A look at the current state of AI, what “AI” refers to, and how focusing on the “human-imitative” aspects of AI ignores opportunities in other research areas
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mantra of the current era. The phrase is intoned by technologists …
Context & Ripple Effects
Writing in 2018, Michael Jordan pushes back on the field's own branding: 'AI' has come to mean human-imitative systems, when the bigger opportunity lies in intelligence augmentation and treating AI as a new kind of infrastructure. His intervention lands amid what decades of misinformed and sensationalized AI coverage had already done to public expectations.
The essay reads differently now because the later coverage validates its frame: the industrial-revolution comparison treats AI as an economic transformation unfolding over years, not a replica of human minds, while the scarcity of voices describing what an AI-saturated world would actually look like shows the human-imitation fixation still crowding out concrete thinking about deployment.
First-order effects
- Jordan's argument directly challenges the research community and its funders to redirect effort from mimicking human cognition toward augmentation tools and large-scale, data-driven infrastructure — a redefinition of what counts as serious AI work.
Second-order effects
- Once the goal is reframed as building infrastructure rather than replicating humans, debates like the NYT's accelerate-adapt-or-collectively-slow choice and Boston Review's warning about power concentrating in a few companies become questions about system design and ownership rather than about machine sentience.
Third-order effects
- If Jordan's framing holds, AI settles into the role the industrial-revolution coverage describes — a general-purpose engineering discipline judged by economic and social outcomes — moving policy attention from speculative machine behavior to who builds, owns, and governs the infrastructure.
The trend: The AI debate is slowly migrating from human-imitative ambition toward AI-as-infrastructure, with each year's coverage trading anthropomorphism for questions of economics, governance, and concentration of power.