The Invisible Hand in the Machine: Rethinking AI Through a Collectivist Lens
The most radical idea in Michael I. Jordan’s latest manifesto isn’t a new model, a benchmark, or even a novel training scheme. It’s a reorientation. He argues that we’ve misdiagnosed the nature of intelligence—and in doing so, we’ve built AI systems that are cognitively brilliant yet socially blind. The cure? Embrace a collectivist, economic lens. This is not techno-utopianism. Jordan—a towering figure in machine learning—offers a pointed critique of both the AGI hype and the narrow symbolic legacy of classical AI. The goal shouldn’t be to build machines that imitate lone geniuses. It should be to construct intelligent collectives—systems that are social, uncertain, decentralized, and deeply intertwined with human incentives. In short: AI needs an economic imagination. ...