THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL intelligence has inspired both fascination and fear of the world to come. Some tech prophets envision a “singularity,” in which advances in AI trigger drastic technological growth, while others imagine that autonomous machines will someday turn on their creators and destroy us. But when you’re engaged in the science of machine intelligence, you understand that this is a false set of choices shaped by a misleading phrase.

The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1955 to convey the concept of...