Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, AI as Social Technology, 26-5 Knight First Amend. Inst. (May 11, 2026), https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-social-technology [https://perma.cc/25BX-GUQL].  “…Authors of speculative non-fiction about AGI are less inhibited, offering sweeping visions of how information technology will completely transform society, economy, politics, or all three. They treat AGI less as a technology than as Andreessen (2023) says, “our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone,” an alkahest that will dissolve the dross and cruft of human institutions, leaving only pure, undiluted progress. Prognosticators regularly describe the social institutions that tremble on the brink of transformation in ways that are only slightly less stylized, claiming for example that AI might transport us into Condorcet’s utopia of a new Age of Reason, this time, happily without tumbrils of condemned prisoners waiting on their appointments with the guillotine (Hall, 2026). The result is a genre that we believe is more liable to confuse smart people and lead them astray than to usefully guide public action. All of these aspirations and arguments are, as we said, rooted in myths which are (at least) twenty years older than the technology which now seems to incarnate them, large language models (LLMs). It is because LLMs moved in the space of a few years from being a technical improvement in machine translation (Vaswani et al., 2017) to being proclaimed as the royal road to AGI that these debates really matter. LLMs are remarkably good generative statistical models of human language (including human-written computer code). This allows them to process language in ways that resemble human discourse and to be jury-rigged to create texts that loosely approximate human reasoning. This is a new material reality, a new force in the world, but one whose actual implications are obscured by the mythic garb it is swaddled in. If we are unimpressed by stories about paperclip maximizers remaking the galaxy, omniscient bureaucracies of terror or wonder, markets that suddenly become self-aware, and the like, it is not because we think they are too weird. Rather, they are not nearly weird enough, and miss how much of the weirdness is already here. The possible futures we face are much messier and more varied than stark visions of omnipotent AGI, just as our immediate past was. They will be shaped by the collision between imperfect and highly complex technologies and imperfect and highly complex human social systems (Matias, 2023; Nelson, forthcoming). It is impossible to predict the consequences, but we can map, study, and think about them as they are happening…”