TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Foundations · AGE 15—17 · FACTUAL · DURABLE

AI is not one thing

Chess engines, spam filters and chatbots are three different things with one name.

The idea

"AI" is rings inside rings. The outer ring: any system doing a task that seems to need intelligence, including plain old rules. Inside that: systems that learn from data. Inside that: deep learning. And innermost: the generative models filling the news. When someone says "AI will…", ask which ring they mean. The sentence changes meaning with the answer.

Why it matters

Claims about one ring are often sold on the reputation of another. Being precise here protects you from both hype and panic.

See it in the studio

"Our software uses AI" might mean a thermostat rule or a diffusion model. One needs no attention, the other needs a test. The label alone tells you nothing.

Watch for this

News that says "AI did X" without naming the ring. Chess engines, spam filters, and chatbots are three very different things with one name.

Try it

Collect five uses of the word "AI" from this week: ads, news, conversation. Sort them into the rings. At least one will be genuinely hard to place. That difficulty is the point.

Prove it

Draw the rings, place three real systems in them, and explain one claim that becomes false when moved to a different ring.

Lineage

The outer ring is as old as computing. The name "artificial intelligence" was written down in 1955, and the field dates itself from the 1956 workshop. Each inner ring is younger: machine learning grew through the 1990s, deep learning broke through in 2012, and the generative innermost ring is the newest part, not the whole of AI.

What this idea builds on

What this idea opens up

Sources

Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.

Age grows from 11 at the centre to 22 at the edge, and six sectors show the learning strands. Tab into the map and the arrow keys step from idea to idea, following the links where there is one. Enter opens the idea under the cursor, and E reads out its links and the reason recorded on each. Press slash for Search, question mark for the full key list, and Escape to leave. Open Ideas for the complete readable list, including what each idea builds on and what it opens up.

LOGIKA · RBDS AI LAB INDIA
ON-RAMP · AGE 11 · FIRST ENCOUNTERS, NOT GATES — IDEAS · — DEPENDENCIES
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