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Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

Our two covers this week are the yin and yang of technological progress. Both AI-powered war and solar energy are being transformed by the head-spinning, pundit-confounding reality of exponential growth. When something doubles and doubles again, our brains find it hard to comprehend. It suddenly emerges from the background and becomes world-changing. Even as you try to catch up, it accelerates away from you.

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.

If humanity is about to enter the solar age, this is its dawn. How about a solar avenue, carved out of a ranch of solar panels? Or we could be more epic. In this sunrise seen from space Earth itself is illuminated.

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.

Why stop at the immensity of Earth? Here, for the full impact, we have focused on Sol instead. So blinding is the torrent of starlight that the red box which contains our masthead has been drained of its colour and our flashes have been blasted from the top right-hand corner of the page out into deep space.

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.

Here is the sunrise over a monolith. Some of us thought that this looked like a glass-fronted skyscraper, so we added a tag to the final cover. Surely readers would know that not even The Economist would devote a special issue to a 20-storey tower block.

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.

In “2001” Kubrick’s monolith also teaches the protohumans to make weapons. Aptly, therefore, our second cover this week looks at technology and war. The struggle here was to focus on the right part of what people with guns call “the kill chain”.

The grenade and the tank are made of microchips. And, sure enough, the battlefield in Ukraine is producing a burst of innovation that demonstrates how AI will enhance weapons. Aerial and naval drones have been vital to both sides in Ukraine for spotting and attacking targets. Breaking the connection between pilot and plane enables a drone to home in on targets, even if GPS signals or the link to the pilot have been cut. AI should soon let armies deploy far larger numbers of low-cost munitions including, one day, self-directing swarms.

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.

AI’s deeper significance is that it sorts through and processes data at superhuman speed. It can pluck every tank out of a thousand satellite images, or interpret light, heat, sound and radio waves to distinguish decoys from the real thing. The speed of AI warfare will change the balance between soldier and software. As finding and striking targets is compressed into minutes or seconds, the human may merely be “on the loop”, as part of a human-machine team. People will oversee the system without intervening in every action. The scale of AI-based war means that mass and industrial heft are likely to become even more important than they are today.

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.

A more striking and ingenious way of showing how AI is embedded in war is to integrate it into the word itself—enhanced here by our designers’ use of a military stencil. The armies that anticipate and master technological advances earliest and most effectively will probably prevail. Everyone else is likely to be a victim. The exponential onrush of AI means that this future may already be drawing close.

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本周封面故事 | 经济学人（强烈推荐）

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