There's been an endless parade of proclamations over the last few years about an AI golden age. Developers proclaim a new industrial revolution and executives promise frictionless productivity and amazing breakthroughs accelerated by machine intelligence. Every new product seems to boast of its AI capability, no matter how unnecessary.
But that golden sheen has a darker edge. There are more indications that the issues around AI technology are not a small matter to be fixed in the next update, but a persistent, unavoidable element of the technology and its deployment. Some of the concerns are born out of myths about AI, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to worry about. Even if the technology isn't scary, how people use it can be plenty frightening. And solutions offered by the biggest proponents of AI solutions often seem likely to make things worse.
