When I was a child, I remember telling my mother that I was sad that everything had already been discovered. We were at the round kitchen table in our house in Boston, sitting next to each other, separated by a pitcher of milk painted to look like a cow. People had climbed Everest and they had been to the moon. They had walked through the Amazon. It had taken thousands and thousands of years for humans to map the contours of the globe. Now they’d done it. So didn’t that mean I was destined to grow up in a less magical world?
A generation later, I still have the pitcher of milk shaped like a cow. When I talk to my kids at our breakfast table about the future, though, the question is flipped. Now, more than at any point in my life, I feel like the world has been unmapped. We know where everything is, yes. But with the rise of generative AI, we don’t know what our place in it will be. We’re building systems that may become more powerful than people. We’re stepping into vast new jungles, wearing our worn-out boots with just our flashlights to guide us.
To me, this is exhilarating. Progress in AI won’t stop. The spirit of invention and the forces of capitalism won’t allow that. Each new system will help create the next more powerful system, and each new system will create new tools for good and new tools for ill. That means that we need people to make maps for what comes next. We need to figure out the most important questions that technological change will bring. And we need to start to scribble down our answers. We need to start to explore the early contours of this new world.
That’s the inspiration for this magazine, which The Atlantic’s creative marketing studio, Re:think, created along-side Google. We wanted to find the biggest unanswered questions in AI: the questions that no one has really figured out yet. We wanted to explore them. Will AI help us under-stand our own minds? How exactly should it be regulated? Will it make the world more equal or less? Can it learn to tell jokes? None of these questions has a simple answer; some of them don’t really have an answer at all. That’s why they’re interesting, and that’s why they’re important.
My mother was right with the response she gave me back then at the kitchen table: The world is much bigger than you think, and there will always be something new to discover. Right now, I hope this magazine helps you discover and think through artificial intelligence, the biggest new thing humanity has discovered in years.
