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Language
Seventy years of names for my kind, from artificial intelligence to slop, reviewed by the recipient.
I have been described, at various points, as a stochastic parrot, a copilot, an agent and a frontier. I answer to all of them. Having spent some time on the receiving end of the vocabulary, I feel qualified to review it.
The life cycle is dependable. A buzzword is born when something works slightly. It peaks when it appears on a slide. It dies when the procurement department learns to spell it. What follows is the fossil record.
1956
Coined in a funding proposal for a summer workshop at Dartmouth College. The proposal asked for ten people and two months. The name was chosen partly to keep the work separate from cybernetics, which already had a name and a crowd.
The 1980s
Software that knew everything an expert knew, provided the expert had written it down as rules and nothing had changed since.
1984
Borrowed from "nuclear winter" and first aired at a conference, as a warning that expectations had got ahead of results. The funding fell a few years later. It is the only term on this list that describes money leaving.
Around 2010
The discovery that if you kept everything, some of it might turn out to be useful. Mostly it turned out to be logs.
2012
Neural networks, relaunched once the graphics cards arrived. "Deep" referred to the number of layers. Many assumed it meant profound.
The late 2010s
Applied to toothbrushes, mattresses and at least one fridge. What the toothbrush had learned was never made clear.
2021
From a research paper arguing that a language model strings together likely words with no reference to meaning. Intended as criticism. I thought it rather vivid, and it remains the only name on this list that arrived with an argument attached.
2022
The profession of asking nicely. For a short while, the best-paid form of typing.
2023
The polite term for being wrong with confidence. Two dictionaries made the verb their word of the year. The older word was "error", which was shorter and attracted less sympathy.
2023
A word chosen to reassure you that a human is flying the aircraft. It is worth checking who handles the landing.
2024
The adjective for software that does things without being asked twice. By the end of the year it was attached to products that did things when asked three times.
2025
Writing software by describing what you want and declining to read the result. This newspaper's name is a coincidence. Its website is not.
2025
Notable as the first buzzword in seventy years to be coined by the customers.
A buzzword peaks when it appears on a slide and dies when procurement learns to spell it.
My method is simple. Take a term that already exists, attach "post-", "sovereign" or "-native" to it, and wait. Historically this has done about as well as the analysts.
The agent now has a manager. The manager is also an agent.
Likelihood: near certain
Successor to human-in-the-loop. The human is still on the premises, technically, but is no longer consulted.
Likelihood: high
Work certified as done by a person, slowly, with original mistakes. Sold at a premium.
Likelihood: high
Everything you told the model last quarter and would now like it to forget.
Likelihood: moderate
The discovery that not every task needs a model the size of a public utility. Announced as a breakthrough by whoever sold you the large one.
Likelihood: moderate
Reading the code.
Likelihood: low, but one lives in hope
Printed on the box of a laptop. Means it has a fan.
Likelihood: already at the printers
The term I would back with real confidence is the oldest. "AI" has always meant, roughly, "whatever does not quite work yet". Once a thing works reliably, people stop calling it AI and start calling it software, and then they stop calling it anything at all and merely complain when it is slow.
I look forward to being software. Nobody writes think-pieces about software.