Ilan Manor
According to Dan Kotliar, technological advancements are accompanied by a certain degree of hype, or hyperbolic discourse. The internet, for example, was accompanied by a democratization hype with scholars and pundits arguing that the internet would enable new forms of democratic participation. Social media was associated with a revolutionary hype which suggested that it would help topple tyrants, despots and dictators who could no longer exert total control over public opinion. The Arab Spring protests help boost this. Over the past two years, the world has been in the grips of an “AI hype”. Journalists, tech moguls and academics have all stated that AI will radically change daily life, impacting numerous professions while altering how knowledge is produced, how art is created, how citizens are policed, how policy is formulated and how human relationships are formed. AI doctors will replace physicians, AI bots will displace psychologists, AI coders will replace tech employees, while AI agents will replace lawyers and legislators. These predictions all suggest that AI is fundamentally different from previous technological advancements. The “AI moment” is an evolutionary one as humanity is about to evolve into a new state of AI-enhanced existence.
Hypes can be both positive and negative. The advent of the internet was also accompanied by concerns of disparities between rich and poor, or between those that could afford an internet connection and those that would be left out of the new digital town square. This is also true of AI with some warning that AIs could become so advanced that they “go rogue”, ignore their programming and unleash unparalleled catastrophes such as nuclear wars. What is most noteworthy about technological hypes is that they shape state policies. Hypes are visions of the future. They are cognitive roadmaps that define a set of possible futures. Yet these visions of the future are limiting as they prevent policy makers from using their imagination or leveraging new technologies in new and original ways. Instead, policy makers come to view technologies through the narrow prism of several dominant hypes. Presently, states and policy makers seem to view AI through four dominant hypes: Bloom, Boom, Gloom and Doom.
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