Where Tech Leaders and Students Really Think AI Is Going

The future never feels fully certain. But in this time of rapid, intense transformation—political, technological, cultural, scientific—it’s as difficult as it ever has been to get a sense of what’s around the next corner.

Here at WIRED, we’re obsessed with what comes next. Our pursuit of the future most often takes the form of vigorously reported stories, in-depth videos, and interviews with the people helping define it. That’s also why we recently embraced a new tagline: For Future Reference. We’re focused on stories that don’t just explain what’s ahead, but help shape it.

In that spirit, we recently interviewed a range of luminaries from the various worlds WIRED touches—and who participated in our recent Big Interview event in San Francisco—as well as students who have spent their whole lives inundated with technologies that seem increasingly likely to disrupt their lives and livelihoods. The main focus was unsurprisingly on artificial intelligence, but it extended to other areas of culture, tech, and politics. Think of it as a benchmark of how people think about the future today—and maybe even a rough map of where we’re going.

AI Everywhere, All the Time

What’s clear is that AI is already every bit as integrated into people’s lives as search has been since the Alta Vista days. Like search, the use cases tend toward the practical or mundane. “I use a lot of LLMs to answer any questions I have throughout the day,” says Angel Tramontin, a student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Several of our respondents noted that they’d used AI within the last few hours, even in the last few minutes. Lately, Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei has been using her company’s chatbot to assist with childcare. “Claude actually helped me and my husband potty-train our older son,” she says. “And I’ve recently used Claude to do the equivalent of panic-Googling symptoms for my daughter.”

She’s not the only one. Wicked director Jon M. Chu turned to LLMs “just to get some advice on my children’s health, which is maybe not the best,” he says. “But it’s a good starting reference point.”

AI companies themselves see health as a potential growth area. OpenAI announced ChatGPT Health earlier this month, disclosing that “hundreds of millions of people” use the chatbot to answer health and wellness questions each week. (ChatGPT Health introduces additional privacy measures, given the sensitivity of the queries.) Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare targets hospitals and other health care systems as customers.

Not everyone we interviewed took such an immersive approach. “I try not to use it at all,” says UC Berkeley undergraduate student Sienna Villalobos. “When it comes down to doing your own work, it’s very easy to have an opinion. AI shouldn’t be able to give you an opinion. I think you should be able to make that for yourself.”

That view may be increasingly in the minority. Nearly two-thirds of US teens use chatbots, according to a recent Pew Research study. About 3 in 10 report using it daily. (Given how intertwined Google Gemini is with search these days, many more may use AI without even realizing it or intending to.)

Ready to Launch?

The pace of AI development and deployment is relentless, despite concerns about its potential impacts on mental health, the environment, and society at large. In this wide-open regulatory environment, companies are largely left to self-police. So what questions should AI companies ask themselves ahead of every launch, absent any guardrails from lawmakers?

“‘What might go wrong?’ is a really good and important question that I wish more companies would ask,” says Mike Masnick, founder of the tech and policy news site Techdirt.