The tech industry is notorious for its ability to sell the future, but its visions of a world powered by the "metaverse," "web3," and "artificial intelligence" are nothing more than mirages. Despite the bite back of reality, these terms have raked in billions of dollars for the industry, and the phrase "artificial intelligence" alone may be one of the most successful marketing terms of all time. Mirage of AI While the notion of thinking machines conjures up images of true intelligence, the reality is that no machine can think, and no software is truly intelligent. Even OpenAI's latest language model, GPT-4, which sounds even more humanlike than its predecessor, is simply mirroring databases of text. These systems are trained to generate text that sounds plausible, but they are far from oracles of knowledge that can be plugged into search engines. Terms like "neural networks" and "deep learning" only bolster...