THE ECONOMIST: Silicon Valley and AI companies are looking to the past to design tech of the future

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 the 1990s.

Andreessen Horowitz, the world’s largest venture-capital firm, has re-branded itself in the art-deco style. Anyone who’s anyone has an opinion on the fallen beauty of the world. The boss of Stripe, a giant payments firm, has given out grants to projects in search of a “new aesthetics”. But many more techies think the answers lie in the past.

Some dismiss all this as the mid-life crisis of an industry whose power has outgrown its casual look. Much has been written about Mark Zuckerberg’s tough-guy transformation, but he still works at “1 Hacker Way”. Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, rarely uses capital letters in his earth-shaking correspondence.

The glass boxes techies live and work in are far less grand than those of tycoons past: a visit to the soaring art-deco tower General Electric erected in Manhattan or the kitsch castle William Randolph Hearst built in California would make any billionaire consider refashioning himself as a mid-century mogul or a neo-classical titan.

It cannot be a good business decision to be of one’s time when that time is so unpopular. The past has always found fans among the very young and the very old. According to a survey from Pew, nearly half of Americans say they would rather live in the past (only a small group would prefer the future to the present or past).

But hardly ever has the future seemed so toxic, if the opposition to data centres is anything to go by. Politics in the rich world is mostly an exercise in promising, however fancifully, to make the economy look like it did decades ago. Among the many re-s that comprise the populist agenda are re-armament, re-industrialisation, re-nationalisation, re-shoring and even re-migration.

The screen will be the front line of the retro revolution. For decades these portals to the digital world got thinner, bigger and more numerous. In his first big announcement John Ternus, Apple’s new boss, unveiled a foldable iPhone, making these giant devices more giant still. Yet as least as much energy is going into replacing the screen with objects that blend into ordinary — which is to say, retro — life. Rings, glasses, watches and even pendants are all “wearable” vessels that promise their host an unconstrained 20th-century existence with the perpetual assistance of a god-like computer from far in the future.

The first retro billionaires are already being minted. Kim Kardashian, a reality television star, might seem like a mogul at peace with her time. But her underwear brand, SKIMS, is a well-marketed reboot of SPANX from the 2000s, which is itself a reboot of the Victorian-era ladies’ corset.

Last year OpenAI paid an astonishing $US6.5b ($9b) to acquire the services of Jony Ive, a British designer responsible for many of Apple’s greatest hits in the 2000s, in pursuit of an attractive (and reportedly screenless) vessel for its AI models. But it is Mr Ive’s business partner, Marc Newson, whose work truly encapsulates the coming retro style: his bright and boxy Ford 021c concept car, unveiled in 1999, is among the greatest retro products never built.

Capitalism has not generally been kind to those who try too hard to put the clocks back. Any backward technological tendencies a modern worker has (like using an old phone) are crushed on contact with the real world. History is littered with companies that try and fail to revive their fortunes by returning to a former design, particularly in the car industry.

Already the latest retro wave is creating casualties who misjudge the delicate balance between new technology and old design.

The Ray-Ban Wayfarer frame used for Meta’s new AI glasses is surely meant to distract from the cameras peeking from their corners. Yet to interact with someone wearing them can be doubly unnerving, since they are both pointing a camera at you and, often, wearing sunglasses.

Even so, profits will flow to those businesses who can make their customers feel like they are inside a Faraday cage, undisturbed by the digital world. That is already the goal of some trendy nightclubs, which require that phones stay in pockets or bags, and those few restaurants snooty enough that diners dare not photograph their food. Schools and universities will increasingly pitch themselves as sacred, tech-free environments. A decade ago a child with an iPad might have been a marker of affluence; now it is a sign of neglect. Bosses might soon find themselves attracting workers to their firms with the promise of retro cubicles and formal dress codes.

The times they are a-changin’

It is a great irony that American capitalism should be so obsessed with the past as it hurtles ceaselessly towards the future. Reviving some version of the old world might be the best chance that tech bosses have to stem the growing hostility towards them. But it is also a warning. If society continues to turn on them, it may take to winding the clock back itself — destroying the whole edifice, and the futuristic dreams of Silicon Valley, in the process.