(no subject)

[timelets]

Finally, the notion that AI is not about "intelligence" is starting to percolate into the mainstream. Almost 10 years ago I argued that point but at the time it fell on deaf ears. Today, technology people still have this weird fascination with the idea that they could build "better" human minds or "improved" biological organisms, using novel hardware and software. It's a part of a greater psychological bias that prevents us from seeing the new, but with AI this mindset is particularly limiting.

...influential group of social and cognitive scientists say can help us better understand artificial intelligence. Today’s AI models are not, in their view, akin to a human mind. Rather, they’re a form of “cultural or social” technology that aggregates and passes on human knowledge — more like a printing press or even a bureaucracy or a market. If we want to understand how to manage AI, they say, we should study how we’ve handled new social technologies in the past.

Last year, Science published a version of this argument by Henry Farrell (a political scientist), Alison Gopnik (a psychologist), Cosma Shalizi (a statistician) and James Evans (a sociologist). “Beginning with language itself, human beings have had distinctive capacities to learn from the experiences of other humans and these capacities are arguably the secret of human evolutionary success,” the authors write. They go on to identify key ideas — from print to television to representative democracy — that transformed the nature of social learning by changing how societies process information.

The Science authors think we should view large language models along these lines — not as intelligence, but as a new form of cultural communication.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-09/what-s-the-best-way-to-think-of-ai-look-to-democracy-marketplaces