Every boardroom has heard it. Every procurement checklist includes it. Every investor deck now features it somewhere between the mission statement and the revenue model. “AI ethics” has become the term that signals seriousness without necessarily delivering it. That gap deserves examination—because the weakness of the term is structural, and structural weaknesses tend to surface at expensive moments.

The two words—intelligence and ethics—contain separate category errors. Fix those errors, and a more useful question emerges, one that belongs at the beginning of AI strategy, before the build, before the contract, and well before the incident.

The first misnomer: Intelligence

Call it a useful fiction that escaped its cage. “Artificial intelligence” began as research shorthand and became infrastructure. Along the way, the word intelligence acquired a passenger it never asked to carry: the assumption that what machines do resembles what humans do, only faster, better, more powerful.

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