I just realized that one of the oldest PR and marketing disasters dates back to Epicurus, the Greek philosopher who developed Epicureanism: the philosophy that holds that pleasure is the supreme good and that happiness is achieved through moderation and the absence of pain.
It's easy to understand why this leads to associating Epicureanism with the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. But this interpretation broadly distorts what Epicurus actually proposed.
What he advocated for wasn't the unbridled pursuit of pleasure, but rather achieving a state of absence of pain (aponia) and imperturbability (ataraxia): a vast difference from mere pleasure.
In one of his letters, Epicurus (tries to) clarify the misunderstanding:
"When we say that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as some understand us through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation."
I think if Epicurus had chosen the word imperturbability (ataraxia) instead of pleasure (hedoné), his philosophy would have had greater impact in competition with Stoicism.
It would have been less catchy, though.
Two thousand years later, we're making exactly the same mistake with artificial intelligence.
Just as "pleasure" betrayed Epicurus's intentions, "artificial" betrays the nature of this incredible technology.
I've noticed that people associate "artificial" with the fake, the inferior, the non-human.
It generates instinctive rejection, as if the technology were an impostor rather than a tool built with our own wisdom.
A parallel I always use as an example with friends: the word "organic" makes a product with no nutritional advantage be perceived as superior, when really the only difference lies in the cultivation process.
Similarly, "artificial" poisons the perception of a profoundly human technology.
I'm convinced that we've committed one of the most serious mistakes of this era: calling an intelligence that is collective artificial.
The capability of language models lies in the human knowledge they've processed.
This intelligence is an aggregation of knowledge built collaboratively throughout history and documented digitally in recent decades.
The information it provides is not artificial, it's collective: the result of centuries of people who questioned their environment and documented their discoveries.
The consolidation of this knowledge into a universally accessible technology is, I think, an act of love toward humanity: democratizing the accumulated wisdom of generations.
Just as Epicurus couldn't rescue his philosophy from linguistic misunderstanding, I want to believe that we're still in time to correct our error.
Calling this technology "collective intelligence" isn't a semantic whim, it's honestly recognizing what it is: humanity speaking to itself across time.
Why Intelligence Is Not Artificial
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