Precision Matters: AI and the Triumph of Strategic Ambiguity

This paper addresses the long-standing practice of describing computing in anthropomorphic language and demonstrates how this linguistic choice has had profound consequences. We reintroduce a moment in the late 1950s and early 1960s during which some computer advocates relied on human-focused language to explain what computers could do to a broader public, while others rejected this strategically ambiguous rhetoric in favor of sometimes more awkward, but more technically precise, language. Strategic ambiguity as a default mode of communication has become one of the sources for the ongoing assumption that human competition or commensurability is the ultimate goal of AI systems, and we consider returning to the historical example of those who favored technical precision over technical persuasion.