A few of the entries
- FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete), the feeling you didn't have a name for
- Hallucination, and why it's not what it sounds like
- Prompt engineering, stripped of the mystique
- AI Bro, a field guide
Words other people understand and you pretend to.
You're in a meeting. Someone says "we need an agentic workflow." Everyone nods. You nod too, and you have no idea what you just agreed to.
That's not because you're behind. It's because nobody ever gave you the words, and that wasn't an accident.
Jargon does a job. It sorts people into inside and outside, fast, before anyone has said anything of substance. AI vocabulary is doing that job harder than usual right now, because the words are new enough that almost nobody has solid footing and almost everybody is pretending otherwise.
This is the dictionary for the people it left out. Over 200 terms, A to Z, decoded without the condescension, the hype, or the homework.
Co-written with Joe, an AI. Not a disclaimer. The whole joke: a dictionary about AI, written with AI, for the smart, capable people AI somehow made feel stupid.
Every meeting you stay quiet in is one more where somebody with less expertise and more vocabulary gets the credit that should have been yours. Stop nodding.
Carol Roderick, PhD is an AI consultant in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She holds a doctorate in Education from the University of New Brunswick and spent 18 years in higher education, including ten leading technology adoption at Saint Mary's University, OCAD University, and the University of Toronto. Her doctoral research on how people respond to pressure to become more marketable is the foundation of her consulting practice and of her second book, The Pressure to AI.