AI Futures

A sober assessment of AI today, and a bold vision for what it could be. Generative AI tools, released by a handful of rich tech companies, are remaking the economy, society, and human life as we know it. Must their vision be our common destiny? Leading a forum, acclaimed technology writer Evgeny Morozov—author of To Save Everything, Click Here and host of the podcast A Sense of Rebellion—takes a hard look at Silicon Valley’s grip on our technological imagination. The prevailing wisdom says we can be complacent realists—erecting a few guardrails around Big Tech—or else total refuseniks, rejecting this new technology altogether. That false choice runs roughshod over history, Morozov argues—and with it a more utopian vision of the role technology can play in our lives. To sketch a better AI future, Morozov takes us back to the past, showing how a radically different way of thinking about artificial intelligence once flourished before losing out to Cold War militarization, consumerism, and venture capital. That more humane vision can still be won, but it requires being clear-eyed about the obstacles. Only by building political power, Morozov concludes, can we wrench control of AI from Silicon Valley and build a technological future that serves us all. Forum respondents include musician Brian Eno, computer scientist and AI pioneer Terry Winograd, free software activist and former digital minister of Taiwan Audrey Tang, technologist Bruce Schneier, writer and software engineer Wendy Liu, and journalist Edward Ongweso Jr.. Also in this issue: Joelle M. Abi-Rached on exploding pagers in Beirut and Israel’s expanding war; Sophia Goodfriend on the military’s embrace of the new AI; Lily Hu on the political theory of algorithms; Alexander Hartley on copyright after ChatGPT; Terry Nguyen on the work of literature in the age of large language models; and more.