AI Is Literally Everything

Here’s a game I sometimes play with friends. And by “sometimes” I mean, like, twice, but it’s super fun. You read out a paragraph from a work of nonfiction, and people have to guess the year it was published. Wanna play? I’ll start:

The world is sliding precariously close to disaster. This conclusion follows from any sober analysis of the state of the planet. Economic stagnation, poverty, rampant inflation, massive unemployment, overpopulation, political strife, terrorism, wars and rumors of wars, and the threat of Armageddon permeate every corner of the globe. Of course, mankind has always faced problems, and present ones naturally seem more formidable than those in the past, but we do appear now to have reached a point where something very substantial will have to give. The height of irony is that much of the blame is now being laid specifically on mankind’s systematic efforts to find solutions to its problems—that is, on technology.

Any guesses? I’m guessing you’re guessing I’m trying to trick you, and you’d be, mostly, right: That is the very first paragraph of a (really wonderful, expertly written, and sadly out-of-print) book called The Creative Computer, published … 41 years ago, in 1984.

How’d you do? Maybe it’s not so shocking. There’s some datedness to the writing—you don’t hear as many references to “terrorism” these days, and even fewer (per social-activist copy editors) to “mankind.” But I still find it pretty remarkable. With just a few tiny adjustments, you could speak pretty much those exact words in 2025.

Well, plus AI, of course. Anything said in the modern era must, it seems, mention AI. There’s no Big Story this week, and that’s because we’ve been working day and literal night to wrap production on, yes, a package of AI stories. A huge, ungodly, sensational, mysterious, even magical package of AI stories, the likes of which I promise you’ve never seen!! They all go live first thing tomorrow morning, and I can’t wait for you to read them, to click through them, to play with them. We didn’t use the paragraph from The Creative Computer as our introduction, but we could have.

The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder

In turbulent and uncertain times like these, one of the few anchors we have is our sense of self. At the end of each day, crowded with new horrors and fresh dread, you are your only port in the storm. What happens, then, when you lose your way?

In 2020, Sandra Upson grappled with that question in a haunting profile of expert software engineer Lee Holloway. Over the course of the 2010s, the cofounder of the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare gradually lost his selfhood—or at least what we think of as selfhood—to early-onset frontotemporal dementia. The feature is wrenching and beautiful, and one of WIRED’s best. It cuts to the very core of being human: the experience of being you, and not someone else. This week I’d like to know: Where do you think the boundaries of selfhood lie? Without the same emotions, values, beliefs, and dreams, are we still ourselves? After all, Sandra’s feature reminds us that, even when someone is no longer recognizable to themselves, there is still a person—still someone—there. Send your thoughts to samantha_spengler@wired.com or comment below the article.

Last week, Steven Levy devoted his Backchannel newsletter to the question of whether AI is doomed, like so many technologies before it, to degrade from beneficial to harmful—a process called “enshittification.” He’s not alone—the concern seems to be gathering speed just as the question of an AI bubble is being brought up in podcasts and social posts and Substacks across the internet. (Check out our AI package tomorrow for even more reading on the subject.) It’s clear AI’s usefulness, or lack thereof, is on the minds of WIRED readers, as dozens shared their thoughts in the comments section. Said one reader, AI has gone “straight to enshittified, with no intervening period of usefulness.” Other readers agreed: “Currently AI generates so much shit among its responses that it needs to de-shittify before it can enshittify via advertising.”

Tell us about your favorite WIRED stories and magazine-related memories. Write to samantha_spengler@wired.com, and include “CLASSICS” in the subject line.