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It is lunchtime on top of the world again. Time’s annual “Person of the Year” issue has revived the iconic Depression-era photograph of steelworkers casually lunching on a beam suspended over Manhattan. With the city rising beneath them, the image portrays risk as normalized, even glamorized.
This time, though, the men at lunch are not anonymous construction workers. Instead, the digital painter Jason Seiler, commissioned by Time, has overlaid photos of the “architects of AI” — Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li and Lisa Su of Advanced Micro Devices. The cover is clever and controversial, with the comedian Jimmy Kimmel describing it as the “eight dorks of the apocalypse.” And by tracing the technological arc from steel skyscrapers to thinking machines, it may reveal more than the editors even intended.
The original photograph, taken at the site of Rockefeller Center, captures a particular moment in modernity, encapsulating the belief that engineering prowess can ultimately outrun risk; that technological progress justifies whatever vertigo it creates; that someone, somewhere, has calculated the margins. What the photograph does not show is the scaffolding, the safety nets or the institutions — from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs to the Beveridge Report (which gave birth to Britain’s National Health Service) — that would allow such ventures to be sustained. Nor does it show the many workers who........

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