Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2023 i WIRED

Team, We’ve worked toward this release date for well over a year, and soon we’ll experience a full product launch. Of all the stretches, the home stretch can be the hardest, so I want to share some learnings from past launches to help you stay motivated through the next phase. We can do this! First, and most important: I need everyone to set impossible expectations of success. You might be anticipating extra equity, huge salary increases, significant press coverage, or Product Hunt glory. You might think the one-liner you use on acquaintances and journalists and investors is puffed-up enough: “By creating a mobile-app-controlled kitty litter scooper, we’re helping humans have better relationships with their cats.” But you should go bigger. Every product can claim to make people’s lives better; if…

WHEN APPLE launched the AirTag in 2021, the Bluetooth tracker was lauded as a step toward the future of augmented reality and a great way to find everyday objects, like that damn TV remote. But cybersecurity experts warned that stalkers would exploit the tracking device. Unfortunately, those warnings were warranted: Multiple women soon reported stalking situations in which AirTags were slipped into their purse or taped to their car. Police departments across the US issued alerts about the potential criminal uses of AirTags. Newer AirPods also have tracking functionality, but their high cost makes them less attractive as a tracking device. Sure, there are other tracking options, like Tile, that could be used for nefarious purposes, but the scale of Apple’s ecosystem sets the AirTag apart. From the US Drug…

Dear Lost, You’re certainly not alone in realizing that some onerous creative or emotive task can be completed relatively painlessly with AI. The same thought has undoubtedly occurred to the tonguetied Tinder user who discovers that he can enlist a digital Cyrano to pen his opening lines to a prospective date; or to the exhausted mother who recognizes that she has at her fingertips a tireless Scheherazade that can produce an infinite scroll of bedtime stories for her children; or to the overworked son who realizes that he can generate, in seconds, a personalized poem for his father’s retirement party. Creatively expressing our feelings to others is time-consuming, uncompensated, and emotionally taxing—that is, at any rate, the message implicit in some of the marketing of large language models. When Microsoft,…

“DO YOU REMEMBER what kind of beer it was?” Andy Hunter pauses for so long before answering my question, it’s awkward. He’s racking his brain. I’ve asked him to tell me about the night he came up with the idea that led to his improbably successful bookselling startup, Bookshop.org. As a former magazine editor, he wants to get the details right. He remembers the easy stuff: It was 2018. He was on the road for work. At the time, Hunter ran the midsize literary publishing house Catapult, a job that required schmoozing at industry events. The night of his big brainstorm, he was away from his two young daughters and his usual evening obligations—dishes, bedtime rituals—and had a rare moment to think, and drink a beer. But what kind of…

THE CURIOUS MIND of Pete Buttigieg holds much of its functionality in reserve. Even as he discusses railroads and airlines, down to the pointillist data that is his current stock-in-trade, the US secretary of transportation comes off like a Mensa black card holder who might have a secret Go habit or a three-second Rubik’s Cube solution or a knack for supplying, off the top of his head, the day of the week for a random date in 1404, along with an uncondescending history of the Julian and Gregorian calendars. As Secretary Buttigieg and I talked in his underfurnished corner offce one afternoon in early spring, I slowly became aware that his cabinet job requires only a modest portion of his cognitive powers. Other mental facilities, no kidding, are apportioned to…

Looking back, I believe I can pinpoint the exact day I loved Twitter most: May 24, 2011. I was in a small Oregon town for work, coping with loneliness and stress in a shabby motel. With a 22-ounce bottle of high-proof beer, I whiled away the evening by churning out a random assortment of tweets: an article I’d read about the hunt for wild garlic in Quebec; images of an apocalyptic Los Angeles mural; my reasons for adoring the 1985 B movie American Ninja. In a reflective moment, I also managed to craft an earnest observation about my job: “The more social media makes journalism an Everyman’s game,” I mused, “the more I’m inspired to dig deep for non-digitized sources.” To my surprise, that tweet earned what seemed at the…

Explosions that helped get this issue out: Trader Joe’s microwave oatmeal—so volatile that there are Reddit threads devoted to it; the carton of berries that led to a meditative fridge clean-out; Hiroshima Notes, by Kenzaburō Ōe; that volcanic moment when Tina Turner shifts “Proud Mary” from “easy” to “rough”; Blood Incantation’s performance of “The Giza Power Plant” at the UC Theatre Taube Family Music Hall; The Secrets of Hillsong documentary; the lightning that interrupted (then ended) Iggy Pop’s performance at Cruel World Festival; the dog’s nighttime bouts of diarrhea; the expulsion of the cat’s stomach contents onto the baby carrier; Native Coconut & Vanilla Body Wash; finally finding properly fitting diapers; absentmindedly shaking the soda can as if it were a baby bottle; forgetting to put the lid on the…

Gantri Analog Task Light Chris Granneberg’s design for this lamp is sure to remind you of a certain Soviet video game—a dangerous thing for a desktop task light, as you might start daydreaming about falling blocks instead of concentrating on your failing code. However whimsical the lamp’s design, Gantri is dead serious about sustainability. Each piece is 3D-printed at the company’s California factory out of a bioplastic derived from sugarcane, then finished with a water-based paint. The swiveling head houses an LED that’s controlled by a dimmer switch on the power cord, shining a soft, warm light on your workspace. $248 Owala FreeSip Water Bottle Being a smart and informed citizen, you’ve already cut single-use plastics out of your life by investing in a reusable water bottle. Now you deserve…

WHEN WIRED HEARD that Christopher Nolan and his producer—and wife—Emma Thomas were coming out with a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, we were perplexed. At least for a moment. It is hard for WIRED to resist a Nolan–Thomas film. Nolan has a real love of science, just like us. (We know this because, well, it’s pretty obvious in some of his movies, but also because Nolan guest-edited an issue of WIRED back in 2014 when his film Interstellar came out and we got him to geek out over physics.) Add to that, the duo like to bend their audience’s minds. And their eyeballs. They make superhero movies! It’s so much chum for WIRED. So, Oppenheimer. A biopic, a look back at history. Alas. WIRED parlance is more often about looking…

I NEVER THOUGHT I’d write these words, but here goes. Satya Nadella—and Microsoft, the company he runs—are riding high on the buzz from its search engine. That’s quite a contrast from the first time I spoke with Nadella, in 2009. Back then, he was not so well known, and he made a point of telling me about his origins. Born in Hyderabad, India, he attended grad school in the US and joined Microsoft in 1992, just as the firm was rising to power. Nadella hopped all over the company and stayed through the downtimes, including after Microsoft’s epic antitrust court battle and when it missed the smartphone revolution. Only after spinning through his bio did he bring up his project at the time: Bing, the much-mocked search engine that was…

HERE’S A QUICK typology of tech journalism today: news reporting (“Amazon Announces Layoffs Affecting 18,000 Employees”), gadget reviews, company and founder profiles, opinion essays (Zeynep Tufekci et al.), investigative work (“The Uber Files”), industry digests (TechCrunch), personal blogs, Substacks, and—if you’re feeling generous—Hacker News comments and GitHub “issues.” It’s an incomplete catalog, but you get the idea. Yet surveying this landscape reveals a curious lacuna: software criticism. To be clear: Technology criticism is nothing new. Depending on who you ask, it goes way back to Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan. More recently, I assume you’ve at least heard of popular books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Merchants and may even be familiar with technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Ellen…

EVERYTHING WAS INSANE and fine. The walls had begun to bend, the grain in the floorboards was starting to run. Jeff Greenberg’s body had blown apart into particles, pleasantly so. When he closed his eyes, chrysanthemums blossomed. A tech executive of 54, Greenberg had eaten 5 grams of psychedelic mushrooms that afternoon. He, like your cousin and your coworker and maybe you yourself, had discovered in recent years the world-expanding powers of psilocybin. But world expansion can be dicey. At some point that afternoon, Greenberg’s thoughts took a dark turn, and soon dark melted into horrifying. The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof called psychedelics “nonspecific amplifiers” of the psyche. Any thoughts, feelings, or memories on hand are subject to unplanned wild magnification. Frequently that results in a thrillingly revelatory experience. Occasionally it…

SCHAUB’S BURGERS AND melted ice cream: Those are the food items logged in my memory from the night I first met Sima Sistani. This was a decade ago, before she became the chief executive of WeightWatchers. Sistani was working at Yahoo, and I had just moved to Silicon Valley. A mutual friend connected us, and Sistani invited me over for dinner. I accepted with “What can I bring?” ¶ This is how I ended up buying charcoal-colored beef patties at her preferred butcher. That night we talked about Yahoo’s content business. We talked about Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. We talked for so long the ice cream became soup in our bowls. It was some kind of indoctrination into the Valley. It was also evident that Sistani wanted to be someone.…

A YEAR AGO, the idea of holding a meaningful conversation with a computer was the stuff of science fiction. But since OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched last November, life has started to feel more like a techno-thriller with a fast-moving plot. Chatbots and other generative AI tools are beginning to profoundly change how people live and work. But whether this plot turns out to be uplifting or dystopian will depend on who helps write it. ¶ Thankfully, just as artificial intelligence is evolving, so is the cast of people who are building and studying it. This is a more diverse crowd of leaders, researchers, entrepreneurs, and activists than those who laid the foundations of ChatGPT. Although the AI community remains overwhelmingly male, in recent years some researchers and companies have pushed to…