wedrifid comments on The UFAI among us - Less Wrong Discussion
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Question: How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg?
Answer: I don't care, your grandma isn't artificial just because you call natural artificial. Presenting a counter-intuitive conclusion based on basically redefining the language isn't "deep". Sometimes things are just simple.
Perhaps you have another point to make about the relative unimportance of the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' in the grand scheme of things? There is certainly a point to be made there, and one that could be made without just using the words incorrectly.
But that would be no fun.
(For the perplexed: see No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices. Attaching too many unrelated meanings to a word is a bad idea that leads to incorrect implicit inferences. Meaning is meaning, even if we don't quite know what it is, grandma and corporations are not Unfriendly AIs, and natural selection doesn't produce artificial things.)
It does, but indirectly.
Corporations are artificial, and they are intelligent. Therefore, they are artificial intelligences.
(ADDED: Actually this is an unimportant semantic point. What's important is how much we can learn about something that we all agree we can call "AI", from corporations. Deciding this on the basis of whether you can apply the name "AI" to them is literally thinking in circles.)