Understanding AI

DP: Writing now has to be really, really good to stand out. People got really upset last December when I tweeted that AI’s writing is already better than the majority of Write of Passage students would be with a day’s worth of work. It made a lot of people upset, but I think it’s true. AI’s writing is great with a good prompt, which is why people... See more

As Cosma and I, and Alison and James have written:

We now have a technology that does for written and pictured culture what largescale markets do for the economy, what large-scale bureaucracy does for society, and perhaps even comparable with what print once did for language. What happens next?

But he saw AI (a term that he had ambiguous feelings about) as a particular variant of a much broader phenomenon: “complex information processing.” Human beings have quite limited internal ability to process information, and confront an unpredictable and complex world. Hence, they rely on a variety of external arrangements that do much of their... See more

To understand the social consequences of LLMs and related forms of AI, we ought consider them as social technologies. Specifically, we should compare them and their workings to other social technologies (or, if you prefer, modes of governance), mapping out how they transform social, political and economic relations among human beings.

I think it's a mistake to conceptualize AI systems as partners, as if they have a will of their own. I don’t think of my pet, my phone, my calculator, or the temperature knob on my stove as partners. I don’t think of any AI system as a partner. The moment we anthropomorphize technology—as if it were a person—we attribute will where none exists. In... See more

This shift in perspective clarifies that humans have always used technology to increase our ability to control our environment. There are few biological or physiological differences between ancestral and modern humans; instead, the relevant differences are improved knowledge and understanding, tools, technology and, indeed, AI. In a sense, modern... See more

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.

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... See more