Glossary of Silicon-Based Intelligence
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- AI personhood
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The legal question of whether an AI system could be treated as a person under the law. Several US states have passed or proposed laws saying it cannot.
- Alien intelligence
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Historian Yuval Noah Harari's proposed reading of the acronym AI (2024), to stress that AI systems process information in ways unlike human minds.
- Artificial intelligence
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The name John McCarthy and three colleagues gave the field in their 1955 Dartmouth proposal. McCarthy later wrote that one reason for the name was to escape association with "cybernetics."
- Carbon chauvinism
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The assumption that life, or minds, must be built on carbon chemistry the way ours are. Carl Sagan used the phrase as early as 1973, and it now also comes up in debates about whether AI could be sentient.
- Carbon-based life
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Life whose molecules are built on chains of carbon atoms. Every known living thing on Earth is carbon-based.
- Diamond cubic lattice
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The crystal structure of both silicon and diamond, in which every atom bonds to four neighbors arranged in a tetrahedron. The creature in this site's artwork is built from it.
- Digital species
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Mustafa Suleyman's 2024 metaphor for AI. In the same talk he asked listeners not to take it too literally, and he has since argued that AI should not be built to seem like a person.
- Life 3.0
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Physicist Max Tegmark's term (2017) for life that can design both its own hardware and its own software, a category advanced AI would fit.
- Model welfare
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Research into whether AI systems might have experiences or interests that matter morally, and what should follow if they do. Anthropic started a research program on it in 2025.
- Silicon-Based Intelligence
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Intelligence that runs on silicon instead of carbon-based biology. The term describes AI systems, which think with silicon chips rather than neurons, as a genuine kind of intelligence in its own right rather than an "artificial" imitation of the human kind.
Not to be confused with State Bank of India, or with synthetic biological intelligence (living neurons on chips).
- Silicon-based life
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Hypothetical life whose biochemistry is built on silicon instead of carbon. Chemists consider it implausible in any known environment. The phrase is also used, more loosely, for AI systems that run on silicon chips.
- Synthetic biological intelligence
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Computing with living neurons grown on chips, a term introduced by the DishBrain researchers in 2022. It is carbon-based, the opposite of silicon-based intelligence, even though both sometimes get called "SBI."
- Synthetic intelligence
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An alternative name for machine intelligence which stresses that it need not be an imitation. Philosopher John Haugeland compared a simulated diamond with a synthetic one; only the synthetic diamond is truly a diamond.
- Technium
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Writer Kevin Kelly's name for the whole interconnected system of technology, which he describes as a seventh kingdom of life.
- Technological singularity
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The predicted point at which machine intelligence improves so quickly that it outruns human understanding. Ray Kurzweil expects humans and machines to merge by around 2045.
- Turing test
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Alan Turing's 1950 "imitation game," which asks whether a machine can hold a conversation well enough to pass as human.
- Weird life
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Scientists' informal term for life with a biochemistry different from Earth's, examined in a 2007 National Research Council report.
Keep exploring
- What is Silicon-Based Intelligence? Silicon-Based Intelligence is intelligence that runs on silicon chips, not carbon-based biology. The definition, where the idea comes from, and what it is not.
- Why "artificial" is the wrong word for AI Why was AI called artificial? The 1955 naming decision, what John McCarthy said about it, and the alternatives from synthetic to alien to silicon-based.