Is AI “normal”?

So against this backdrop, a recent essay by two AI researchers at Princeton felt quite provocative. Arvind Narayanan, who directs the university’s Center for Information Technology Policy, and doctoral candidate Sayash Kapoor wrote a 40-page plea for everyone to calm down and think of AI as a normal technology. This runs opposite to the “common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.” Instead, according to the researchers, AI is a general-purpose technology whose application might be better compared to the drawn-out adoption of electricity or the internet than to nuclear weapons—though they concede this is in some ways a flawed analogy. The core point, Kapoor says, is that we need to start differentiating between the rapid development of AI methods—the flashy and impressive displays of what AI can do in the lab—and what comes from the actual applications of AI, which in historical examples of other technologies lag be ... Read full article.