In 1998, John Chambers, the former president and C.E.O. of Cisco, declared that “with internet leaders and government working hand in hand, America can look to a bright horizon filled with hope.” At the time, Cisco’s stock was trading at an all-time high; a few years later, it collapsed in the crash that vanquished the dot-com bubble. Chambers’s comments embodied the utopian optimism that defined the early days of the internet, and the same mood permeates these yawning days of artificial intelligence. In fact, the language used by industry leaders to describe the promise of A.I. might be even more extreme. If we’re to believe OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman, “access to A.I. will be a fundamental driver of the economy, and maybe eventually something we consider a fundamental human right.”