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.'