Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all sat shoulder to shoulder, nearly as if on show, in entrance of a few of the most essential figures of the brand new administration. They weren’t the one tech leaders in Washington, DC, that week. Tim Cook dinner, Sam Altman, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew additionally put in appearances in the course of the president’s first days again in motion.
These are tycoons who lead trillion-dollar firms, set the route of whole industries, and form the lives of billions of individuals all around the world. They’re among the many richest and strongest individuals who have ever lived. And but, similar to you and me, they want relationships to get issues performed. On this case, with President Trump.
These tech barons confirmed up as a result of they want relationships greater than private standing, greater than entry to capital, and typically much more than concepts. A few of those self same individuals—most notably Zuckerberg—needed to make profound breaks with their very own pasts to be able to forge or protect a relationship with the incoming president.
Relationships are the tales of individuals and techniques working collectively. Typically by selection. Typically for practicality. Typically by drive. Too usually, for purely transactional causes.
That’s why we’re exploring relationships on this situation. Relationships join us to 1 one other, but additionally to the machines, platforms, applied sciences, and techniques that mediate trendy life. They’re behind the partnerships that make breakthroughs doable, the networks that assist concepts unfold, and the bonds that construct belief—or a minimum of entry. On this situation, you’ll discover tales in regards to the relationships we forge with one another, with our previous, with our youngsters (or not-quite-children, because the case could also be), and with know-how itself.
Rhiannon Williams explores the relationships individuals have shaped with AI chatbots. A few of these are purely skilled, others extra sophisticated. This sort of relationship could also be novel now, but it surely’s one thing we are going to all take as a right in just some years.
Additionally on this situation, Antonio Regalado delves into our relationship with the ecological previous and the best way historic DNA is getting used not solely to study new truths about who we’re and the place we got here from but additionally, doubtlessly, to handle trendy challenges of local weather and illness.
In a particularly thought-provoking piece, Jessica Hamzelou examines individuals’s relationships with the thousands and thousands of IVF embryos in storage. Held in cryopreservation tanks around the globe, these embryos wait in limbo, in ever rising numbers, as we try to reply sophisticated moral and authorized questions on their existence and preservation.