Episode #1062 of Thinking With Mitch Joel is now live.

We’re being told that artificial intelligence is going to change everything. That it will transform our jobs… revolutionize education… solve humanity’s biggest problems and eventually become more intelligent than we are. Billions of dollars are being invested in making these systems more powerful. And we’re increasingly being asked to accept that this future is inevitable. But what if we’ve confused the technological possibilities of AI with a story we’ve convinced ourselves must come true That’s one of the central conversation starters with Virginia Dignum, professor of Responsible Artificial Intelligence at Umea University in Sweden. Virginia has spent more than four decades researching artificial intelligence, ethics and governance, and her new book, The AI Paradox – How To Make Sense Of A Complex Future, challenges many of the assumptions shaping our current relationship with this technology.

Virginia believes we’ve become so consumed with what AI might eventually become that we’re losing sight of what it actually is.

She questions whether the technology companies building these systems have become trapped in their own narratives of inevitable progress, and whether simply investing in more computing power will bring us any closer to the artificial general intelligence being promised. One of the most interesting ideas we explore is whether we’re asking the wrong questions about intelligence itself. We’ve spent decades comparing computers to the human brain, but why should human intelligence be the model we’re trying to replicate? The opportunity isn’t to build machines that think like us, but to develop technologies that help us accomplish things we otherwise couldn’t. We also dig into education, where AI may be exposing something fundamentally broken. If our education systems have spent generations rewarding people for producing the right answers rather than learning how to think, what happens when machines become extraordinarily capable at generating those answers? Virginia argues that a mature AI society wouldn’t simply be one with the most advanced technology. It would be one where people have meaningful choices about whether, when and how AI is used. That challenges everything from the current race toward sovereign AI infrastructure to the assumption that adoption should always come before purpose. What I appreciate about Virginia’s perspective is that she’s neither dismissing AI’s extraordinary potential nor accepting the industry’s predictions as destiny. She’s asking us to recognize the contradictions, understand the limitations and take greater responsibility for the choices we’re making.

Listen to my conversation with Virginia Dignum here: Responsible AI With Virginia Dignum – TWMJ #1062.

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