Where is AI headed? As AI becomes embedded in everyday life, two 1960s thinkers offer frameworks for understanding its wider impact on society and communication.
Where is AI headed? The 1960s were a time of great change in technology, culture and politics. Television was radically altering the media environment, and nobody was quite sure how to think about it.
As the world struggles with the impact of another new high-tech medium — generative artificial intelligence (AI) — two thinkers from that era have acquired new relevance for understanding what is happening and where we’re heading.
AI as medium
In the early days of the printing press, it was used to produce copies of the Bible. TV relied on theatre and radio for much of its early content. The internet was first mostly used for sending electronic “mail” and exchanging “files”.
McLuhan noticed the pattern here. New media are initially used to recreate content from old media. But then we see novel kinds of content appear that are native to the new media. Television, for example, led to the advent of reality TV, 24-hour news coverage, and other forms that uniquely suited the medium.
We’re still in the early days with generative AI. People use it to produce old content in a new medium: writing essays, generating pop songs, spawning web pages, and so on.
Hints of genuinely new forms of AI-enabled communication are starting to emerge. Google’s Project Genie generates explorable worlds in real time on demand. In academia, we are seeing experiments with books as linked modules with embedded prompts.
This matters because, in McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message”. Whether you’re watching live-streaming influencers or nature documentaries, you’re still staring at a screen. If you’re interfacing with AI systems instead of humans over a long period of time, it will change how you experience the world.
As AI continues to evolve, staying informed, learning new skills, and using the technology responsibly will be the key to making the most of its potential.