What is the difference between a rat and a squirrel? There is no difference — squirrels are just rats with better PR. So runs the joke. Sometimes I think of artificial intelligence like a squirrel with excellent marketing, its overpaid pundits assuring us that nothing more important has ever happened in history, that it is the answer to our every question and the solution to our every problem. The tale is repeated so many times that it seems more real than our lived experience.
I have heard people rant about the marvels of AI while grappling with its many glitches, whether it is a digital assistant misunderstanding them, facial recognition not recognizing them, or a chatbot suggesting that they put glue in their food. We suffer from optimism bias to such an extent that seemingly no technology failure, no matter how epic, will dissuade us from believing the story that technology will be our savior, and that whatever problems it has now will not be there in the future.