Breaking the Spell of AI’s Fairy Tale Wish

The public release of OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022 was, in the jargon of political science, a “critical juncture” in which AI’s potential was made manifest to ordinary people. Following the initial enthusiasm, however, came a strong undercurrent of skepticism about the human costs of AI advances. In 1958, Hannah Arendt presciently observed:

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfilment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. … What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse. ¹