Artificial Intelligence Becomes An Age – The New Yorker

…the automobile age, the Internet age—when it’s so pervasive that you can’t imagine life without it. Culturally speaking, there’s a before and after. For people of a certain generation, the Internet was once a rumor about bulletin boards and “Usenet”; now they arrive at a countryside bed and breakfast and ask for the Wi-Fi password with their room key. The new age arrives on no specific day; it creeps up slowly, and then pounces suddenly. And so, it seems, with A.I. For some years, it had been a silent partner in the most ordinary aspects of life, from smartphone pics to Netflix recommendations. But once it learned to converse—via ChatGPT, Bard, and the like—millions of people were startled into elation and alarm. Pygmalion had parted her lips.

This was the year of a thousand think pieces about whether machines could now think. In fact, the “generative A.I.” behind all those chatbots is just a fragment of a larger project, one that has been under way for many decades and has had an expanding role in our work and in our play. What lies ahead? According to the experts, A.I. will raise our society to a higher level or destroy civilization as we know it. It will give us godlike powers or make us puny and irrelevant. It’s ridiculously overhyped, except we still haven’t grasped the scale of its significance. Amid contending certainties, maybe some humility is in order?

This week’s issue of The New Yorker explores A.I. not as simply as a technology but as a way of life. James Somers, a professional coder, reflects on how his livelihood—and sense of purpose—has been affected by the scripting wizardry of A.I. chatbots; Eyal Press reports on the damage done when law enforcement misuses facial-recognition services; Joshua Rothman visits the so-called godfather of A.I. to find out how the “neural net” revolution happened and why a brilliant computer scientist has come to fear his brainchild; Anna Wiener writes about the experimental musician and artist Holly Herndon’s creation of Holly+, a machine-learning model trained on her; and Daniel Immerwahr argues that worries about a digital-disinformation menace are misplaced.

As all these stories make clear, there’s a sense in which this technology is uniquely personal. Cars don’t help us understand how people run. But thinking about artificial intelligence helps us think about the other kind. Matching ourselves against its capacities, variously savantlike and bumbling, we get a sense of how we are and are not special. What’s most disturbing about the tech—its susceptibility to bias and fabrication—is what’s most human about it. Thank you, as always, for reading.

—Henry Finder, editorial director