"Pulsing through the episodes we’ve been doing, the debate the country has been having about artificial intelligence is a pretty simple but hard question: What sort of technology is artificial intelligence?
Is it a technology that works somewhat the way past ones have worked? Is it comparable to electricity, the internet, the bicycle — something like that?
Or is it something new? Is the addition of intelligence and volition to these systems the creation of something more like an alien mind, such that analogies to the way we have treated transformational technologies before no longer hold?
Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy.
He’s the author, alongside Sayash Kapoor, of the very influential essay “A Guide to Understanding A.I. as Normal Technology.” It became a Substack of the same name and then a series of essays, including a very good one on the Hugging Face hacks.
In this set of arguments, they put forward the idea that A.I. is something we have seen before — or at least it bears enough resemblance to things we’ve seen before — and that we already have a road map for how to deal with it.
So I want to bring Narayanan on the show to articulate that perspective. He joins me now."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-arvind-narayanan.html
#AI #GenerativeAI #AISafety #CyberSecurity #NormalTechnology #OpenAI #AIAgents #Anthropic