We Can’t Imagine the Future of AI
In the June 2024 issue, we explore the ways that artificial intelligence is shaping our economy and culture. The stories and art are about AI—and occasionally by AI. (Throughout the issue, we have rendered all text generated by AI-powered tools in blue.) To read the rest of the issue, go here.
Vernor Vinge was the bard of artificial intelligence, a novelist and mathematician who devoted his career to imagining the nearly unimaginable aftermath of the moment when technology outpaces human capability. He died in March, as we were putting together Reason‘s first-ever AI issue, right on the cusp of finding out which of his fanciful guesses would turn out to be right.
In 2007, Reason interviewed Vinge about the Singularity—the now slightly out-of-favor term he popularized for that greater-than-human intelligence event horizon. By that time the author of A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky had, for years, been pinning the date of the Singularity somewhere between 2005 and 2030. To Reason, he offered a softer prediction: If the rapid doubling of processing power known as Moore’s law “continues for a decade or two,” that “makes it plausible that very interesting A.I. developments might occur before 2030.”
That prophecy, at least, has already come true.
Innovation in AI is happening so quickly that the landscape changed dramatically even from the time Reason conceived this issue to the time you are reading it. As a consequence, this particular first draft of history is likely to become rapidly, laughably outdated. (You can read some selections from our archives on the topic.) As we worked on this issue, new large language models (LLMs) and chatbots cropped up every month, image generation went from producing amusing curiosities with the wrong number of fingers to creating stunningly realistic video from text prompts, and the ability to outsource everything from coding tasks to travel bookings went from a hypothetical to a reality. And those were just the free or cheap tools available to amateurs and journalists.
Throughout the issue, we have rendered all text generated by AI-powered tools in blue. Why? Because when we asked ChatGPT to tell us the color of artificial intelligence, that’s what it picked:
The color that best encapsulates the idea of artificial intelligence in general is a vibrant shade of blue. Blue is often associated with intelligence, trust, and reliability, making it an ideal color to represent the concept of AI. It also symbolizes the vast potential and endless possibilities that AI brings to the world of technology.
Yet the very notion that any kind of bright line can be drawn between human- and machine-generated content is almost certainly already obsolete.
Reason has a podcast read by a version of my voice that is generated entirely artificially. Our producers use dozens of AI tools to tweak, tidy, and improve our video. A few images generated using AI have appeared in previous issues—though they run rampant in this issue, with captions indicating how they were made. I suspect one of our web developers is just three AIs in a trenchcoat. In this regard, Reason is utterly typical in how fast we have incorporated AI into our daily business.
The best we can offer is a view from our spot, nestled in the crook of an exponential curve. Vinge and others like him long believed themselves to be at such an inflection poin
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