Translating Chinese AI

The Chinese term for artificial intelligence, rengong zhineng (人工智能), was originally introduced to China via Japan in the mid-twentieth century as a localisation of the Japanese term jinkō chinō (人工知能). Whereas the first element of the English compound ‘Artificial Intelligence’ clearly implies artificiality and perhaps even artifice—suggesting that AI is something alien to humanity—the Chinese and Japanese phrases harbour no such association. Rengong zhineng and jinkō chinō translate most faithfully as ‘humanmade intelligence’. The first half of each double compound is composed of two characters 人, literally person or human, and 工, work or labour. These characters define AI as a product of human creation and link it to an entirely different constellation of associations. We can sense the effect of this shift in orientation in popular discourse. There is, for example, a Chinese saying which states that many of the products currently being marketed as AI involve more rengong (人工), manual labour, than zhineng (智能), intelligence (e.g. many ‘AI-enabled technologies’ currently rely on armies of human workers to manually code data and process information instead of using machine-learning algorithms). Such playful language is deeply revealing. It shows how the concept of rengong zhineng in Chinese is intrinsically centred on the human