“I’m not intelligent, I just act that way.”

In 1984, Vicks 44 Cough Medicine ran possibly the most inane television commercial in history (which is saying a lot). They hired a B-list actor named Chris Robinson, who played a doctor on the soap opera “General Hospital,” to deliver this line:

“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.”

He then went on to use his non-expertise to extoll the virtues of Vicks 44, as if somehow his pretend doctoring gave him credibility when it came to actual medicine. Shockingly, the ad worked, so much so that two years later, Vicks used another ‘doctor’ from the soap opera “The Young and the Restless,” to do the same ad (links in first comment).

Why did these ads work? Because people confused imitation medical expertise with real expertise. If it looks like a doctor, talks like a doctor, and does doctor-ish things, it must be a doctor, right?

Now consider AI.

Let’s get this straight. AI is not intelligent. It’s not sentient. It has no emotions, empathy, hostility, feelings of affection, or any other of the traits that make us human. It is a very sophisticated amalgamation of data and mathematics, running on the most advanced computing hardware ever invented. Nothing more.

AI is not evil any more than the Pythagorean theorem is evil. It’s not benevolent, any more than a quadratic equation is benevolent. It’s not intelligent, any more than Euler’s Identity formula is intelligent.

It just does a really, really good job of acting that way.

Don’t lose sight of that.

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