A.I. Needs New Clichés
The old ones aren’t helping, and the new ones are old
If you plug “A.I.” or “artificial intelligence” into Google Image Search, here’s what you get: electric brains firing blue with neurons; translucent robots and robot heads; code dribbling down their foreheads and noses. A monkey that becomes a smartphone user, then a figure in wearable tech, a prosthesis, and a network coming out of their head. “What is A.I.?” asks one cyborg, but never receives an answer from the robot heads, brains, and bodies. A.I. means that we and our robot friends are flying through a world of ones and zeroes, against a black screen of outer space.
You get an image like this: the uncanny-valley woman with Photoshop-perfect features. She’s a vision of a cyborg: part female and part circuit board, with jQuery running in the background. Google’s best guess for the image? “Artificial intelligence operator.” This cyborg illustrates the future in numerous articles, as you’ll see with a Reverse Image Search, including “Rise Of The Machines: BlackRock Turns To Robots To Pick Stocks,”and “Vatican cardinal on a quest for the soul inside the machine.” She even illustrates a ZDNet article about my university’s…
