Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor: AI as Normal Technology

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 tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.

And here's Jasmine Sun in agi (disambiguation):

I suspect the story of AI may look quite similar \[climate science\]. Harmful incidents—security breaches, misinformation, job loss, deception, discrimination, misuse—are happening today. So are AI’s benefits, like human augmentation and accessibility. These impacts will get magnified as AI systems become more powerful and autonomous, whether or not AGI has been formally declared. And like with climate change, we ought to frame AI progress not as a binary of safe/unsafe or AGI/not-AGI, but as a jagged frontier of capabilities with risks that depend on where you’re looking.9 AI discovered wholly new proteins before it could count the ‘r’s in ‘strawberry’, which makes it neither vaporware nor a demigod but a secret third thing.

This idea that LLMs are just "normal technology" is something I've had simmering in my brain for a while now, and it's becoming more clear to me by the day that this seems to be where we're heading. As I've said before, the "AGI is 6 months away" crowd is exhausting, but the "AI is terrible and does no good" crowd is equally ignorant, just in the opposite direction, in my opinion. There is good stuff to be had as well as new challenged posed by their technology, but let's talk about it as a piece of technology, not as some inherently evil or all-knowing superpower.