To name something is to define what it can do, what it means, how we relate to it, what power it holds over us and we over it.

We can keep reaching for metaphors of the past - tools, assistants, minds, intelligences - and keep getting the politics they encode.

Or we can choose terms that encode the politics we want: human agency, collective benefit, individual sovereignty, honest assessment of what this is and isn’t.

Fork. Construct. Ansible. Daemon. Symbiont. Cognitive... See more

In AI, we have something genuinely new - a category of technology that doesn’t fit our existing frames - and we’re trying to describe it with words inherited from the past. Every term we reach for either undersells the thing or oversells it.

“Assistant” makes it sound like a slightly upgraded Clippy. “Tool” makes it sound like a hammer.... See more

The fight over vocabulary is never just semantic, it’s always about power, permission, and what becomes possible.

The words that stick are borrowed, not invented. They come from fields where they already do work - software, biology, science fiction, political economy - and get reapplied to open up new ways of thinking. The best borrowed words don’t just describe; they import entire frameworks of understanding, entire sets of questions, entire ways of thinking... See more

Our current terminology clusters into two failing camps, and both serve interests that aren’t ours.

The diminishing frame - tool, assistant, software, program, bot - licenses cognitive outsourcing without accountability. It creates regulatory blindspots because you can’t harm a tool, you have no obligations to a tool. It permits surveillance under... See more