Ist KI eher ein Geist oder ein Markt?

*Walter Frick for Bloomberg News*

Imagine a system that takes in billions of data points, conducts a massive number of simple but opaque operations, and then spits out responses that are both useful and, sometimes, destructive. The system seems all-knowing, but it is reductive and lacks common sense. We allow it to make major decisions, although a chorus of critics worries that it doesn’t share our values and may prove impossible to control. The system is not a large language model like ChatGPT. It’s the US stock market.

This is the sort of metaphor that a small but influential group of social and cognitive scientists say can help us better understand artificial intelligence. Today’s AI models are not, in their view, akin to a human mind. Rather, they’re a form of “cultural or social” technology that aggregates and passes on human knowledge — more like a printing press or even a bureaucracy or a market. If we want to understand how to manage AI, they say, we should study how we’ve handled new social technologies in the past.

Last year, [*Science* published a version of this argument](https://henryfarrell.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Science-Accepted-Version.pdf) by Henry Farrell (a political scientist), Alison Gopnik (a psychologist), Cosma Shalizi (a statistician) and James Evans (a sociologist). “Beginning with language itself, human beings have had distinctive capacities to learn from the experiences of other humans and these capacities are arguably the secret of human evolutionary success,” the authors write. They go on to identify key ideas — from print to television to representative democracy — that transformed the nature of social learning by changing how societies process information.

[Read the full essay here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-09/what-s-the-best-way-to-think-of-ai-look-to-democracy-marketplaces?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2Nzk1OTMzOCwiZXhwIjoxNzY4NTY0MTM4LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUOEw3S0ZLR0lGUTEwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.I2GqM4kSJt5Z6YiWSeYcpw5GTnwccMmpyd3WpPDJWmw)