Are we really talking about A.I.?

The rise of Agentic Autocomplete

I think the term A.I. is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in most discussions. Not only is it imprecise and difficult to know what anyone is referring to when then say A.I., but it also presupposes intelligence. The term is applied to automation, pattern recognition, machine learning, chatbots, AGI, and everything in between.

How would things look if we used a different term? Assume this new term is just another name for the same LLM systems with the same capabilities that we currently call A.I. What if we called it Advanced Autocomplete (A.A.) or Interactive Autocomplete (I.A.) with its companion Agentic Autocomplete?

It would be more difficult to ascribe intelligence to autocomplete. Afterall we all have experience with the unreliability of autocorrect. Would we be so quick to anthropomorphize consciousness in an autocomplete system? Would we be as concerned that most white collar work could be replaced by autocomplete agents? Would we see huge valuations of autocomplete companies?

Because we so loosely use the A.I. term for all of these tools and systems, the presumption of intelligence get’s smuggled in, and is often conflated with AGI. It causes us to muddle the potential benefit and impact of true A.I.(AGI) with the benefits and impacts of current technology (LLM’s).

Before we can evaluate we need to know what we’re talking about.