About the Author
Josh Tyrangiel has spent the past several years reporting on artificial intelligence, with roles first at The Washington Post and now at The Atlantic. Before shifting to full-time AI coverage, he led both Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Media as an executive, and created original news content and documentary features for HBO and Netflix.
What’s the Big Idea?
Artificial intelligence’s most transformative, lasting impact on society will not come from flashy, headline-grabbing tech promises. Instead, it will emerge from practical, accessible tools that help people solve tangible, real-world problems. To grasp AI’s true value, we must tune out overblown hype, center hard real-world evidence, and frame AI as a powerful collaborative assistant that amplifies human capabilities when deployed responsibly.
1. Hype Is the Real Enemy of Good AI
The biggest barrier to AI delivering widespread, meaningful good to the world is not the technology itself—it is the endless, inflated chatter surrounding it. Every week brings a new viral announcement claiming AI will cure cancer, end global poverty, or automate your job out of existence by the end of the month. This constant noise is so loud it completely drowns out the signal of what AI is already doing well.
After years of on-the-ground reporting, Tyrangiel found that the spaces where AI is already working effectively—saving lives in clinical settings, supporting underserved student groups, repairing broken public systems—almost never grab major headlines. These underrated projects are quieter, far less dramatic, and run by teams that prioritize outcomes over media attention.
The hype cycle causes real, measurable harm. It creates wildly unrealistic expectations that inevitably lead to public backlash when AI fails to deliver on impossible promises. It diverts critical investment away from unglamorous but high-impact problems and toward flashy, attention-grabbing demos that solve little to nothing. Most importantly, it leaves ordinary people feeling like AI is an uncontrollable force happening to them, rather than a tool that can be shaped to work for their benefit.
The first critical step to understanding AI’s true potential is turning down the volume on the loudest voices selling AI as either a silver bullet or an apocalypse, and focusing on what the technology is already doing right.
About the Author
