CONCEPT
Extravagant Expectations
Boorstin's diagnosis of the cultural demand for more reality than reality can supply — a mismatch between what life is and what we have been trained to expect it to be, now intensified to breaking by AI's capability promises.
Boorstin opened The Image with a claim that reframed his entire argument: we suffer, he wrote, not from too little but from too much. Americans had come to expect experiences more vivid than experience, entertainments more entertaining than reality, news more dramatic than events, and products more satisfying than objects can be. The graphic revolution had trained a population to demand from reality what only manufactured representations could provide — and the resulting gap between expectation and experience was generating the specific form of disappointment that would shape the subsequent decades of American public life. The AI discourse, with its capability claims and its revolutionary rhetoric, has extended this pattern into the domain of technology itself.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The diagnosis has a structure Boorstin adapted from classical thought: the extravagance is not in having expectations but in having expectations of a kind that reality cannot satisfy. A traveler expects a