Jamil El Imad Rebrands AI as Artificial Intellect

During an interview at the AI4 conference in Las Vegas, Jamil El Imad, an honorary senior research fellow at Imperial College London, proposed renaming artificial intelligence to artificial intellect. El Imad, who spent 35 years working on assembly code and statistical approximation, argued that current systems merely compute, analyze, and store data faster than humans without possessing genuine awareness. While intellect represents the ability to answer questions from an existing body of knowledge, true intelligence requires biological elements like imagination, emotion, and original thought.

According to El Imad, achieving artificial general intelligence remains an impossible milestone because of the sheer complexity of the human brain. He pointed out that neither IBM nor Nvidia can currently simulate the brain's 86 billion neurons, making it the only human organ that cannot be replicated digitally. Because of this limitation, he warned against deploying fully autonomous systems in the enterprise, arguing that removing human accountability risks creating what he termed digital tyranny. Instead, businesses should focus on guided autonomous AI that maintains human oversight.

Despite fears of widespread job displacement, El Imad views the rise of automation as an opportunity to eliminate repetitive, boring tasks. He believes this shift will allow workers to focus on creativity and empathy, even predicting the rise of new roles like the humanizer to preserve interpersonal connections in the workplace. For businesses to achieve sustainable profits rather than short-term gains, he advised leaders to actively retrain their workforces and foster compassionate, inclusive corporate cultures that value human traits machines cannot replicate.