it was the Industrial Age, followed by the Information Age, or Digital Age; or Knowledge Age (Bereiter, 2002). and 2.5 decade into the 21st century, the next Age perhaps has arrived — the Age of Pretending.
just saw Richard Stallman gave this lecture at Georgia Tech some two weeks ago, and he coined the term “PI”, no, not private investigator, but Pretend Intelligence:
“…nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all because they don’t understand anything and they don’t know anything… promoted the most for large language models, generators as I call them, because they don’t know anything. They generate text and they don’t
understand really what that text means…Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they’re not. So let’s let’s refuse to do that. So I’ve come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. ” (12:25-12:49)
calling it PI is great, cos very catchy, and cos some singaporeans prided themselves that they like abbreviations a lot (and often these many assumed initialisation is the same as acronym).
was discussing with my new younger friend vera 清雅 (清秀、雅丽, a beautiful name), who happened to share with me an article on the phenomenon of influencers. and influencers essentially banked on “percevied expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness” (Duckwitz & Strasser, 2025, p.2). the keyword here is — percevied. and what’s an (best) act that can influence pple? yes no prize for guessing it, wayang (where one defines wayang as involving some act of pretending, intelligence or otherwise).
it’ll be interesting to observe where all these are going some years down the road, how AI or PI is going to advance humanity, in the domain of human intelligence, pretending, or wayang.