Wednesday, 1 July 2026 at 7 pm
In recent years, we have witnessed attempts to normalise the everyday use of AI technologies in our lives: generating everything from business emails and shopping lists to entire websites and visual identities, the use of AI is presented as the ultimate - and inevitable - solution to every first-world problem.
The risks these technologies bring along - the long-term impact on cognitive abilities, the unemployment crisis, the exploitation of an invisible workforce, energy consumption, water and electricity needed to run data centres, the disruption to the quality of life for residents living near them - are routinely explained away by their proponents, who argue that the end justifies the means (and the victims too). Indeed, unquestioning support and faith in the supposedly salvific power of AI technology are all that is left to us in this state of polycrisis - for only AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, is capable of resolving all the problems humanity has got itself into.
In interviews and blog posts, tech evangelists lavish praise on the excellence of artificial intelligence, sketching out a hazy utopia in which technological advancements will lead to significant improvements in our living conditions. The details of these saviour-like predictions always remain vague, and the methods behind them secret; they are best compared to politicians’ campaign promises.
These utopian visions of an AI future are not usually dismissed as fairy tales, thanks to one convenient marketing trick: they are a collection of fossilised ideas about the usefulness of technological progress, the cult of the technological genius, and the idea of AI's inevitability. All of these create a narrative that helps to overshadow the obvious flaws and shortcomings of artificial intelligence.
In this Session, Bookworms Ema Marača and Izabela Šegedin will discuss these very narratives that AI and techno-overlords are trying to pull the wool over our eyes with, focusing on Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, and his spiritual enemy, Elon Musk, whose company xAI developed the chatbot Grok. We will analyse the narratives about the inevitability of AI, flirt with Luddism and explore: is technological progress always a good thing? What is technological progress, anyway? Is perpetual growth really possible? And finally, is the race to create AGI just one big ego trip?
Join us on Wednesday, 1 July at 7 pm at KIC!