Loren Carpenter

The year is 2026, and we take computer-generated movies for granted: Pixar, Illumination, DreamWorks, and a myriad of smaller studios delight us every year with more and more technical and storytelling prowess. Heck, we even have “artificial intelligence” systems that can generate whole movies out of a single “prompt” consisting of a certain amount of words that make a certain sense in a particular context. 50 years ago, however, the prospect of a computer generating images was the subject of intense scientific research.