For many, AI technology inspires hope for the future-the promise of shared human flourishing and collective liberation from drudgery that defines the "good life," but always seems to elude our species. Yet today's AI technology is forged from human-generated data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors that endlessly reflect the same errors, biases and failures of wisdom we are striving to escape. To open new futures for ourselves with these tools is as misguided as gazing into a mirror while trying to climb an uncharted mountain. At this crucial juncture for humanity and our planet, we need something new from AI, and more importantly, from ourselves. We need to find new hope-not to surrender our greatest moral and intellectual ambitions to machines that have none, but to renew those ambitions, collectively, for ourselves. Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be, and what we can be with it. She calls us to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than losing sight of our shared humanity as we gaze dully into our AI mirrors.

For many, technology offers hope for the future—that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome—not by us, but by our machines.

Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time.

To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves.

Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.