We are already in the process of normalizing AI. In five years we probably won’t call it AI. It will have become something mundane, part of everyday life. As Postman said of television, AI will become a “meta-medium — an instrument that directs not only our knowledge of the world, but our knowledge of ways of knowing as well.”
The same way search engines became a routine and acceptable way of sourcing information and “googling” became a verb in our common vocabulary, AI looks to follow a similar trajectory, but the curve seems much steeper and more harrowing. The promise of AI, that is, AGI, feels at this current distance, far-fetched, but if and when it arrives, it will likely produce a shift of such unfathomable proportions that it may be hard for us to even perceive it directly, like the rise of the global temperature, it will create enormous downstream repercussions.
Normalization does not mean neutral. Names, especially when they’re new, shape how we relate to the thing being named. We used to have a thing we called “supercomputers.” The name made it seem extraordinary. Now we don’t talk about supercomputers anymore, even though an iPhone 14’s GPU alone is roughly 100× faster than a single Cray X1 node (circa 2003). Losing the name “supercomputer” meant we stopped asking what it means to have that power in our pocket. What we consider mundane is constantly shifting, and mundane means it’s so banal we don’t have to consider it.
Our brains are wired to adjust to a new normal — homeostasis. We don’t think twice about flying in airplanes, drinking clean water from a tap, or looking up information on the Internet. Or talking to a chatbot as if it were an “intelligent” being. When we stop thinking about outsourcing our thinking, it will be almost impossible to turn back.
