And probably never will.
Dear readers and customers,
the professional field of IT is a foggy sector sometimes. You will encounter more buzzwords than anywhere else throughout your career, most of them will loose their meaning entirely during the same timeframe, and what’s even more worse: you leave humans in anger and fear more times than it can be healthy for both sides, clients as well as customers. We need to actively change that for the better.
As such, and seeing it from a linguistic perspective too, renaming terminology is the way to go. And we fully support the idea provided by the Center on Privacy and Technology: reducing actively, or even eliminating where possible, the damage caused by digital technology.
One of the most popular and best examples: artificial intelligence. Today, 2022, even the most sophisticated supercomputers only provide the intelligence of a cockroach. Or more realistically: a network of cockroaches. As such, the center recommends eliminating this terminology completely. We fully support that one as well as the other mentioned buzzwords computers aren’t capable of: which is “thinking”. “Judging”. “Predicting”. “Interpreting”. “Decision making”. “Realising”. “Learning”. Humans and animals may be capable of all that. But no computer on this Earth, and possibly for many decades to come. Period.
If you encounter these associations somewhere, online or offline, be aware that you might be a victim of a creative marketing department. Nothing more, nothing less. “Artificial intelligence” doesn’t exist, not in the sense of the programmer Alan Turing, who invented the concept of turing completeness. Even more so as mentioned in the valuable and much more creative novels by authors of science fiction literature, who might be able to describe sentient artificial beings, maybe even their hypothetical behaviour. However it stays a fiction in any case, no matter how great the novel was you were reading. Sorry.
For us at AETHYX MEDIAE, this idea proposed by the Center on Privacy and Technology sounds like a no-brainer. However we are not free of bias as we have roots and work in this professional field since over two decades now. We’re sad that news agencies and journalists are not capable to reduce the damage before it reaches their readers. As it is in their responsibility to do their own research before making an article popular and publishing it to thousands of concurrent readers. As such, the warning and the proposal comes to late for us. For the year 2022 as well as for millions of people on this planet. Plus, we were also not safe sometimes to use misleading technology terminology. We need and want to apologise for that. And promise to change it for the better where we see fit.
Be proud to be human! Have no fear of IT! Keep thinking! As in the end, it’s just another field where people need to pay their rents from.
All the best,
the aethyx staff