There is no dataset for grief.

No metric for justice.

No optimizer for legitimacy.

And yet we keep bringing the Hammer of AI to every problem we face. Climate change. Pandemics. Cancer. Energy. War. Political corruption. There is no problem that the omnipresent, all-knowing, all-mighty artificial superintelligence will not eventually crack.

This is a religion. Technology is its faith. Silicon Valley is its Promised Land. Entrepreneurs are its prophets. And we are all believers.

I should know. I used to be one.

In my latest piece on Singularity Weblog, I argue that some problems do bend to computation: fusion, protein folding, the genome. But others do not. They are not computable, only livable. And when we hammer them anyway, things break. Sometimes the thing that breaks is the problem. Sometimes it is us.

When you have a hammer, the world is full of nails. When you have a Hammer of AI, the world is full of marriages and meanings, conflicts and griefs, all mistaken for nails.

What problem in your life refuses to be a nail?

(https://www.singularityweblog.com/hammer-of-ai/)

This Manichean silver-bullet thinking is the source of the Hammer of AI.

When the Tool Misses the Target

The Hammer of AI is what happens when we apply computation to questions computation was never built to answer.