Artificial or pseudo-intelligence?

Like a pesky swarm of bees or bots, artificial intelligence or AI permeates every aspect of human existence nowadays. When someone gives a voice command on Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, artificial intelligence comes into play.

When someone opens a chat window while shopping online or making immigration inquiries via Ask Emma, an AI talk-to-me mechanism is triggered.

When someone books a trip via Expedia or Agoda, a virtual booking agent is activated. When someone operates a self-driving Tesla, a computerized Uber-like driving platform is generated.

Of course, the most notorious form of AI is the robotic or humanoid design that can be seen broadcasting news online, rolling and fetching food at local Asian restaurants, vacuuming floors at airports, or performing minor surgeries at high-tech medical facilities.

But beneath the glitter of all these 21st-century technological advancements is a troubling question: Are humans surrendering a crucial element of their biological existence to the yoke of artificial intelligence with parlous consequences?

While it is true that AI has helped modernize humanity’s communication and automation systems by leaps and bounds during the past decade or so, equally incontrovertible is the fact that AI has opened up a proverbial hellhole of a mess from which there is no turning back.

Thus, thanks to AI, deep-fake porno artists are having a field day creating authentic-looking porn reels that feature not only the forged anatomies of attention-seeking celebrities but those of hapless private citizens as well.

Thanks to AI, state-sponsored propagandists and lone-wolf anarchists can easily put up sham broadcasts of influential public figures with genuine-looking visages while inputting bogus utterances into their mouths.

Thanks to AI, shark-like, for-profit companies can virtually filch, devour, and violate citizens’ privacy by algorithmically and secretly analyzing, recording, and eavesdropping on people’s online shopping habits and mundane everyday conversations for despicable commercial ends.

And thanks to AI, automated elections are no longer viewed as a sacrosanct exercise, having lost their perceived immunity against outside interference and manipulation, threatening to destroy the very essence of democratic existence.

Perhaps artificial intelligence is a misnomer.

Although the word artificial correctly describes the concept’s unnatural origin, the various ways by which this type of intelligence is being used in an embarrassingly sordid fashion should give rise to a new label that most accurately reflects its general utility.

Since it is commonly leveraged as a platform for pushing forward sham agendas and spurious objectives, perhaps pseudo-intelligence or PI is the better term?