AI as Normal Technology

The dominant alternatives in the public conversation about artificial intelligence share a common structural error: they treat AI as a separate order of being rather than as a technology. The utopian variant sees AI as the arrival of a genuinely new intelligence that will liberate humanity from scarcity; the dystopian variant sees it as the arrival of a potentially superior agent that will escape human control and threaten human existence. Both variants derive the urgency of their responses from the same premise—that AI is a new kind of thing, fundamentally unlike any technology that came before—and both therefore miscalibrate what the situation actually requires. Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor's 2025 essay “AI as Normal Technology” proposes the more demanding alternative: AI belongs in the same category as electricity, the printing press, and the internet—general-purpose technologies that were genuinely transformative, reshaped civilization profoundly, and remained throughout the kind of thing that humans built, deployed, governed, and absorbed over