CY8ERPUNKS

Prior art · AI

Machine intelligence

Era 0 · 1948–1974

Ground

cybernetics meets the counterculture

  1. 1950

    Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."

    The Turing Test. The founding document of the AI question.

Era 4 · 1992–1996

Cypherpunks, Wired, the Declaration

  1. 1993

    Vernor Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era"

    (VISION-21 Symposium, NASA Lewis Research Center & Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993). Vinge had already written True Names (1981). This is the hinge where cyberpunk's attention turns toward superintelligence.

Era 6 · 2005–2015

The cypherpunk payoff

  1. 2005

    Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

    (2005). Vinge's idea becomes a mass movement with a timeline attached.

  2. c. 2006

    Daniel Suarez, Daemon

    (2006) and Freedom™ (2010) — autonomous software seizing economic power. Widely ignored, very relevant now.

Era 7 · 2016–2026

AI

  1. 2018

    GPT-1; the transformer era begins (2017 paper)

    GPT-1; the transformer era begins (2017 paper)

  2. 2020

    GPT-3; Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red)

    The game is the emblem of the retro re-hash: enormous, beautiful, and almost entirely a 1980s mood board. (Its redemption arc via Edgerunners and the 2.0 overhaul is also worth noting as craft.)

  3. 2022

    Stable Diffusion

    (Nov 30, 2022). The moment "AI" stops being a niche concern.

  4. c. 2023

    The frontier-lab era, agentic systems, open-weight models, the concentration-versus-diffusion fight

    This is CY8ERPUNKS' present tense and the actual subject of the magazine.