The situation with AI has thrown a shadow across the civilised consensus world-view which was still alive-and-kicking up to 2022.

Most philosophers probably reject this shadow, but the reality is that a huge mass of intelligent and energetic people have endorsed it, and that philosophy has been ruthlessly sidelined by Silicon Valley. The PR executives of the Valley have hyped it beyond recall.  Philosophy has been treated as an old, passé, obsolete scholastic endeavour.

The main problems facing AI are as follows:

1. It has encouraged unrealistic managers to invest unwisely on a scale of trillions of dollars. AI is valued by its users, but not sufficiently to pay for this unprecedented, rash borrowing (in future profits).
2. The scale of the payments which the AI suppliers will have to meet has not yet been taken into account. It needs carefully monitored “training” —which excludes ideological biassing— it will eventually have to pay electricity bills, water bills, output checking staff…
3. The neural networks which have been assembled try to mimic the human brain, but they do not (cannot) mimic the effect of blood supply, hormones, enzymes, or the local cell-growth of new neurones.
4. Silicon Valley seems to be mesmerised by a quest for super-intelligence. This is hopelessly unrealistic. The future cannot be foretold, because it is going to be affected by human decisions. These human decisions are driven by freewill. “The future” is not “there” to be forecast, it is up for grabs.
5. The main reason why AI has been so widely supported is that the mass populations of the advanced world have not been properly educated to develop their critical judgment, thinking, imagination, rigour, discipline still less unegoistic attitudes.