War
AI is making weapons faster, cheaper, and more autonomous. It has not made war less likely. If anything, it's lowering the barrier to starting one.
Did AI solve it?
Did AI Solve It Yet?
AI is writing our emails, taking our jobs, and racking up a massive energy bill. The least it could do is solve a few of the hard problems. Is it?
The big ones
Poverty
AI is creating enormous wealth. It is not distributing it. The people building AI are getting rich. The people being replaced by AI are not.
Disease
AI is good at reading medical images, screening drug compounds, and writing research papers about itself. People are still getting sick and dying from preventable causes.
Everything else
Cancer
AI is good at reading scans and finding drug candidates faster. It has not cured cancer. We'd be a lot more forgiving about the whole job displacement thing if it had.
Climate change
AI can make power grids smarter and weather forecasts better. Emissions are still going up. Also, training AI models uses a lot of electricity, which is a bit awkward.
AI alignment
We are building increasingly powerful AI systems and we do not know how to make sure they do what we actually want. You'd think this would be a bigger deal.
Fusion
Fusion has been thirty years away for seventy years. AI has not changed this. It has helped with plasma control, which is nice but is not the same as a working power plant.
Aging
AI can help identify longevity-related genes and screen for senolytic drugs. You are still getting older. So is everyone you know.
Hunger
The world produces enough food to feed everyone. It doesn't. AI has not changed this, because the problem was never a lack of information about who's hungry.
Traffic
AI can time traffic lights better and route you around jams. You are still sitting in traffic. So is everyone else whose routing app found the same shortcut.
Centering a <div>
With all the jobs AI has taken, you'd think it could at least center a div on the first try. It can't. It will suggest flexbox, grid, absolute positioning, and margin: auto, sometimes all four at once.