Artificial intelligence may be the most powerful tool humanity has ever built. That is exactly why it deserves our best thinking, not our worst fears.
The printing press was blamed for spreading heresy and chaos. Electricity, cars, radio, television and the internet were each greeted with predictions of ruin. Some of the worries were real, and people worked hard to solve them. Most of the worst predictions never came true. What did come true, again and again, was that new tools, guided well, made human lives longer, richer, safer and freer.
Abundance, accelerated
In Abundance, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue that exponential technologies take things that were scarce and make them plentiful. A smartphone today holds more computing power, maps, music, books and knowledge than a head of state could command a few decades ago. AI pushes this further: expertise that once belonged to a few, a doctor’s eye, a tutor’s patience, a translator’s skill, can increasingly reach anyone with a phone.
Protein structures known
Shared freely with scientists worldwide. Its makers won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The power of a personal tutor
The average classroom student does better than half the class.
The average tutored student did better than 98% of the classroom group (Bloom, 1984). AI could bring that tutor to every child.
What AI can do for people
Faster science
Mapping proteins in hours instead of years, finding new materials and medicines, and speeding up the slow work of discovery.
Better health
Helping doctors read scans, spot disease earlier and bring good medical advice to places with too few doctors.
A tutor for every child
Patient, personal help in a child’s own language, at their own pace. Education is where the gains may be greatest.
Cleaner energy
Better batteries, smarter grids, more accurate weather forecasts and less waste in farming and industry.
The future of AI is not something that happens to us. It is something we build.Serious, but solvable
Intelligent Optimism is not blind. AI brings real risks, and they deserve serious attention from scientists, governments, companies and citizens. To borrow Steven Pinker’s phrase about other great challenges, they are serious but solvable.
Problems are solved by people who believe solutions are possible. Fatalism does not make anyone safer; it only takes the most thoughtful people out of the room.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Alan Kay, computer scientistThe arc bends because people bend it. Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc shows that moral progress came from reason, science and the widening of our circle of concern. The same tools, applied with care, are how we make AI serve everyone.
What an intelligent optimist does
Learn how these tools work and use them well. Teach young people to think critically about what AI tells them. Support good rules and open research. Celebrate the breakthroughs, name the risks honestly, and keep humans at the centre.
Drawing on: Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance (2012) · Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now (2018) · Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc (2015) · Benjamin Bloom, “The 2 Sigma Problem” (1984) · Google DeepMind and EMBL-EBI, AlphaFold Protein Structure Database · RCSB Protein Data Bank · Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024