The Work That Names Our Present Tense

When a new instrument outpaces the words available to describe it, the naming is not a courtesy performed after the real work is done but is itself part of the work, as Faraday discovered when he had to write to a classicist just to give his apparatus a language it could travel in. The same discipline is being carried out now around autonomous decision systems, where inherited words like AI, automation, and agent each catch a piece of the instrument and miss the whole, making precise new vocabulary not a branding exercise but the condition under which the thing can be seen, governed, and built upon.