The rise of retrofuturism
Astra, the latest artificial-intelligence model from OpenAI, is a technological leap forward and an aesthetic jump backward, going by its promotional video. The clip begins with grainy footage from 1979, of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher testing voice-command software. Cut to the present. The Eames chair and projector screen remain. But now workers assemble presentations and fiddle with contracts via dictation as they pace around the brown carpet. Another chills out by building and playing a rocket-ship game. The whole thing is, in a word, retro.
A retro revolution is under way in Silicon Valley. Outside Elon Musk’s diner in Los Angeles, a homage to 1950s Americana, can be spotted at least a few Cybertrucks, Tesla’s beefed-up version of the 1981 DeLorean. Palmer Luckey founded not just Anduril, a defence firm named after the sword from J.R.R. Tolkien’s middle-earth, but also ModRetro, which makes replicas of video-game consoles from...
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