The future is never you feel fully confident. But in this age of rapid, intense change—political, technological, cultural, scientific—it’s as difficult as ever to get a sense of what’s around the next corner.
Here at WIRED, we’re busy with what’s next. Our pursuit of the future often takes the form of powerfully reported stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people who help define it. That’s why we recently adopted a new tagline: For Future Reference. We focus on stories that not only define the future, but help shape it.
In that spirit, we recently interviewed a number of international luminaries at WIRED—and participants in our recent Big Interview event in San Francisco—and students who have spent their entire lives surrounded by technology that seems at risk of disrupting their lives and livelihoods. The focus was not surprisingly on artificial intelligence, but extended to other areas of culture, technology, and politics. Think of it as a symbol of how people think about the future today—and perhaps a rough map of where we’re going.
AI Everywhere, All the Time
What is clear is that AI is already integrated into people’s lives as search has been done since the days of Alta Vista. Like search, use cases tend to be either functional or general. “I use multiple LLMs to answer any questions I have throughout the day,” says Angel Tramontin, a student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Several of the respondents noted that they had used AI within the past few hours, even in the past few minutes. Recently, Anthropic founder and president Daniela Amodei has been using her company’s chatbot to help with childcare. “Claude actually helped my husband and I potty train our older son,” she says. “And I recently used Claude to do the equivalent of Panic-Googling symptoms for my daughter.”
He is not alone. They are not bad director Jon M. Chu turned to LLMs “just to get advice about my children’s lives, which may not be the best,” he says. “But a good place to start is as a reference.”
AI companies themselves see life as a potential growth area. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health earlier this month, revealing that “hundreds of millions of people” use the chatbot to answer health and wellness questions each week. (ChatGPT Health introduces additional privacy measures, given the sensitivity of the questions.) Anthropic Claude for Healthcare targets hospitals and other health care systems as clients.
Not everyone we interviewed took such a focused approach. “I try not to use it at all,” said UC Berkeley student Sienna Villalobos. “When it comes to doing your job, it’s very easy to have an idea. AI shouldn’t be able to give you an idea. I think you should be able to do that yourself.”
That opinion may grow into a minority. About two-thirds of US teenagers use chatbots, according to a recent Pew Research study. About 3 in 10 report using it every day. (Given how intertwined Google Gemini is with search these days, many more may be using AI without even realizing it or intending to.)
Ready for a Launch?
The pace of AI development and deployment is not slowing down, despite concerns about potential impacts on mental health, the environment, and society as a whole. In this open regulatory environment, companies are largely left to police themselves. So what are the questions AI companies should be asking themselves before every launch, in the absence of watchdogs from lawmakers?
“‘What could go wrong?’ “It’s a really good and important question that I wish more companies would ask,” said Mike Masnick, founder of tech news and policy website Techdirt.
