Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark hope for a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today’s powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful and useful but deeply flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we are striving to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show where our data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time. To meet today’s grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves. This book makes a case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, the book encourages readers to pursue technology that helps them recover their sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. The book calls readers to rethink what AI is and can be, and what they want to be with it.