Arvind Narayanan
Co-author of AI as Normal Technology and AI Snake Oil
“It turns out the limiting speed is not the trains themselves. It's the tracks that are too curved and the signaling infrastructure that is centuries old. … Most of the time, AI is the trains. It's not the track. So AI is accelerating a part of the process that was never the bottleneck to begin with.”
The Ezra Klein Show · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Narayanan, who argues that AI should be treated as a normal technology, explaining why it will show up in the economy more slowly than people expect. His example is Amtrak's new Acela trains, which he says can do 165 miles an hour on a line where the average speed is still 65 to 70. The track, in his analogy, is organisational culture, regulation and how much change a society will accept in a year.
Transcript
Yeah, I mean, again, I think I mostly agree. I do think, again, that companies can make decisions that are irrational in their own long-term interests because they're, especially in Silicon Valley, there's a culture really of focusing on these shorter-term metrics and A-B tests.
…do have a view that is sort of different from some people in Silicon Valley. Is that it's going to be much harder for AI to show up in the economy, for AI to show up in the world than people think, that there is not a one-to-one between intelligence and that. So, talk to me a bit about diffusion.
Yeah, this really clicked for me actually a few months after we wrote this essay when I was looking at Amtrak's proud announcements of the new train sets that they had purchased for their Acela series. Apparently, it can go 165 miles per hour. At first, I thought this is going to be amazing. That's way faster than the trains currently go. And then I dug into it a little bit more. And it turns out the limiting speed is not the trains themselves. It's the tracks that are too curved and the signaling infrastructure that is centuries old. And those things are not changing. And so the average speed hasn't really budged much. It's still 65 to 70 miles per hour. And it struck me that this was, you know, this is kind of an elegant way to say what we've been trying to say in AI as normal technology, which is that most of the time, AI is the trains. It's not the track. So AI is accelerating a part of the process that was never the…
we ever do. So, this part of AI, the AI story, I'm incredibly skeptical of, right? You'll hear a Sam Altman say talk about how AI through innovation is going to help us solve our energy problems. Another way to sort of distill down that idea is that the binding constraint right now on clean energy…
It's not.
We know we have much better energy technologies than we're currently using for vast amounts of our energy infrastructure. And we're not doing it because it would be against some people's profits. We're not doing it because there are political limits to building in the real world. We're not doing it…
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