We’re either liberated or constrained in our thinking by the words we use. For example, Sterling says, if we hadn’t coined, adopted and continually used the phrase “artificial intelligence‿ when talking about early computers, we would have (perhaps) seen the computers for what they were – number crunchers, link shufflers. By using "artificial intelligence" we envisioned and then paved the road to a future populated with thinking machines – a task still awfully far off. If we’d called computers something like “ordinators," we’d have taken advantage of their number crunching abilities and not tried to make them into something they’re not -- mechanical humans. Sterling suggests that had we done that, Google might have appeared in 1980.
View Comments
There are currently no comments to display.
Post a Comment
To post a comment, you must be a registered user of FCW.com and be logged in. Use one of the forms below to login or register for FREE to FCW.com. To protect your privacy, you can use an alias as your username.
