normalizing

Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor:

We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact — even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.

A helpful framing indeed, and one that offers a helpful counterbalance to utopianism and catastrophism alike. Almost nine (!) years ago, at the outset of the first Trump administration, I wrote about “the absolutizing of fright,” and we’re still in that mode: everything (in technology, politics, sports, you name it) is is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever — though usually the worst: do-what-I-say-or-we’re-all-gonna-DIE. It’s the huckster’s standard rhetorical mode, and it has been the register of all social-media and almost all legacy-media discourse since we first elected a huckster as President.

Even in this crazy moment — and yeah, it certainly is crazy — there’s a lot more that’s normal than we’re typically allowed to think. Normal isn’t good — a lot of perfectly normal things are very, very bad — but what’s normal works according to established laws and patterns. We can use our experience and our understanding of history to help us figure out how to cope.

I very strongly recommend to everyone this interview with my old friend Yuval Levin, who in his usual calm, rational, extremely well-informed way explains calmly and rationally what the current administration has accomplished, what it hasn’t accomplished, which among its accomplishments are likely to last and which are almost sure to be evanescent. Even the Trump administration is in many ways — more ways than we’re typically allowed to think — normal. Yuval’s analysis will give you the same kind of helpful reset in your thinking about politics that the Narayanan & Kapoor essay will give you about the promise and threat of AGI.