If you are currently surrounded by people (at the office, cafe, street or even home) do a quick scan. How many people are wearing something blue? Could be a hat, a t-shirt, shorts or skirts or even their socks. How about you? My trousers and socks are both blue as I sit here in my office seat and write this. And I count at least 11 different instances of the color blue on colleagues around me.
Blue is ubiquitous. For a lot of people it is their favorite color – ever present in their wardrobes. Think of all the different shades of blue you can name – cyan to cerulean, prussian to sapphire, baby to navy, aquamarine to azure and turquoise and everything in between. The homescreen of your phone is most likely filled with blue icons and we at Google have had our own obsession with 50 shades of blue.
But blue wasn’t always so universally available. While the sky above was always blue – artists and craftsmen across history did not have easy access to this pigment. The view of Toledo always remained grey in paintings. Notoriously difficult to naturally extract or synthesize – blue was the color reserved for divinity and royalty.
The ancient Egyptians were the first to successfully manufacture a blue pigment. Egyptian blue was made by heating together sand, limestone, copper and alkali at extremely high temperatures. But the most prized blue came from lapis lazuli – a rare stone mined primarily in present-day Afghanistan and carried across enormous distances through ancient trade routes. Turning it into ultramarine pigment required an elaborate process of grinding, kneading and repeatedly washing the stone to separate the blue from the grey impurities. The finest ultramarine could cost more than gold.
A fragment of Egyptian blue, the world’s earliest known synthetic pigment. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This scarcity gave blue its power. Medieval and Renaissance painters reserved ultramarine for the most important figures in their paintings – particularly the robes of the Virgin Mary. Patrons sometimes specified exactly how much ultramarine should be used in a commissioned painting. Dressing Mary, a king or a wealthy aristocrat in blue was not merely an artistic decision. It was a very visible demonstration of devotion, importance and wealth.
Sassoferrato’s The Virgin in Prayer. Her brilliant robe was painted with ultramarine made from lapis lazuli, once among the most expensive pigments in the world.
Textiles followed a slightly different path. Indigo could be extracted from plants, but the process involved growing and harvesting the crop, fermenting its leaves and maintaining carefully controlled dye vats. The cloth emerged yellowish-green and turned blue only when exposed to air. Indigo became deeply embedded in textile cultures across India, Africa and Japan. In Japan, indigo-dyed clothing became so common that foreign visitors began describing the country through the phrase “Japan blue.” And when the newly invented Prussian blue reached Japanese printmakers in the nineteenth century, Hokusai used it to create the extraordinary skies and waves that we now immediately associate with Japanese art.
Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa, commonly called The Great Wave, c. 1830–32. Its extraordinary range of blues was created using indigo and the newly available synthetic pigment Prussian blue.
Then chemistry changed everything. Prussian blue was accidentally discovered in Berlin in the early 1700s. Synthetic ultramarine followed in the 1820s, producing something close to the precious Afghan pigment at a fraction of the price. By the end of the nineteenth century, synthetic indigo could be manufactured reliably inside factories instead of being cultivated across vast plantations. Combined with industrial textile production and the rise of blue denim and jeans, these inventions transformed blue from a color of scarcity into the most ordinary color in the world.
Copper-riveted blue jeans, the garment that helped transform indigo from an industrial dye into the most ubiquitous color in the modern wardrobe.
If you were a child of the 80s and 90s like me and a bit nerdy – you probably grew up on a steady stream of Asimov and Clarke and then graduated to Adams. But the one constant across the history of science fiction has been sentient artificial beings (the other being space travel). As a species we have been obsessed with artificial intelligence for a long time. Our popular culture (from Terminator, to Star Trek, to 2001 A Space Odyssey, to Ghost in the Shell, to Her – the list is endless) was built on the belief that AI would be all pervasive in everyday life. We have been chasing this singularity (when AI and humans merge) for a long time.
But over the last few years something has perceptibly shifted. Just like the color blue (once reserved for divinity and royalty in paintings), AI is no longer just something we read about in science fiction novels and watch in big budget Hollywood blockbuster movies. It is already a part of our everyday lives.
Self-driving cars, personal AI agents maintaining and running our daily schedule and small companies run by a swarm of agents are already real. And this will spread. The pigment is easy to manufacture – the economies of scale will kick in and inference and compute will be as readily available as blue denim. Before we know it, AI will be the new blue.
The history of humanity is one of constant change. But change takes generations and centuries. Blue did not become the most dominant color in our lives overnight. With AI, however, technological progress is happening at a pace where every person alive can bear witness to incredibly real step function jumps in a matter of years.
AI is going to be as ubiquitous as blue. Robots are next.