Acceptance speech upon receiving the 2024 Helmut Schmidt Future Prize:
Make no mistake – I am optimistic – but my optimism is an invitation to analysis and action, not a ticket to complacency.
With that in mind, I want to start with some definitions to make sure we’re all reading from the same score. Because so often, in this hype-based discourse, we are not. And too rarely do we make time for the fundamental questions – whose answers, we shall see, fundamentally shift our perspective. Questions like, what is AI? Where did it come from? And why is it everywhere, guaranteeing promises of omniscience, automated consciousness, and what can only be described as magic?
Well, first answer first: AI is a marketing term, not a technical term of art. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1956 by cognitive and computer scientist John McCarthy – about a decade after the first proto-neural network architectures were created. In subsequent interviews McCarthy is very clear about why he invented the term. First, he didn’t want to include the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener in a workshop he was hosting that summer. You see, Wiener had already coined the term “cybernetics,” under whose umbrella the field was then organized. McCarthy wanted to create his own field, not to contribute to Norbert’s – which is how you become the “father” instead of a dutiful disciple. This is a familiar dynamic for those of us familiar with “name and claim” academic politics. Secondly, McCarthy wanted grant money. And he thought the phrase “artificial intelligence” was catchy enough to attract such funding from the US government, who at the time was pouring significant resources into technical research in service of post-WWII cold war dominance.
Now, in the course of the term’s over 70 year history, “artificial intelligence” has been applied to a vast and heterogeneous array of technologies that bear little resemblance to each other. Today, and throughout, it connotes more aspiration and marketing than coherent technical approach. And its use has gone in and out of fashion, in time with funding prerogatives and the hype-to-disappointment cycle.
So why, then, is AI everywhere now? Or, why did it crop up in the last decade as the big new thing?
The answer to that question is to face the toxic surveillance business model – and the big tech monopolies that built their empires on top of this model.