Baria and Cross ask who the brain-as-computer metaphor harms

A 2021 essay on arXiv by Alexis T. Baria of the Society of Spoken Art and Keith Cross of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa is worth pulling back up, because the question it puts to neuroscience is the one that keeps coming back around when people argue about what to call the systems being sold as AI.

The authors take the Computational Metaphor, the habit of comparing the brain to a computer and the computer to a brain, and note it is the most prominent metaphor in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. That much is uncontroversial inside the field. Their move is to observe that the internal debate has almost entirely been about scientific utility, whether the metaphor helps or hinders the work of the lab, and that considerably less attention has gone to how the metaphor operates outside the lab and shapes society's interactions with AI.

From there they connect the metaphor to publicized concerns that AI perpetuates racism, genderism and ableism, and argue the term 'artificial intelligence' is itself misplaced and that a new lexicon is needed to describe these computational systems. The framing they push the neuroscience community toward is one sentence long and does most of the work in the piece: whom does it help and whom does it harm.

The honest caveat is that this is an invitation essay, not an empirical study. It names harms and calls the vocabulary into question, but the retrieved abstract does not lay out the replacement lexicon, name the specific mechanisms tying the metaphor to each harm, or measure uptake of the critique inside neuroscience departments. Read it as an agenda-setting piece, not settled analysis.

What is worth watching, five years on, is whether the terminology fight the authors called for actually arrives at the places where the word 'intelligence' is currently load-bearing, in product marketing, in regulation, and in the press. If it does, teams whose framing depends on the brain-computer metaphor will be answering the authors' question in public whether they want to or not.