Cutting Through the AI Hype

Every day, stories about how Artificial Intelligence is “reshaping society” and “transforming the economy” crowd news headlines. These dramatic narratives are rivaled only by even more grandiose claims about how the impending advent of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI, will foment a full-scale revolution—eliminating the need for work; rendering humans irrelevant (or extinct); and/or rapidly solving our biggest problems, from cancer to climate change. These dynamics are part of the “hype” that often accompanies the introduction of new technologies. When people are uncertain about what an emerging technology’s capabilities will be, or how those capabilities will affect the world, sensationalist narratives tend to rush in to fill that void. Across current AI discourse, this overemphasis on the most extreme possible long-term consequences of AI— both positive and negative—is obscuring a clear-eyed evaluation of the smaller-scale AI issues that are affecting us right now.