An alternative to the vision of AI as a potential superintelligence

By Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor (of “AI Snake Oil”), Apr 15, 2025

LINK: https://kfai-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/c3cac5a2a7/AI-as-Normal-Technology—Narayanan—Kapoor.pdf

Excerpt:

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.¹

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.

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