AI as Normal Technology

Summary

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 1. Nick Bostrom. 2012. The superintelligent will: Motivation and instrumental rationality in advanced artificial agents. Minds and Machines 22, 2 (May 2012), 71–85. https://doi:10.1007/s11023-012-9281-3; Nick Bostrom. 2017. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (reprinted with corrections). Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom; Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. 2023. Governance of Superintelligence (May 2023). https://openai.com/blog/governance-of-superintelligence; Shazeda Ahmed et al. 2023. Building the Epistemic Community of AI Safety. SSRN: Rochester, NY. doi:10.2139/ssrn.4641526. 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.2 2. This is different from the question of whether it is helpful for an individual user to conceptualize a specific AI system as a tool as opposed to a human-like entity such as an intern, a co-worker, or a tutor. The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society. It rejects technological determinism, especially the notion of AI itself as an agen...