The phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ brings a particularly sinister note to media headlines on the effect of automation on work. Machines such as ‘dumb’ robots that replace physical work have now found a reasonably uncontroversial acceptance as part of productive efforts. It seems to be largely accepted that such machines are needed to work in collaboration with humans to extend production beyond human limitations or capacity. Such robots weld, paint, lift, move, even predict future markets and, generally, perform tasks that leave humans free to plan, manage, invent, design and try to understand the world in which they live. But point to a robot equipped with ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and the old ‘hype–and-fear’ attitudes (as identified by Willcocks [lead paper]) percolate back into the discourse. They appear to threaten human intelligence-based activities. The fear is not entirely surprising. Working humans cherish their intelligence for setting them apart from machines that might replace them. I argue that there is a massive divide between intelligence acquired by living creatures, and the artificial version which is the effort of human programmers. The fear results from an inappropriate use of the word ‘intelligence’ in the context of computation. It is a category error, that is, one where things of one category are being presented as if they belong to another or, alternatively, assigning a property that belongs to a category of objects to another category where it does not belong. That is, it is an error to take ‘intelligence’ as known to belong to the category of living things and apply it to the category of machines that someone has just chosen to call ‘intelligent’. The category error is intensified every time that headlines such as this appear:

中文翻译：

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让生活智能将人工版本置于其位置

“人工智能”这个词给媒体头条带来了关于自动化对工作影响的特别险恶的注解。替代体力劳动的“哑巴”机器人等机器现在已成为生产性工作的一部分，已获得了相当无争议的接受。人们普遍认为，需要此类机器与人类合作才能将生产扩展到人类的限制或能力之外。这种机器人焊接、油漆、举升、移动，甚至预测未来市场，并且通常执行的任务让人类可以自由地计划、管理、发明、设计和尝试了解他们生活的世界。但是指出一个配备了“人工智能”的机器人和旧的“炒作和恐惧”态度（正如威尔科克斯[主要论文]所确定的）重新渗透到话语中。它们似乎威胁到基于人类情报的活动。这种恐惧并不完全令人惊讶。劳动人民珍惜他们的智慧，因为他们将他们与可能取代他们的机器区分开来。我认为生物获得的智能与人类程序员努力的人工版本之间存在巨大差异。恐惧源于在计算环境中对“智能”一词的不当使用。这是一个类别错误，即一个类别的事物被呈现为好像它们属于另一个类别，或者，将属于一个对象类别的属性分配给它不属于的另一个类别。那是，将“智能”视为已知属于生物类别并将其应用于某人刚刚选择称为“智能”的机器类别是错误的。每次出现这样的标题时，类别错误就会加剧：