AI as Normal Technology
Narayanan and Kapoor's AI as Normal Technology reads AI as an ordinary general-purpose technology whose economic effects arrive over decades through slow diffusion, the way electricity did, rather than as an imminent discontinuity. The load-bearing move is swapping intelligence for power as the unit of analysis, then pointing at the speed limits in each stage -- innovation, adoption, deployment -- with safety-critical adoption lagging technical capability by years. The policy conclusion follows: build resilience, gather evidence to shrink the uncertainty, and treat nonproliferation as counterproductive because it concentrates power. Their follow-up on open-ended research is the empirical companion and the sharper read -- frontier agents given thousands of dollars of credits and six days to reproduce two unpublished papers were unambiguously rejected by those papers' own authors, failing on judgment, resource management, response to feedback, backtracking and following instructions. Small sample, and they say so. It is still a direct check on the recursive-self-improvement story rather than an argument against it.
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