What do they mean what if? It is similarly based to something that has existed for around 4 decades. It of course is at a higher standard of efficiency and able to search through and combine more data but it isn't new. It is just a normal technology and this was why myself and many others were shocked at the initial hype.

Okay, so AI isn’t exceptional, but I’m also not exceptional. I run on the same tech base as any old chimpanzee, but at one point our differences in degree turned into one of us remaining “normal” and the other burning the entire planet.

Whether the particular current AI tech is it or not, I have yet to be convinced that the singularity is practically impossible, and as long as things develop in the opposite direction, I get increasingly unnerved.

What if this paper actually took things seriously?

A serious paper would start by acknowledging that every previous general-purpose technology required human oversight precisely because it couldn't perceive context, make decisions, or correct errors - capabilities that are AI's core value proposition. It would wrestle with the fundamental tension: if AI remains error-prone enough to need human supervisors, it's not transformative; if it becomes reliable enough to be transformative, those supervisory roles evaporate.

These two Princeton computer scientists, however, just spent 50 pages arguing that AI is like electricity while somehow missing that electricity never learned to fix itself, manage itself, or improve itself - which is literally the entire damn point. They're treating "humans will supervise the machines" as an iron law of economics rather than a temporary bug in the automation process that every profit-maximizing firm is racing to patch. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind when it's obvious that GPT-5 could do better than Narayanan and Kapoor did in their paper at understanding historical analogies.

I think the "calculator for words" analogy is a good one. It's imperfect since words are inherently ambiguous but then again so is certain forms of digital numbers (floating point anyone?).

Through this lens it's way more normal

AI is technology that does not exist yet that can be speculated about. When AI materializes into existence it becomes normal technology.

Let's not forget there has been times when if-else statements were considered AI. NLP used to be AI too.

I’m guessing it will be exactly like the internet. Changes everything and changes nothing.