本周封面故事 | 经济学人（强烈推荐）
1
2
How we chose this week’s image
We have reached that point with the technologies behind both our cover stories. When solar power was a tenth of its current size a decade ago, it was still seen as marginal, even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. Consider that the next ten-fold increase, over the next decade, will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them. Then imagine what will happen in the decade after that.
In the same way, artificial intelligence has become capable of astonishing feats of object recognition and higher-order problem solving. In due course, “decision-support systems” may be able to grasp the baffling complexity of war rapidly and over a wide area—perhaps an entire battlefield. AI systems, coupled with autonomous robots on land, sea and air, are likely to find and destroy targets at an unprecedented speed and on a vast scale.
In their exponential growth, life-destroying warfare and life-giving solar energy share an embrace: yin meets yang. The task of our covers was to get across the change they promise.
These images are not hyperbole. Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. Much of the world will begin to feel energy-rich, a new and transformational feeling for humankind.
We worried that this looked more like the cover for an atlas of the solar system than a feet-on-the-ground guide to a transformational technology. We needed to come down to earth.
This image is a homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey”. In Stanley Kubrick’s film the monolith inspires the ability to use tools. Solar energy could unleash a similar burst of creativity. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will not just slow climate change, boost productivity and make possible activities that are too expensive today. It will also free the imagination, setting the mind spinning with new ideas. Welcome to the solar age.
But drones are not where military AI will make the most difference. As our coverage explains, the technology is also revolutionising the command and control that military officers use to orchestrate wars. We needed to illustrate that.
Above, the three rockets with a binary exhaust of 1s and 0s tries to illustrate an army that runs on AI. It’s clever if you know the story, but if you don’t it is too subtle.
3
愿景
微信扫码关注该文公众号作者
戳这里提交新闻线索和高质量文章给我们。
来源: qq
点击查看作者最近其他文章