Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Kyle Chayka’s smart close in a smart piece for The New Yorker, “Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life”:
Altman and Ive are positioning their device as a solution to screen fatigue. They promise that their gadget will free us from technology, as evinced by their softly smiling faces in their joint portrait and the warmth and companionship of the café in which they conducted their video interview. But we will only get to this appealingly humane place, they imply, by adopting more technology—their technology. Speculative mockups online imagine an A.I. companion device that looks simple, like a rounded metal amulet—it would be Ive’s style to make the design approachable yet austere. Yet the sleek and frictionless object will rely on a vast infrastructure of factories and server farms; the labor of human maintenance workers and moderators; and, ultimately, the corpus of information that has been digested as training data, which is effectively the entire history of human thought. The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that forty-six per cent of youth ages sixteen to twenty-one would prefer to live in a world in which the internet doesn’t exist. Given all the regret and dread that digital culture has prompted, some two decades since the advent of social media, it seems worth thinking twice before allowing Altman and Ive’s incipient creation to occupy our time and our minds, too.