The AI Effect: Why We Always Move the Goalposts on Artificial Intelligence

We’ve all been there: You watch a demonstration of a computer generating a photorealistic image from a simple text prompt, writing a fully functional computer program in seconds, or translating complex legal jargon into plain English in real-time. For a brief moment, your jaw drops. It feels like science fiction.

Yet, within weeks, that same technology stops feeling like “real AI.” It quietly transforms into a mundane background utility—a spell-checker on steroids, a glorified calculator, or just another software feature we take entirely for granted.

Welcome to The AI Effect.

What is the AI Effect?

Coined by computer scientist John McCarthy—one of the founding fathers of the field—the AI Effect describes a psychological and linguistic phenomenon: As soon as AI solves a problem, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence.

Instead, it gets reclassified as ordinary software, routine automation, or simply “math.”

Think about how we view technologies that were once considered the holy grail of computer science:

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Reading handwritten postal codes or scanning physical receipts used to require cutting-edge neural networks. Today, it’s a standard feature in your smartphone camera app.
• Chess and Strategy: When IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was hailed as a monumental milestone for machine intelligence. Decades later, anyone can download a chess app on their phone that would easily crush Deep Blue. We don’t call those apps “intelligent”; we call them “games.”
• Recommendation Algorithms: The algorithms that curate your social media feeds or predict what movie you want to watch next are powered by sophisticated machine learning. Yet, we rarely marvel at them; we mostly just find them convenient—or occasionally annoying.

Why Do We Always Move the Goalposts?

Human beings have a persistent habit of redefining intelligence the moment a machine manages to mimic it. This behavior stems from a few deep-seated psychological quirks:

1. The Mystery of the Unknown: Intelligence is heavily tied to mystery. When a task is difficult for humans—like calculating complex statistics or beating a Grandmaster at Go—we view it as a high-water mark of cognition. Once a machine masters it, we realize the task can be broken down into mechanical rules and probabilities. The mystery evaporates, and with it, our perception of “intelligence.”
2. The “Just Math” Fallacy: Because computers operate on binary code, transistors, and mathematical matrices, we tend to dismiss their outputs as soulless calculations. Even when a generative model writes a touching poem or designs an architectural blueprint, we remind ourselves, “It’s just predicting the next word based on statistics.” We reserve true “intelligence” for things we don’t fully understand in ourselves, like consciousness, intuition, and subjective emotion.
3. Familiarity Breeds Contempt: Habituation dulls our sense of wonder. The first time you experience a breakthrough technology, it feels magical. The five-hundredth time, it’s just an interface you have to wait to load.

The Double-Edged Sword of the AI Effect

The AI Effect isn’t just a quirky psychological observation; it has real-world consequences for researchers, industries, and society at large.

• The Funding Trap: For decades, the field of computer science went through cycles known as “AI Winters,” where funding dried up because researchers failed to meet overhyped expectations. When AI achieves a milestone, the public immediately normalizes it, leading investors and policymakers to ask, “Is that all it can do?”
• Underestimating the Impact: By dismissing mature AI technologies as “not real AI,” we risk underestimating their societal footprint. Automated loan approvals, facial recognition systems, and predictive policing algorithms carry immense weight in the real world. Treating them as routine software can blind us to the ethical, bias, and privacy challenges they pose.
• The Search for AGI: The AI Effect keeps pushing our collective gaze toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)—a hypothetical machine that can match or exceed human capabilities across all domains. Because every current achievement gets disqualified as “narrow AI,” the finish line is perpetually moving just over the horizon.

Rediscovering the Wonder

The irony of the AI Effect is that it robs us of our appreciation for profound technological evolution. We live in an era where silicon chips can converse, create, analyze, and diagnose at speeds unimaginable to previous generations.

Perhaps the next time you prompt an AI to help you draft an email, brainstorm a recipe, or debug a script, take a brief second to pause. Remember that you are interacting with a pinnacle of human ingenuity—a cascade of mathematics and engineering that once lived exclusively in the realm of philosophers and dreamers.