TL;DR: Michael I. Jordan, the man Science magazine named “the world’s most influential computer scientist,” has never considered himself an AI researcher. His thesis: intelligence is not a property of individual systems but emerges from collectives interacting through economic mechanisms. Most AI today is optimization (one agent, one metric). The real world is an equilibrium problem (multiple agents, competing incentives, stable states). The distinction matters for how you architect systems in media, advertising, retail, and publishing. Jordan’s framework does not say “stop building.” It says “stop optimizing in isolation and start designing markets.”