Comment Language is important though (Score 4, Interesting) 29
Because when enough people start using a technical term incorrectly, that mistake becomes the "official, most correct" usage of the term in the natural language.
Examples:
CPU - you know, the big beige computer box under your desk, as opposed to the "monitor". Luckily somehow English has escaped from that misuse that was common in the 1990s and 2000s.
"I could care less" - This now means "I couldn't care less" which actually made literal sense.
"Meme" - you know, those silly viral images or animations passed around on socials or the Interweb: Example "Grumpy Cat"
As opposed to its intended scientific meaning as "a unit of information with the property that it can induce its hosts to replicate it and thus carry it forward in time." Examples: the holy books of a religion.
And now we have "AGI" which if we're not careful will come to mean "Agentic AI" or even, an ARM chip used for AI, as opposed to "Artificial General Intelligence".
Examples:
CPU - you know, the big beige computer box under your desk, as opposed to the "monitor". Luckily somehow English has escaped from that misuse that was common in the 1990s and 2000s.
"I could care less" - This now means "I couldn't care less" which actually made literal sense.
"Meme" - you know, those silly viral images or animations passed around on socials or the Interweb: Example "Grumpy Cat"
As opposed to its intended scientific meaning as "a unit of information with the property that it can induce its hosts to replicate it and thus carry it forward in time." Examples: the holy books of a religion.
And now we have "AGI" which if we're not careful will come to mean "Agentic AI" or even, an ARM chip used for AI, as opposed to "Artificial General Intelligence".