Jul 2, 2026 06:17 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 2, 2026 06:17 PM by C C.)
Meh. Tu-may-toe, tu-mah-toe.
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Ridley: We’re using the wrong pronouns for AI
https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack...dium=email
INTRO: Most people who talk about artificial intelligence reach, sooner or later, for the singular. There is the AI, the machine, the mind we are about to build, and the only argument left is whether it saves us or finishes us off. Matt Ridley thinks that whole habit of speech is a category error, and at ARC in London this week, the annual gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the science writer offered something cheerier and more curious instead: stop saying it, and start saying them.
His line was almost a grammar lesson. “We’re using the wrong pronoun,” he told the room, before landing it plainly: “It’s not it. It’s them.” From most speakers that might pass as a debating trick, but Ridley has spent forty years studying how living systems arrange themselves, and he means it as biology rather than wordplay. What is arriving, on his account, is not a single intelligence on a single timeline but a teeming population of them, and once you see the technology that way, almost every fear attached to it changes shape.
That instinct is what makes Ridley such a refreshing voice in a conversation otherwise run by computer scientists and philosophers. Where most of the AI debate borrows its metaphors from software and science fiction, the runaway program, the bottled genie, the god in the machine, he reaches instead for the living world. He looks at the field the way a zoologist looks at a coral reef, and what he sees is not one emerging titan but a habitat beginning to fill up with competitors...
[...] What makes all this worth hearing is how squarely it cuts against the prevailing mood. The loudest voices on AI tend to divide into prophets of doom, who treat a single superintelligence as an extinction event in waiting, and evangelists of hype, who greet the very same machine as a coming messiah. The striking thing is that both camps share a grammar. They are arguing about an it, a one, a single arriving power, and they disagree only over whether to kneel before it or flee from it.
[...] Take the reframing on its own terms and it props open a door the rest of the conversation keeps trying to shut. If we really are getting them and not it, a wild and various population rather than one sovereign mind, then the future of AI looks less like a countdown and more like the opening of a new ecology, with all the surprise and abundance that word carries. After a decade of being told to dread a single machine, a change of pronoun might be exactly what the argument has been waiting for... (MORE - details)
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Ridley: We’re using the wrong pronouns for AI
https://rationaloptimistsociety.substack...dium=email
INTRO: Most people who talk about artificial intelligence reach, sooner or later, for the singular. There is the AI, the machine, the mind we are about to build, and the only argument left is whether it saves us or finishes us off. Matt Ridley thinks that whole habit of speech is a category error, and at ARC in London this week, the annual gathering of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, the science writer offered something cheerier and more curious instead: stop saying it, and start saying them.
His line was almost a grammar lesson. “We’re using the wrong pronoun,” he told the room, before landing it plainly: “It’s not it. It’s them.” From most speakers that might pass as a debating trick, but Ridley has spent forty years studying how living systems arrange themselves, and he means it as biology rather than wordplay. What is arriving, on his account, is not a single intelligence on a single timeline but a teeming population of them, and once you see the technology that way, almost every fear attached to it changes shape.
That instinct is what makes Ridley such a refreshing voice in a conversation otherwise run by computer scientists and philosophers. Where most of the AI debate borrows its metaphors from software and science fiction, the runaway program, the bottled genie, the god in the machine, he reaches instead for the living world. He looks at the field the way a zoologist looks at a coral reef, and what he sees is not one emerging titan but a habitat beginning to fill up with competitors...
[...] What makes all this worth hearing is how squarely it cuts against the prevailing mood. The loudest voices on AI tend to divide into prophets of doom, who treat a single superintelligence as an extinction event in waiting, and evangelists of hype, who greet the very same machine as a coming messiah. The striking thing is that both camps share a grammar. They are arguing about an it, a one, a single arriving power, and they disagree only over whether to kneel before it or flee from it.
[...] Take the reframing on its own terms and it props open a door the rest of the conversation keeps trying to shut. If we really are getting them and not it, a wild and various population rather than one sovereign mind, then the future of AI looks less like a countdown and more like the opening of a new ecology, with all the surprise and abundance that word carries. After a decade of being told to dread a single machine, a change of pronoun might be exactly what the argument has been waiting for... (MORE - details)