For many technology offers hope for the future-that promise of shared human flourishing and
liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies
spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties
are finally overcome-not by us but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures
today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into
immensely powerful but flawed mirrors they reflect the same errors biases and failures of
wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward . They show only where
the data say that we have already been never where we might venture together for the first
time. To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet we will need something
new from AI and from ourselves. Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging prophetic and
philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and
intellectual growth rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of
doom she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible
and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink
what AI is and can be and what we want to be with it.
