When we started planning this year’s Future of Work issue, we knew that we wanted to cut through the most cartoonish hype around A.I.’s potential to turbocharge the job market. But we also wanted to avoid knee-jerk, doomsday coverage. Instead, our goal was to be as concrete and specific as possible, telling stories from the front lines of the hybrid A.I.-human work force — while also imagining, in a cleareyed way, the transformations that are still to come. The resulting issue is full of fascinating thinking and reporting. Clive Thompson wrote about the small-business owners managing hordes of A.I. employees — including one bankruptcy lawyer who cheerfully declared that, as wowed as he was by the technology, he also believed he was automating himself out of a job. Linda Kinstler reported on the California State University system, where a new A.I. initiative has stirred up a heated backlash (and where one sociology professor created a Marxist chatbot named MarxGPT to help him teach). Oliver Whang unearthed a whole new social media economy: the content creators making money off A.I. slop. And Coralie Kraft put together a photo essay about how farmers are using A.I., featuring, among many other memorable details, a cow-feeding robot named Gordon. A great challenge of the moment for magazine designers is that A.I. is tough to visualize; it is, after all, mostly invisible. But our incredible art team managed to render A.I., story after story, with vivid, dynamic, colorful illustrations, all of which are strikingly different from one another. In this issue, our A.I. future of work seems, in some ways, deeply dystopian; in other ways, it’s full of promise and delight. We hope you enjoy reading. FEATURES
THE INTERVIEW It’s a two-episode weekend for The Interview, with David Marchese sitting down with Senator Raphael Warnock to discuss voting rights and religion in politics, as well as a bonus edition featuring Lulu Garcia-Navarro talking to Scott Pelley, the “60 Minutes” correspondent who was ousted from CBS News earlier this week after accusing its leadership of “murdering” the country’s top-rated news program.
ON THE COVER This week’s cover features Steven Spielberg, who was profiled by Wesley Morris in advance of the director’s new movie, “Disclosure Day.” Additionally, if you’re in the New York area, Wesley will be hosting a live episode of “Cannonball” at the Tribeca Festival on June 12, featuring a conversation with the actress Cynthia Nixon about art and popular culture.
FROM THE ARCHIVES ‘It’s Not the Years, Honey, It’s the Mileage’Steven Spielberg was profiled in the magazine back in 1999 by Stephen J. Dubner, before Dubner became the co-author of the wildly successful “Freakonomics.” The feature contains many details that are echoed in Wesley Morris’s story today. Some excerpts: Spielberg fully understands the height of his pedestal. “I do think I have a personal responsibility as a family man to use my filmmaking opportunities to put out there stories that have some sort of redeeming social value,” he says at one point, his brow serious. But when asked if movies really need to have a moral imperative, he says, “I think even movies that are pure escape give people a chance to look at someone up on the screen and say, ‘Man, I wish that was my mousse in Cameron Diaz’s hair.’” — Why is it that no one else is making films like Steven Spielberg’s? It could be that it’s simply too soon for imitators. Or it could be that no one else is able to. — They tell him that they love his movies, that he should shoot his next one in their countries, that he should dramatize the lives of their repressed people. These men and women, powerful in their own circles, clearly recognize that Spielberg’s power dwarfs theirs by a frightening multiple. His power, after all, is unlimited by reality. The stories he tells have come to represent not just escape from an imperfect world but a facsimile of a more perfect world — where the lamb lies down with the lion, the discriminator with the discriminated. And in that world, they know, Steven Spielberg is the king. COLUMNS
COMMENT OF THE WEEK Scenes From a Mexican RestaurantFrom a comment on the reader’s poll of the greatest living American songwriters: Seeing that Billy Joel polled ahead of so many great songwriters reminded me that Taco Bell is frequently voted the best Mexican restaurant in the U.S. That’s all for this week. Email us at magazine@nytimes.com with your thoughts, questions and feedback. Stay in touch: |
