This essay is over 15,000 words; I'll be making my way through it. The authors said, due to the attention and response to it, they plan to develop it further into a book. Quite interesting.
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.
(breaking out into ordered list is me)
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 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.
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.
Emphasis their own:
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.
URL: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology