Member-only story
The Hyperbole of Artificial Intelligence
If all the bombast, embellishing, hype, huckstering, blathering, doomsaying and induced night terrors of Artificial Intelligence over the past 18 months has left a bad taste in your mouth, there is good news. There’s an AI powered toothbrush to help get rid of that. If it’s left you exhausted, there’s a mattress with AI to help you sleep better. Oh, and there’s an AI pillow for that AI mattress.
I am sure this will be followed by a toothpaste with AI that sets algorithms dancing about your teeth, fighting those cavities and leaving your breath feeling minty clean! And a shampoo that will have AI powered algorithms slipping about your hair follicles so you can wander down the street gloriously tossing your AI enhanced locks everywhere.
We are in a rather funny place with regard to Artificial Intelligence in our consumerist world today. In large part because absolutely no one, well, maybe some computer and neuroscientists, really knows what AI is or even means. And sometimes, they seem at odds with what AI is, or does. Which is kind of interesting in terms of a revolutionary technology coming into the world like a three-year old tearing around on a sugar high.
I’m not lambasting AI tools here. Rather, looking at the pomp and circumstance of AI in a larger, sociocultural sense of how we are perceiving AI and it’s roles in our…