"The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist," Karl Marx once said. We have seen over and over again throughout history how technological inventions determine the dominant mode of production and with it the type of political authority present in a society. So what will artificial intelligence give us? Who will capitalise on this new technology, which is not only becoming a dominant productive force in our societies (just like the hand mill and the steam mill once were) but, as we keep reading in the news, also appears to be "fast escaping our control"? Could AI take on a life of its own, like so many seem to believe it will, and single-handedly decide the course of our history? Or will it end up as yet another technological invention that serves a particular agenda and benefits a certain subset of humans?

That is, the Van Gogh Test for sheer creativity. This past Thursday night, Discovery Institute's tech summit COSM 2022 presented a live, in-person interview with Federico Faggin, the Italian physicist and computer engineer who co-won the prestigious Kyoto Prize in 1997 for helping develop the Intel 4004 chip. Faggin was interviewed by technology reporter Maria Teresa Cometto, who asked him to regale the audience with tales about helping to design early microchips. Eventually Faggin recounted a time when he was "studying neuroscience and biology, trying to understand how the brain works," and came upon a startling realization: And at one point I asked myself, "But wait a second, I mean these books, all this talk about electrical signals, biochemical signals, but when I taste some chocolate, I mean I have a taste. A computer, does it taste this? Does it have a sensation or a feeling for the signals that he has in his memory or in his CPU? So where are sensations and feelings coming from?" … And so I discovered what was later called the hard problem of consciousness.