Pioneering computer scientists and mathematicians John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, on 31 August 1955, asked the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a summer workshop at Dartmouth. Their proposal conjectured that every feature of intelligence could be described so precisely that a machine could be made to simulate it. The verb was simulate. McCarthy later said he chose the name artificial intelligence partly to keep clear of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics. A label picked to win a turf war in a funding application now passes for a description of reality. It is false. What we call AI is artificial…