AI makes most of us nervous, but can it also make us more purposeful?

Recently, one of us was guest-teaching a humanities class on artificial intelligence. He asked students a simple question. Had they noticed themselves becoming more “attached” to their favorite chatbot? “For example,” he asked, “do you find yourself saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to the chatbot more than you used to?” Nearly every head nodded. “Why?” he asked. One student raised her hand. “So if AI does take over,” she said, “it’ll remember that I was nice to it.” The class laughed—but not entirely. The fear and hype around AI When we see public conversations about AI, they tend to swing wildly between hype and catastrophe. On one end, we see promises of unprecedented productivity and creativity. On the other hand, there is no shortage of warnings about mass unemployment, loss of human agency, and even the extinction of our species. In a national survey we conducted in December of more than 1,600 Americans, roughly four in 10 reported being very concerned