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. 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. 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 agent in determining its future. It is guided by lessons from past technological revolutions, such as the slow and uncertain nature of technology adoption and diffusion. It also emphasizes continuity between the past and the future trajectory of AI in terms of societal impact and the role of institutions in shaping this trajectory.
In Part I, we explain why we think that transformative economic and societal impacts will be slow (on the timescale of decades), making a critical distinction between AI methods, AI applications, and AI adoption, arguing that the three happen at different timescales.
In Part II, we discuss a potential division of labor between humans and AI in a world with advanced AI (but not “superintelligent” AI, which we view as incoherent as usually conceptualized). In this world, control is primarily in the hands of people and organizations; indeed, a greater and greater proportion of what people do in their jobs is AI control.
In Part III, we examine the implications of AI as normal technology for AI risks. We analyze accidents, arms races, misuse, and misalignment, and argue that viewing AI as normal technology leads to fundamentally different conclusions about mitigations compared to viewing AI as being humanlike.
Of course, we cannot be certain of our predictions, but we aim to describe what we view as the median outcome. We have not tried to quantify probabilities, but we have tried to make predictions that can tell us whether or not AI is behaving like normal technology.
In Part IV, we discuss the implications for AI policy. We advocate for reducing uncertainty as a first-rate policy goal and resilience as the overarching approach to catastrophic risks. We argue that drastic interventions premised on the difficulty of controlling superintelligent AI will, in fact, make things much worse if AI turns out to be normal technology— the downsides of which will be likely to mirror those of previous technologies that are deployed in capitalistic societies, such as inequality. 3. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. 2023. Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity .PublicAffairs, New York, NY.
The world we describe in Part II is one in which AI is far more advanced than it is today. We are not claiming that AI progress—or human progress—will stop at that point. What comes after it? We do not know. Consider this analogy: At the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution, it would have been useful to try to think about what an industrial world would look like and how to prepare for it, but it would have been futile to try to predict electricity or computers. Our exercise here is similar. Since we reject “fast takeoff” scenarios, we do not see it as necessary or useful to envision a world further ahead than we have attempted to. If and when the scenario we describe in Part II materializes, we will be able to better anticipate and prepare for whatever comes next.
A note to readers. This essay has the unusual goal of stating a worldview rather than defending a proposition. The literature on AI superintelligence is copious. We have not tried to give a point-by-point response to potential counter arguments, as that would make the paper several times longer. This paper is merely the initial articulation of our views; we plan to elaborate on them in various follow ups.
Part I: The Speed of Progress
Figure 1. Like other general-purpose technologies, the impact of AI is materialized not when methods and capabilities improve, but when those improvements are translated into applications and are diffused through productive sectors of the economy. 4. Jeffrey Ding. 2024. Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition. Princeton University Press, Princeton. There are speed limits at each stage.
Will the progress of AI be gradual, allowing people and institutions to adapt as AI capabilities and adoption increase, or will there be jumps leading to massive disruption, or even a technological singularity? Our approach to this question is to analyze highly consequential tasks separately from less consequential tasks and to begin by analyzing the speed of adoption and diffusion of AI before returning to the speed of innovation and invention.
We use invention to refer to the development of new AI methods—such as large language models—that improve AI’s capabilities to carry out various tasks. Innovation refers to the development of products and applications using AI that consumers and businesses can use. Adoption refers to the decision by an individual (or team or firm) to use a technology, whereas diffusion refers to the broader social process through which the level of adoption increases. For sufficiently disruptive technologies, diffusion might require changes to the structure of firms and organizations, as well as to social norms and laws.
AI diffusion in safety-critical areas is slow
In the paper Against Predictive Optimization , we compiled a comprehensive list of about 50 applications of predictive optimization, namely the use of machine learning (ML) to make decisions about individuals by predicting their future behavior or outcomes. 5. Angelina Wang et al. 2023. Against predictive optimization: On the legitimacy of decision-making algorithms that optimize predictive accuracy. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (Chicago, IL, USA: ACM, 2023), 626–26. doi: 10.1145/3593013.3594030 . Most of these applications, such as criminal risk prediction, insurance risk prediction, or child maltreatment prediction, are used to make decisions that have important consequences for people.
While these applications have proliferated, there is a crucial nuance: In most cases, decades-old statistical techniques are used—simple, interpretable models (mostly regression) and relatively small sets of handcrafted features. More complex machine learning methods, such as random forests, are rarely used, and modern methods, such as transformers, are nowhere to be found.
In other words, in this broad set of domains, AI diffusion lags decades behind innovation. A major reason is safety—when models are more complex and less intelligible, it is hard to anticipate all possible deployment conditions in the testing and validation process. A good example is Epic’s sepsis prediction tool which, despite having seemingly high accuracy when internally validated, performed far worse in hospitals, missing two thirds of sepsis cases and overwhelming physicians with false alerts. 6. Casey Ross. 2022. Epic’s Overhaul of a Flawed Algorithm Shows Why AI Oversight Is a Life-or-Death Issue. STAT . https://www.statnews.com/2022/10/24/epic-overhaul-of-a-flawed-algorithm/ .
Epic’s sepsis prediction tool failed because of errors that are hard to catch when you have complex models with unconstrained feature sets. 7. Andrew Wong et al. 2021. External validation of a widely implemented proprietary sepsis prediction model in hospitalized patients. JAMA Internal Medicine 181, 8 (August 2021), 1065–70, https://doi: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.2626 . In particular, one of the features used to train the model was whether a physician had already prescribed antibiotics —to treat sepsis. In other words, during testing and validation, the model was using a feature from the future, relying on a variable that was causally dependent on the outcome. Of course, this feature would not be available during deployment. Interpretability and auditing methods will no doubt improve so that we will get much better at catching these issues, but we are not there yet.
In the case of generative AI, even failures that seem extremely obvious in hindsight were not caught during testing. One example is the early Bing chatbot “Sydney” that went off the rails during extended conversations; the developers evidently did not anticipate that conversations could last for more than a handful of turns. 8. Kevin Roose. 2023. A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled. The New York Times (February 2023). https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html. Similarly, the Gemini image generator was seemingly never tested on historical figures. 9. Dan Milmo and Alex Hern. 2024. ‘We definitely messed up’: why did Google AI tool make offensive historical images? The Guardian (March 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/08/we-definitely-messed-up-why-did-google-ai-tool-make-offensive-historical-images Fortunately, these were not highly consequential applications.
More empirical work would be helpful for understanding the innovation-diffusion lag in various applications and the reasons for this lag. But, for now, the evidence that we have analyzed in our previous work is consistent with the view that there are already extremely strong safety-related speed limits in highly consequential tasks. These limits are often enforced through regulation, such as the FDA’s supervision of medical devices, as well as newer legislation such as the EU AI Act, which puts strict requirements on high-risk AI. 10. Jamie Bernardi et al. 2024. Societal adaptation to advanced AI. arXiv: May 2024. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10295 ; Center for Devices and Radiological Health. 2024. Regulatory evaluation of new artificial intelligence (AI) uses for improving and automating medical practices. FDA (June 2024). https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-regulatory-science-research-programs-conducted-osel/regulatory-evaluation-new-artificial-intelligence-ai-uses-improving-and-automating-medical-practices ; “Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 Laying down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence and Amending Regulations (EC) No 300/2008, (EU) No 167/2013, (EU) No 168/2013, (EU) 2018/858, (EU) 2018/1139 and (EU) 2019/2144 and Directives 2014/90/EU, (EU) 2016/797 and (EU) 2020/1828 (Artificial Intelligence Act) (Text with EEA Relevance),” June 2024, http://data.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng . In fact, there are (credible) concerns that existing regulation of high-risk AI is so onerous that it may lead to “runaway bureaucracy”. 11. Javier Espinoza. 2024. Europe’s rushed attempt to set the rules for AI. Financial Times (July 2024). https://www.ft.com/content/6cc7847a-2fc5-4df0-b113-a435d6426c81 ; Daniel E. Ho and Nicholas Bagley. 2024. Runaway bureaucracy could make common uses of ai worse, even mail delivery. The Hill (January 2024). https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4405286-runaway-bureaucracy-could-make-common-uses-of-ai-worse-even-mail-delivery/ . Thus, we predict that slow diffusion will continue to be the norm in high-consequence tasks.
At any rate, as and when new areas arise in which AI can be used in highly consequential ways, we can and must regulate them. A good example is the Flash Crash of 2010, in which automated high-frequency trading is thought to have played a part. This led to new curbs on trading, such as circuit breakers. 12. Avanidhar Subrahmanyam. 2013. Algorithmic trading, the flash crash, and coordinated circuit breakers. Borsa Istanbul Review 13, 3 (September 2013), 4–9. http://doi: 10.1016/j.bir.2013.10.003 .
Diffusion is limited by the speed of human, organizational, and institutional change
Even outside of safety-critical areas, AI adoption is slower than popular accounts would suggest. For example, a study made headlines due to the finding that, in August 2024, 40% of U.S. adults used generative AI. 13. Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and David J. Deming. 2024. The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI . National Bureau of Economic Research. But, because most people used it infrequently, this only translated to 0.5%-3.5% of work hours (and a 0.125-0.875 percentage point increase in labor productivity).
It is not even clear if the speed of diffusion is greater today compared to the past. The aforementioned study reported that generative AI adoption in the U.S. has been faster than personal computer (PC) adoption, with 40% of U.S. adults adopting generative AI within two years of the first mass-market product release compared to 20 % within three years for PCs. But this comparison does not account for differences in the intensity of adoption (the number of hours of use) or the high cost of buying a PC compared to accessing generative AI. 14. Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and David J. Deming. 2024. The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI . National Bureau of Economic Research. Depending on how we measure adoption, it is quite possible that the adoption of generative AI has been much slower than PC adoption.
The claim that the speed of technology adoption is not necessarily increasing may seem surprising (or even obviously wrong) given that digital technology can reach billions of devices at once. But it is important to remember that adoption is about software use, not availability. Even if a new AI-based product is instantly released online for anyone to use for free, it takes time to for people to change their workflows and habits to take advantage of the benefits of the new product and to learn to avoid the risks.
Thus, the speed of diffusion is inherently limited by the speed at which not only individuals, but also organizations and institutions, can adapt to technology. This is a trend that we have also seen for past general-purpose technologies: Diffusion occurs over decades, not years. 15. Benedict Evans. 2023. AI and the Automation of Work. https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2023/7/2/working-with-ai ; Benedict Evans, 2023; Jeffrey Ding. 2024. Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
As an example, Paul A. David’s analysis of electrification shows that the productivity benefits took decades to fully materialize. 16. Paul A. David. 1990. The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. The American Economic Review 80, 2 (1990), 355–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2006600 ; Tim Harford. 2017. Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing? (August 2017). https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694 . Electric dynamos were “everywhere but in the productivity statistics” for nearly 40 years after Edison’s first central generating station. 17. Robert Solow as quoted in Paul A. David. 1990. The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox. The American Economic Review 80, 2 (1990), Page 355. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2006600 ; Tim Harford. 2017. Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing? (August 2017). https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40673694 . This was not just technological inertia; factory owners found that electrification did not bring substantial efficiency gains.
What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries. Workers had more autonomy and flexibility as a result of the changes, which also necessitated different hiring and training practices.
The External world puts a speed limit on AI innovation
It is true that technical advances in AI have been rapid, but the picture is much less clear when we differentiate AI methods from applications.
We conceptualize progress in AI methods as a ladder of generality. 18. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. 2024. AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference . Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. Each step on this ladder rests on the ones below it and reflects a move toward more general computing capabilities. That is, it reduces the programmer effort needed to get the computer to perform a new task and increases the set of tasks that can be performed with a given amount of programmer (or user) effort; see Figure 2. For example, machine learning increases generality by obviating the need for the programmer to devise logic to solve each new task, only requiring the collection of training examples instead.
It is tempting to conclude that the effort required to develop specific applications will keep decreasing as we build more rungs of the ladder until we reach artificial general intelligence, often conceptualized as an AI system that can do everything out of the box, obviating the need to develop applications altogether.
In some domains, we are indeed seeing this trend of decreasing application development effort. In natural language processing, large language models have made it relatively trivial to develop a language translation application. Or consider games: AlphaZero can learn to play games such as chess better than any human through self-play given little more than a description of the game and enough computing power—a far cry from how game-playing programs used to be developed.
Figure 2: The Ladder of Generality in Computing. For some tasks, higher ladder rungs require less programmer effort to get a computer to perform a new task, and more tasks can be performed with a given amount of programmer (or user) effort. 19. Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffrey E Hinton. 2012. ImageNet classification with deep convolutional neural networks. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 25 (2012); Harris Drucker, Donghui Wu, and Vladimir N. Vapnik. 1999. Support vector machines for spam categorization. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 10, 5 (September 1999), 1048–54. http://doi: 10.1109/7