IBM rebranded AI as cognitive computing to avoid connotations of inscrutable machine power

Evidence

It is therefore understandable that Green portrays machine intelligence—and specifically IBM’s anthropomorphized artificial intelligence system called “Watson”—as the authoritative savior of an apparatus threatened by waste and incomprehensibility. Machine intelligence is referred to as “cognitive computing” at IBM, presumably to avoid the uneasy connotations of inscrutable power associated with words like machine and artificial. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 657

Categorization

• CANDY: A short, tweetable nugget: IBM called AI ‘cognitive computing’ to dodge the scary word ‘machine.’
• XREF: connects to: Tech firms avoided the term AI due to dystopian sci-fi connotations — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 690

Broader Connections

• Tech firms avoided the term AI due to dystopian sci-fi connotations #corroborates (0.92) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 690