A.I. Needs New Clichés
The old ones aren’t helping, and the new ones are old
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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 new AI major that includes courses I teach.
Google Image Search offers a row of words to help pare down results. After words like robot, alien, computer science, and brain, female and father are back to back, followed by power system, human, and god. “Father” offers images of Alan Turing and John McCarthy. “Female” serves up images of fembots.
“Sometimes in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.”
Some of this aesthetic was popularized by the movie Minority Report, which presented gestural interfaces on the big screen. Today, intelligent environments are a reality. But why do we depict them as layered and ghosted? “These cultural clichés/touchstones are popular for another reason: It’s really, really hard to talk about digital-reality tech otherwise,” Eric Johnson writes. “These fields are full of jargon, inconsistent in practice and difficult to grok if you…
