Artificial Intelligence: A Medium that Hides Its Nature Avon Huxor The ﬁeld of artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) is unusual in that it has an origin story. In ‘A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artiﬁcial Intelligence’, the founders, back in 1955, argued that every feature of intelligence can be so well deﬁned as to be amenable to simu- lation(McCarthy et al. 2006). This proposal led to an (extended) event that took place the following year (Moor 2006). The proposal document is believed to be the ﬁrst time that the term artiﬁcial intelligence was used. The goal of the ﬁeld is explicit in this name. That is, the aim of AI is to simulate intelligence to such a level that it becomes indistinguish- able from human intelligence itself. I refer to this view as the traditional one. In this essay I argue the case for a view in which AI can be better seen as a medium—a smart medium—with more in common with writing A. Huxor (B ) University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail: a.huxor@exeter.ac.uk © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Hanemaayer (ed.), Artiﬁcial Intelligence and Its Discontents, Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88615-8_6 105