NEW YORK, 9 January 2026 — Rather than likening artificial intelligence to a mind, some scholars and commentators argue that AI should be conceptualised as a social technology, more comparable to systems such as democracy, markets or large-scale governance mechanisms that organise collective information and decision-making. Their reasoning provides a fresh lens on how AI is reshaping society, beyond the simple metaphor of machines thinking like humans.
Academics call for moving past the idea that AI is merely an intelligent agent and instead viewing it through frameworks that have historically helped humans process complex information, similar to how democracies aggregate citizen views or markets coordinate economic activity. This perspective frames AI not as a direct substitute for individual intelligence but as a collective information processor that influences coordination and choice.
AI As A Social Coordination System
The argument rests on the idea that traditional governance and economic systems, like democracy or marketplaces — serve to aggregate, prioritise and summarise complex data for large populations. Democracy attempts to translate diverse public opinions into collective policy choices, while marketplaces coordinate millions of individual preferences into prices that guide production and consumption. By this view, AI similarly acts as a mechanism for processing and organising vast quantities of data and preferences, enabling decisions at a scale and speed that surpass human capacities.
Under this paradigm, large language models and generative AI are seen as technologies that classify, summarise and coordinate, functions that resemble political and economic coordination systems more than a singular “artificial brain.” This reframing suggests that AI’s influence may extend well into the domains traditionally managed by collective human institutions, raising both opportunities and challenges for governance.
For example, just as a marketplace efficiently aggregates demand and supply signals to set prices, certain AI systems can synthesise diverse user inputs to produce predictive outputs or recommendations that inform human decision-making. Likewise, democratic systems synthesise individual voices into public policy; AI could in future play a role in shaping or simulating such collective judgements.
Implications For Policy And Society
Thinking of AI in this way has important implications for regulation, ethics and governance. If AI functions more like a collective information processing system, then oversight models might need to address not only technical performance and safety but also how AI reorganises social coordination, influences markets, and shapes political discourse. It suggests that policymakers and researchers should pay closer attention to how AI interacts with existing governance structures and where it may create new forms of collective influence.
This conceptual shift also signals that debates around AI shouldn’t be limited to technical prowess or fears of humanoid intelligence, but should extend to broader questions about how collective choices, economic systems and democratic processes are mediated by algorithmic platforms that rival traditional institutions in scale and reach.
