Where technology leaders and students really believe AI is headed

Never future He feels completely certain. But in this time of rapid and intense transformation – political, technological, cultural and scientific – it is more difficult than ever to recognize what is around the corner.

Here at WIRED, we’re obsessed with what comes next. Our quest for the future often takes the form of powerfully published stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people who help define it. This is also why we recently adopted a new slogan: For future reference. We focus on stories that not only explain what’s coming, but help shape it.

In this spirit, we recently interviewed a range of notable figures from across the worlds of WIRED touch – who have participated in our programme The last big interview event In San Francisco — as well as students who have spent their entire lives immersed in technologies that seem increasingly likely to disrupt their lives and livelihoods. The main focus was unsurprisingly on artificial intelligenceBut it extended to other areas of culture, technology and politics. Think of it as a benchmark for how people think about the future today — and maybe even a rough map of where we’re headed.

Artificial intelligence is everywhere, all the time

What is clear is that AI is already becoming integrated into people’s lives just as research has been since the days of Alta Vista. Like research, use cases tend toward the practical or mundane. “I use a lot of MBAs to answer any questions I have throughout the day,” says Angel Tramontin, a student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Many survey respondents indicated that they had used AI within the last few hours, even in the last few minutes. Recently, Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic, used her company’s chatbot to help with childcare. “Claude actually helped my husband and I potty train our oldest son,” she says. “And I recently used Claude to do the equivalent of Google panic symptoms for my daughter.”

She’s not the only one. evil Director John M. says: Chu said he turned to LLM holders “just to get some advice about my children’s health, which is probably not the best.” “But it’s a good reference point to start.”

AI companies themselves see health as a potential area of ​​growth. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health earlier this month, revealing that “hundreds of millions of people” use the chatbot to answer health and wellness questions every week. (ChatGPT Health offers additional privacy measures, due to the sensitivity of queries.) Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare targets hospitals and other healthcare systems as clients.

Not everyone we interviewed took such an immersive approach. “I try not to use them at all,” says Sienna Villalobos, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student. “When it comes to doing your own work, it’s very easy to have an opinion. AI shouldn’t be able to give you an opinion. I think you should be able to give it yourself.”

This view may be increasingly becoming a minority. Nearly two-thirds of American teens use chatbots, according to a recent study by Pew Research He studies. About 3 in 10 reported using it daily. (Given how closely Google Gemini is intertwined with search these days, many people may be using AI without realizing it or intending to.)

Ready to go?

The pace of AI development and deployment is relentless, despite concerns about it Potential effects on mental healththe environmentand Society in general. In this widely open regulatory environment, companies are largely left to self-regulation. So what questions should AI companies ask themselves before every launch, in the absence of any guardrails from regulators?

“What could go wrong?” “It’s a really good and important question that I wish more companies would ask,” says Mike Masnick, founder of the technology and policy news website. I was upset.