一组学者主张，应将人工智能理解为一种“社会技术”，而非类似人类心智的个体智能，更接近市场、官僚体系或印刷术等信息聚合机制。该观点在2025年发表于《科学》杂志，强调AI通过吸收海量人类文本并重新组合来发挥作用，类似市场将分散知识汇聚为价格信号。其核心不是思考而是重混：用户向模型求助，本质上是在与成千上万前人的经验进行技术中介下的互动。
这一类比借鉴了哈耶克1945年关于市场的信息聚合理论，即无人能掌握全局知识，但系统可通过简化信号协调行动。学者认为，大语言模型对文化信息所做的，类似价格对经济信息或官僚分类对社会信息的作用：以高效率整合、重组与传递。AI并非“懂”文本，而是通过预测与人类偏好对齐，将庞大的概率空间压缩为可用输出，从而解决信息规模问题。
尽管近四年内AI能力突飞猛进，使其是否具备“智能”更具争议，作者仍认为社会技术视角至关重要。历史上，印刷术在15世纪后引发知识爆炸，并催生书评、图书馆与百科全书等制度来应对认知危机。类似地，治理AI不仅是技术对齐问题，还涉及制度重构。无论将AI视为心智、市场或“异类智能”，它都将重塑文化、权力与社会协作方式。
A group of scholars argue that artificial intelligence should be understood as a “social technology” rather than an individual mind, closer to markets, bureaucracies or the printing press. Advanced in a 2025 Science article, the view holds that AI works by absorbing vast amounts of human text and recombining it, much like markets aggregate dispersed knowledge into price signals. Its core function is not thinking but remixing: when users seek help, they are engaging in a technically mediated interaction with the accumulated experiences of countless others.
The analogy draws on Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 argument that markets solve information problems no individual can grasp. The authors suggest large language models do for cultural information what prices do for economic data or bureaucratic categories do for social facts: efficiently aggregating, restructuring and transmitting knowledge. AI does not “understand” text; by predicting sequences and aligning outputs with human judgments, it compresses enormous probability spaces into usable results, addressing the scale of information rather than reasoning itself.
Even as rapid advances over the past four years make AI’s intelligence harder to dismiss, the authors maintain that the social-technology lens remains essential. Historically, the printing press unleashed an explosion of information and prompted new institutions—reviews, libraries, encyclopedias—to manage an epistemic crisis. Similarly, governing AI will require more than technical alignment; it demands institutional innovation. Whether framed as mind, market or alien intelligence, AI will reshape culture, power and social coordination.