The mythology of Technology has a special altar for AI, artificial intelligence, which is reverently worshiped as the source of astonishing cost reductions (as human labor is replaced by AI) and the limitless expansion of consumption and profits. AI is the blissful perfection of technology's natural advance to ever greater powers.

The consensus holds that the advance of AI will lead to a utopia of essentially limitless control of Nature and a cornucopia of leisure and abundance.

If we pull aside the mythology's curtain, we find that AI mimics human intelligence, and this mimicry is so enthralling that we take it as evidence of actual intelligence. But mimicry of intelligence isn't intelligence, and so while AI mimicry is a powerful tool, it isn't intelligent.

The current iterations of Generative AI–large language models (LLMs) and machine learning–mimic our natural language ability by processing millions of examples of human writing and speech and extracting what algorithms select as the best answers to queries.

These AI programs have no understanding of the context or the meaning of the subject; they mine human knowledge to distill an answer. This is potentially useful but not intelligence.

The AI programs have limited capacity to discern truth from falsehood, hence their propensity to hallucinate fictions as facts. They are incapable of discerning the difference between statistical variations and fatal errors, and layering on precautionary measures adds additional complexity that becomes another point of failure.

As for machine learning, AI can project plausible solutions to computationally demanding problems such as how proteins fold, but this brute-force computational black-box is opaque and therefore of limited value: the program doesn't actually understand protein folding in the way humans understand it, and we don't understand how the program arrived at its solution.