Humanity’s alignment problem

It's lunchtime on top of the world again.

- Antara Haldar

Time’s annual “Person of the Year” issue released two weeks ago has revived the iconic Depression-era photograph of steelworkers casually lunching on a beam suspended over Manhattan. With the city rising beneath them, the image portrays risk as normalised, even glamourised.

This time, though, the men at lunch aren’t anonymous construction workers. Instead, the digital painter Jason Seiler commissioned by Time, has overlaid photos of the “architects of AI’: Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAl’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Stanford's Fei-Fei Li, and Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices. The cover is clever and controversial, with the comedian Jimmy Kimmel describing it as the “eight dorks of the apocalypse” And by tracing the technological arc from steel skyscrapers to thinking machines, it may reveal more than the editors even intended.