What is the AI Effect? Impact on Technology and Society

The Moving Goalposts of the Mind: Understanding the “AI Effect”

Imagine walking through a museum exhibit dedicated to the future. A robot glides across the room, carrying on a smooth, natural conversation, translating foreign languages in real-time, and generating a photorealistic painting of a cyberpunk city based on a single sentence. To anyone from a few decades ago, this would look like pure magic—the definitive arrival of artificial intelligence.

Yet, for us today, it just feels like Tuesday.

We might shrug, type our next prompt, and move on. This peculiar psychological phenomenon—where we constantly downgrade our perception of a technology’s brilliance the moment it actually works—is known as the AI effect.

What Is the AI Effect?

Coined by computer science pioneer John McCarthy, the AI effect describes a moving target: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”

As soon as a machine successfully solves a problem that once required human brainpower, we stop calling it “artificial intelligence”. Instead, we reclassify it as routine software, smart engineering, or automated calculation.

• Yesterday’s Sci-Fi: Decades ago, things like optical character recognition (the technology that lets your phone scan a document from a photo) or computer chess-playing programs were treated as the holy grail of artificial intelligence research.
• Today’s Mundane Reality: Now, those features are baked quietly into background code. Because we understand how they work, we no longer view them as “truly intelligent”—they’re just tools.

A History of Shrinking “Genius”

The AI effect has repeated itself like clockwork throughout tech history:

1. The Chess Shock (1997): When IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, it made global headlines as a watershed moment for machine cognition. Critics quickly pivoted, arguing that Deep Blue wasn’t actually “smart”—it was just a brute-force calculator crunching millions of possibilities per second.
2. The Rise of Recommendation Engines: Years ago, a computer predicting what music, videos, or clothes you might like based on your history felt uncanny. Today, algorithms power every streaming platform and social media feed, and we view them merely as annoying or convenient filters rather than intellectual marvels.
3. Generative AI Today: We are living through the latest chapter of this loop. When advanced large language models first emerged, people were stunned by their prose and creativity. Within months, as millions of people integrated them into daily school and work workflows, the narrative shifted: “It’s just predicting the next word based on statistics; it doesn’t actually ‘know’ anything.”

Why Do We Do This?

The AI effect isn’t just a tech quirk; it’s deeply psychological. Humans have a tendency to gatekeep the concept of “intelligence” because we want to preserve a special, unreplicable status for ourselves.

For a long time, we defined human uniqueness through traits like language, artistic creation, strategic gaming, and problem-solving. When a silicon chip masters one of those domains, we don’t usually conclude that machines are becoming smart. Instead, we redefine intelligence to exclude whatever the machine just did. We essentially move the goalposts, deciding that real intelligence must be whatever humans can do that computers haven’t figured out yet.

The Danger of the Goalpost Shift

While it’s funny to watch our standards change, the AI effect has real-world consequences. It can lead to two extremes:

• Underestimating Progress: By dismissing working technology as “just math” or “just statistics,” we can fail to appreciate the massive structural and societal changes these tools bring.
• Chasing Phantoms: Because we are always waiting for a mythical, sci-fi style awakening to validate what “real” AI is, we might overlook the actual, tangible impacts—both positive and negative—that current systems have on jobs, privacy, education, and daily life.

The Ultimate Irony

The ultimate irony of the AI effect is that AI can never truly win. The better, faster, and more seamlessly a piece of artificial intelligence integrates into our lives, the faster it loses its title as “AI”. Intelligence, it seems, is a destination that moves the second you arrive.