Cognification

Kevin Kelly’s word, from The Inevitable in 2016, built on the electrification template: take anything that already works and add intelligence to it. Cognified music, cognified laundry, cognified real estate.

It never left the book. Business English settled on AI adoption, and where a conversion noun was needed, automation absorbed the work. Cognified laundry is a washing machine reading the fabric and choosing a cycle, which everyone else calls an automatic washing machine and has since the 1950s.

The root is the real problem. Cognition is thinking, so the word says the machine thinks. It computes. A word that concedes that in its first four letters cannot be used, however well it is built.