2025-09-10
8 分钟The Economist Hello, Mike Bird here, co-host of Money Talks,
our weekly podcast on markets, the economy and business.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an article from the latest edition of The Economist,
which we very much hope you'll enjoy.
Opinions about artificial intelligence tend to fall on a wide spectrum.
At one extreme is the utopian view that AI will cause runaway economic growth,
accelerate scientific research and perhaps make humans immortal.
At the other extreme is the dystopian view that AI will cause abrupt,
widespread job losses and economic disruption and perhaps go rogue and wipe out humanity.
So a paper published earlier this year by Arvind Narayanan and Seyash Kapoor,
two computer scientists at Princeton University,
is notable for the unfashionably sober manner in which it treats AI as normal technology.
The work has prompted much debate among AI researchers and economists.
Both utopian and dystopian views, the author's right,
treat AI as an unprecedented intelligence with agency to determine its own future,
meaning analogies with previous inventions fail.
Messas Narayanan and Kapoor reject this and map out what they see as a more likely scenario.
That AI will follow the trajectory of past technological revolutions.
They then consider what this would mean for AI adoption, jobs, risks and policy.