I like how there are all these terms with increasingly loose definitions, to which we attach different levels of evilness:
- algorithm - older, reliable, deterministic except when it's "The Algorithm" in capital letters like "The Social Media Algorithm"; then it becomes evil
- machine learning - been out for decades, hasn't destroyed the world, mostly does its job undetected. Used mainly by technical people
- machine intelligence - The machine is starting to become conscious but it is still generally helpful. "Machine intelligence" performs brain surgery, detects tumors, folds and unfolds proteins, whatever that means (but it sounds like a good thing, so we'll give it a pass)
- artificial intelligence - machine intelligence's evil twin. Takes credit for everything good that comes from the other ones and we tend to believe it, because it's the only one we can actually speak to and can lie to us very convincingly. On its own it can draw pretty pictures and animate them, write code that occasionally works, pretend to love us and teach us the most effective way to slash our own wrists
