The future never feels fully certain. But in this time of rapid, intense transformation\u2014political, technological, cultural, scientific\u2014it\u2019s as difficult as it ever has been to get a sense of what\u2019s around the next corner.<\/p>\n
Here at WIRED, we\u2019re obsessed with what comes next. Our pursuit of the future most often takes the form of vigorously reported stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people helping define it. That\u2019s also why we recently embraced a new tagline: For Future Reference. We\u2019re focused on stories that don\u2019t just explain what\u2019s ahead, but help shape it.<\/p>\n
In that spirit, we recently interviewed a range of luminaries from the various worlds WIRED touches\u2014and who participated in our recent Big Interview event<\/a> in San Francisco\u2014as well as students who have spent their whole lives inundated with technologies that seem increasingly likely to disrupt their lives and livelihoods. The main focus was unsurprisingly on artificial intelligence<\/a>, but it extended to other areas of culture, tech, and politics. Think of it as a benchmark of how people think about the future today\u2014and maybe even a rough map of where we\u2019re going.<\/p>\n AI Everywhere, All the Time<\/p>\n What\u2019s clear is that AI is already every bit as integrated into people\u2019s lives as search has been since the Alta Vista days. Like search, the use cases tend toward the practical or mundane. \u201cI use a lot of LLMs to answer any questions I have throughout the day,\u201d says Angel Tramontin, a student at UC Berkeley\u2019s Haas School of Business.<\/p>\n Several of our respondents noted that they\u2019d used AI within the last few hours, even in the last few minutes. Lately, Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei has been using her company\u2019s chatbot to assist with childcare. \u201cClaude actually helped me and my husband potty-train our older son,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve recently used Claude to do the equivalent of panic-Googling symptoms for my daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s not the only one. Wicked director Jon M. Chu turned to LLMs \u201cjust to get some advice on my children\u2019s health, which is maybe not the best,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s a good starting reference point.\u201d<\/p>\n AI companies themselves see health as a potential growth area. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health earlier this month, disclosing that \u201chundreds of millions of people\u201d use the chatbot to answer health and wellness questions each week. (ChatGPT Health introduces additional privacy measures, given the sensitivity of the queries.) Anthropic\u2019s Claude for Healthcare targets hospitals and other health care systems as customers.<\/p>\n Not everyone we interviewed took such an immersive approach. \u201cI try not to use it at all,\u201d says UC Berkeley undergraduate student Sienna Villalobos. \u201cWhen it comes down to doing your own work, it\u2019s very easy to have an opinion. AI shouldn\u2019t be able to give you an opinion. I think you should be able to make that for yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n That view may be increasingly in the minority. Nearly two-thirds of US teens use chatbots, according to a recent Pew Research study<\/a>. About 3 in 10 report using it daily. (Given how intertwined Google Gemini is with search these days, many more may use AI without even realizing it or intending to.)<\/p>\n Ready to Launch?<\/p>\n The pace of AI development and deployment is relentless, despite concerns about its potential impacts on mental health<\/a>, the environment<\/a>, and society at large<\/a>. In this wide-open regulatory environment, companies are largely left to self-police. So what questions should AI companies ask themselves ahead of every launch, absent any guardrails from lawmakers?<\/p>\n