October 5, 2026

3 Minute Read

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THIS WEEK'S EDITION

No, AI Is Not a Normal Technology

Two academics are making a splash arguing that artificial intelligence is a normal technology. Their essay is careful, well written, and getting forwarded around companies and government offices as an excuse to relax about AI. In today's short read, we show you the gaping hole in the argument, and suggest an alternative frame to use instead.

The Essay Being Forwarded Around Washington

Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor, and Sayash Kapoor, his longtime co-author and an incoming professor at UC Berkeley, published "AI as Normal Technology." Their claim: AI is a general-purpose technology in the lineage of electricity, the automobile, and the internet. Powerful. Eventually transformative. But not a separate species. Full adoption will take time, they argue, because what a model does in a lab is not what an institution absorbs in an office.

That last part is partially correct. As we've discussed several times in this newsletter, the bottleneck to AI adoption is now organizational, not technical. But that doesn't mean AI adoption is slow as the professors claim. Electricity took four decades to reach half of American homes. 61.8% of Americans ages 18–64 had used generative AI as of May 2026. That's less than four years after ChatGPT launched. (Bick, Blandin, and Deming's GenAI Adoption Tracker, the ongoing version of the St. Louis Fed study).

But there is an even bigger, gaping hole in the middle of the professors' argument.

The Strawman Shuffle

The essay lines up the most extreme claims about AI, rogue superintelligence, the end of human relevance, knocks them down, and then lands on the conclusion that AI is therefore normal.

That is a campaign tactic, not a proof. It is debunking your opponent's worst argument and declaring the issue over. The distance between "AI ends humanity" and "AI is just a faster spreadsheet" is enormous. That gap is where the real argument lives, and the essay walks past it.

"Normal" Is Doing A Lot Of Work Here

Then there is what they concede. By their own framing, AI belongs in the same category as electricity.

Electricity.

Electricity did not just make the factory brighter. It redesigned the factory floor, emptied the countryside, built new industries, killed old ones, and rewired how every household spends its waking and sleeping hours.

So if the reassuring version of your argument is "relax, it is merely as world-changing as electrification," you have not calmed anyone down. You have conceded the point and given it a softer name. A hurricane is a normal weather event. You still board up the windows.

Every Other Technology Was A Tool. This One Is An Agent.

Here is the distinction the essay skips, and historian Yuval Noah Harari has put it best: every technology in human history has been a tool. AI is the first one that is an agent.

A tool waits for a person. The printing press never wrote a book. The atom bomb never picked a target. Electricity has no opinions. Each of those inventions extended a human decision. None of them made one.

AI makes decisions nobody handed it and generates ideas nobody fed it. That is a difference in kind, not degree. And it is not a thought experiment. Today's systems run for hours or even days at a stretch, pick their own next steps, write and run their own code, and come back with finished work.

Keep this frame at hand: AI is not a tool. It is an agent. It makes decisions on its own, and invents ideas on its own. Every other technology in history, even the most powerful ones, have been tools.

This is not normal.

Speed Does Not Define Normal

Suppose they are completely right about speed and full adoption takes twenty years. That is still a claim about the calendar, not about the thing itself. A new hire who takes eighteen months to get productive is still either an intern or an eventual senior leader in your organization. Pace tells you when. It does not tell you what.

What This Means For Public Affairs

You might hear "AI is a normal technology" in a strategy meeting soon. It will be offered as a reason to wait. Pull the two claims apart. The speed claim is reasonable and you should plan around it. The kind claim is wrong, and acting on it is expensive. Organizations that treat AI as a faster tool will book modest efficiency gains, while falling further behind those that treat it as an agent.

One Way To Operationalize This Email

🔱 Keep this frame at hand: AI is not a tool. It is an agent. It makes decisions on its own, and invents ideas on its own. Someone in the coming weeks will try to tell you this is normal. You'll know better.

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