What Do TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year and a 2,000-Year-Old Shipwreck Have in Common?
If I were to design a strategic gift for the recipients of the TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year—The Architects of AI — that honors the recognition, I wouldn’t start with AI. I’d start 2,000 years ago.
In 1901, divers recovered a corroded object from a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera. For decades, no one understood it. Only much later did we realize it was the world’s first known analog computer—a hand-powered machine built around 100 BCE to model celestial motion, eclipses, and time itself. It was built to make sense of reality, before the language to describe such a machine even existed.
This year, TIME named The Architects of AI its Person of the Year—leaders reshaping how we live, work, and imagine what’s next. The cover shows them suspended on a beam above a city, echoing the iconic 1932 photograph Lunch Atop a Skyscraper: the future being built in public, before certainty, before guardrails. Eight visible figures. Twelve companies shaping the system beneath them. A future under construction.
The Gift
The gift would be a reimagined Antikythera Mechanism—the world’s first analog computer—presented to The Architects of AI, whose work now places them within the same historical lineage of those who have built machines to make sense of reality.
It would be machined in industrial steel, the material that built modern skylines. Marked with twelve subtle indices that mean nothing on their own. And beside it: a lens.
Without the lens, the object resists understanding. With it, hidden engravings align. Patterns emerge. Time and scale collapse into coherence. The machine doesn’t change. Only our ability to see it does.
That experience mirrors the shift we’re living through now. AI isn’t just changing what we can do—it’s changing what we can perceive, and how quickly meaning follows power. This a gift that harnesses strategy and story.
What This Gift Strategically Achieves for TIME
For TIME, this gift reinforces the power and purpose of the recognition itself.
TIME’s Person of the Year has been about honoring people and shaping how history understands moments of consequence. By pairing this recognition with this gift, TIME extends the impact of the award beyond the page and into lived experience.
This gift:
Deepens the meaning of the honor by placing recipients within a historical lineage of world-shaping technology
Reinforces TIME’s role as a trusted interpreter of global influence—not just a chronicler of it
Strengthens the emotional and intellectual resonance of the award, ensuring it is remembered, discussed, and felt long after the announcement
Aligns the recipients more closely with the values and gravity of the recognition itself
Rather than a momentary accolade, the award becomes a durable cultural artifact—one that recipients carry forward as part of their identity and legacy.
This is how gifting functions strategically: As a force that extends its influence, reinforces its authority, and secures its place in history.
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by Moira Hanna Jamrisko
