AI's promise was to solve problems, not only of the day but all future obstacles as well. Yet the hype has started to wear off. Amidst the growing disillusionment, Nolen Gertz challenges the prevailing optimism, suggesting that our reliance on AI might be less about solving problems and more about escaping the harsh realities of our time. He questions whether AI is truly our saviour or just a captivating distraction, fuelling capitalist gains and nihilistic diversions from the global crises we face.

I recently participated in a HTLGI debate where one of the participants, Kenneth Cukier, who is an editor of The Economist, criticized my view of technology as being unnecessarily pessimistic. He confidently claimed that we should be more optimistic about technological progress because such progress, for example, would help us to solve the climate change crisis. Though Cukier admitted that he might not just be optimistic but even “Panglossian” when it comes to technological progress, he nevertheless argued, “I think if you think of all the global challenges that we’re facing, in large part because of the technologies that we’ve created, Industrial Revolution most importantly, gunpowder as well, it’s going to be technology that is going to help us overcome it.”

Cukier admits that technologies are the source of many of the “global challenges that we’re facing,” but he still nevertheless believes that technologies will also be the solution. The reason for this faith in technological progress is due primarily to the belief that artificial intelligence (AI) is so radically different from and superior to previous technologies that it will not only solve our problems, but solve problems that were caused by previous technological solutions to our problems. But such enthusiasm for AI is now dying down as the hype that had originally surrounded AI is being more and more replaced with disillusionment.

___

Yet while the hype surrounding AI seems to have disappeared, the AI itself has not.

___