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As a descriptor, artificial intelligence (AI) is polysemous and problematic. Like the muddled “big data” before it, this term du jour tends to be invoked broadly and haphazardly, by boosters as well as critics in some cases, making it difficult to discern exactly what AI is supposed to represent in the world, let alone how it is intended to work as a means of performing human tasks—from recognizing images, blocking spam email, and serving up algorithmic newsfeed recommendations to the more complicated challenges of autonomously flying drones and driving cars. Because science fiction and Hollywood so often depict AI in the form of sentient machines, many people associate AI with “thinking” robots or computers that can mimic human reasoning and behavior with uncanny accuracy—though, as Meredith Broussard points out in this special forum and in her book Artificial Intelligence: How Computers Misunderstand …