HAMILTON — "It's actually going to be easy to cure aging and cancer," insists David Sinclair, a researcher on aging at Harvard University. Similarly, Elon Musk continues to claim that he will soon land humans on Mars and deploy robotaxis en masse. Major corporations have set carbon-neutrality targets based on highly optimistic forecasts about the potential of carbon-removal technologies. And, of course, many commentators now insist that artificial intelligence "changes everything."
Amid such a confounding mix of hype and genuine technological marvels, are entrepreneurs, scientists and other experts getting ahead of themselves? At the very least, they betray a strong preference for technological solutions to complex problems, as well as an abiding belief that technological progress will make us healthier, wealthier and wiser. "Give us a real-world problem," writes Silicon Valley doyen Marc Andreessen in "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," "and we can invent a technology that will solve it."
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