Sure, but in 2012, AI wasn’t a common subject for laypeople to discuss as non-fiction. Policy makers for decades mostly dismissed AI because of earlier failures

Sure, but in 2012, AI wasn’t a common subject for laypeople to discuss as non-fiction. Policy makers for decades mostly dismissed AI because of earlier failures to live up to the hype. In 2012, most people didn’t have smartphones in their pocket with “AI processors” capable of 10-30 trillion operations per second. Face, voice, and object recognition, real-time language translation etc weren’t ubiquitous and taken for granted. As AI becomes increasingly a realistic part of every day life, it necessarily invades language. Historically even words for colors took centuries to enter into common usage in most cultures. If AI researchers were to stop referring to AI as a whole, and individual AI technologies as “a thing,” it wouldn’t change how the rest of the population talks about AI. When I entered the field, my mentor said that the first thing to know was that, “Nothing works.” For years, branding something as AI was an invitation to not get funded. I doubt the restraint around the use of the term was entirely altuistic. AI skeptics notwithstanding, the train has left the station and the changing public discourse reflects that reality.