AI Is Like Tinkerbell: It Only Works If We Believe in It

There’s no limit to the promise of artificial intelligence. Or at least, there’s no limit to the promises that the powerful make about AI. We're told by tech companies and their investors that AI has the capacity to transform everything, making us more productive workers and more efficient learners — before eventually making us obsolete by AI agents that “won’t complain about work-life balance” while they automate away the majority of our jobs. 

And of course, all these promises are steps along the path to constructing a cyber-god in the form of artificial general intelligence.

But the future is a fickle thing. It can fail to materialize in the way envisioned. Our expectations for emerging tech are always at risk of being dashed against the rocks of reality. We often look to science fiction as a beacon that can help us navigate the waves of uncertainty, predict the future of tech, and discern what it means for society. However, if we want to understand what fuels the AI boom — and how the bubble might burst — the best analogy comes instead from children’s fantasy.

In the story of "Peter Pan," the fairy Tinkerbell only exists if people believe in her and clap for her. Once we stop believing in her magic, she starts fading away. It’s at this point she implores Peter Pan — and the broader audience — to clap as loud as they can. Tinkerbell is sustained by our attention.

A new piece of emerging tech can be a lot like Tinkerbell. When it's still trying to shift from speculative ideas based on buggy demos to real material things that are normal parts of our daily lives and business practices, its existence depends on our belief in the magic of possibility. At this point, they still only exist when we believe hard enough and clap loud enough. If we stop believing and clapping, then they can start fading away, becoming more intangible by the moment until they disappear — remember 3D televisions? Just like with Tinkerbell, audience participation is necessary. 

That faith in the eventual power of progress can buy time for emerging tech like AI and blockchain — which can feel more like impressive parlor tricks desperately searching for useful purposes and business models — to establish more concrete anchors in reality. Their transparency level can be set at 50 percent for a long time if there are enough people in the audience believing and clapping for them.

The Tinkerbell Effect explains the extreme hype cycles in the tech sector. There's a massive industry in Silicon Valley geared at getting us to believe hard and clap loud. Rather than organic enthusiasm, the hype is a form of manufactured belief. But the difference between Silicon Valley and Tinkerbell is that while they would both like you to applaud for them, the former can sustain itself on the attention generated by both cheers and jeers, believers and skeptics. All that matters is that we keep channeling our psychic energy into the dreams of mega-corporations, tech billionaires, and venture capitalists.

Of course, Silicon Valley isn't just a world of pure imagination. Promises made about AI are also built on mountains of cash amassed by internet tycoons and oceans of cheap data extracted from internet users. Tech companies have successfully turned cash and data into emerging systems that prompt even grander visions of the future. But their investments are now showing diminishing returns as they butt up against technical, financial, and social limits of fast and easy progress in AI. This has led Google CEO Sundar Pichai to admit recently that "I think the progress is going to get harder. When I look at '25, the low-hanging fruit is gone. The hill is steeper."

If Silicon Valley is going to stave off another devastating AI winter — let alone usher us into an AI utopia — then it's going to need more than just the brute power of compute, data, and cash. It'll also need to exploit the power of belief. 

We have plenty of recent examples that show even investing billions of dollars into a speculative tech may not be enough to guarantee the realization of a dream if people lose interest and stop feeding it with their attention. Metaverse? A distant memory. Web3? Sorry, wrong number. Google Glass? Never heard of it. 

AI depends on vital support from people hard at work in the futurism factory. These are the executives, consultants, journalists, and other thought leaders whose job is the selling of things to come. They craft visions of a specific future — such as ones where AI models built by companies like OpenAI or Microsoft are undeniable forces of progress — and they build expectations in the public about the inevitable capabilities and irresistible outcomes of these tech products. 

By flooding the zone with an endless stream of new partnerships, new products, new promises, the tech industry makes us feel disoriented and overwhelmed by a future rushing at us faster than we can handle. The desire to not be left behind — or taken advantage of — is a powerful motivator that keeps us engaged in the AI sales pitch. The breathless hype surrounding AI is more than just a side-effect of over-eager entrepreneurs; it’s a load-bearing column for the tech sector. If people believe hard enough in the future manufactured by Silicon Valley, then they start acting like it already exists before it happens. Thus the impacts of technologies like AI become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We should think of AI futurism as a sophisticated form of check kiting — cashing a check today and hoping the money will be in the account later. In other words, the business of expectations is based on producing scenarios about what might happen in the future and using them to extract speculative value in the present. It’s our belief that these promissory notes are worth anything that allows the tech industry to keep floating until the big payday finally hits. 

The lesson we should take from the Tinkerbell Effect is that the power of belief — its ability to fuel multi-billion dollar booms and busts — also reveals the power of disbelief. When Silicon Valley implores us to please clap louder for their dreams, our response should be “Sorry, I don’t believe in your fairytales anymore.” You’ll be amazed how quickly these mighty promises start to fade away.

Jathan Sadowski is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University and the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism.