Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI COVID-19 vaccines so quickly. And we’re on the cusp of experi- encing even greater progress on multiple fronts. All of which leads to a significant irony: when we acclimate to the extraordinary, anything less can register as failure. We expect a government as responsive to our exact individual pref- erences as our smartphones are. We get frustrated when cor- porations don’t address and correct systemic inequities as effi- ciently as they deliver packages. Incremental progress starts to feel like a copout. Compromise feels like appeasement. Certainly there is no current shortage of deeply pessimistic books, movies, TV shows, and podcasts about the darkness that awaits us. And maybe we are headed to ruin. Maybe endless pandemics and chronic droughts and wildfires are the new normal, with civil war, mass unemployment, and just enough medical breakthroughs to keep Donald Trump permanently alive rounding out the picture. But the futures we imagine are inevitably the futures we steer toward. That’s why it’s so important to dream dreams that go well past salvaging what we can from the status quo —dreams that peer into seeming dystopia and envision what could possi- bly go right. I call myself a techno-humanist. I know the phrase strikes some as an oxymoron: technology and humanity can sometimes seem like oppositional forces. What’s so human about algorithms that turn moral discretion into math equations? What’s so human about scale disinformation systematically eroding our appetite for consensus and mutual benefit? 196