Editorial of May 1, 2025

Chatting with a Lesser God

Some time ago, in the mid-1990s or so, we human beings created the World Wide Web. We thought, at the time, that this new sensation would bring on a new utopia, a connected world in which borders and differences would disappear, but that was simply not the case. The World Wide Web has not solved our man-made problems. Although it is a fact that we now have access to the knowledge of the world, discontent and polarization have become the norm, inspiring a renewed surge of the discordant far right and far left, and destabilizing democracy and truth.

Today our world also has AI—artificial intelligence—which came upon us by storm a few years ago and is now available everywhere, more fully developed and more fully responsive to what we might come to think of as our needs. Some, perhaps more than some, might believe that AI is able to answer all our questions correctly, and solve, also correctly, all our problems, coming to us as a somewhat “better,” or “more intelligent” and “most human-like” entity, though of course still man-made and robotic. Artificial, that is, which in fact means human-caused, factitious and fake.