Month: December 2022

The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, to telemedicine and mixed reality, to as yet undreamed technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier require high-speed, always-on internet connections. To keep up with the demand, the mobile industry introduced 5G—so named because it’s the fifth

It might finally be happening. For years now, technologists have promised that the age of the electric vehicle cometh. After false starts in the early 20th century (when electrics, for a short time, accounted for a third of US vehicles), the 1970s (thanks, gas crisis), and the early 2000s (when two American engineers founded a

The problem with Amazon’s own-brand mince pies is that they’re delicious. For years, the ecommerce giant has stuck its fingers into every pie going—Amazon wind farms and an Amazon airline are no longer something to Amazon Blink at. Yet now Jeff Bezos has stuck his finger in the pie pie: For £2.04 ($2.50), British Amazon customers can get

WIRED has written frequently of late about Elon Musk’s Twitter, so forgive me for coming back to it—but for those of us as terminally online as I am, let me just ask: What the hell happened last weekend? I woke up on Sunday morning to learn that Twitter was going to block all mentions of,

The thread connecting most of these applications is the use of NFTs and economic incentive as the foundation for community-building. Even creators originally drawn to NFTs for the monetization opportunity are cottoning on. “It’s bigger than the money,” says King Saladeen, a prominent Philadelphia-born artist who turned to NFTs when lockdown stopped him working on

Rodti MacLeary started a Mastodon instance, mas.to, in 2019. By early November 2022, it had amassed around 35,000 users. But since Elon Musk bought Twitter and unleashed one chaotic decision after another, people have signed up for mas.to and other instances, or servers, in surging waves that have sometimes kicked them briefly offline. The influx of users is propelled by each haphazard policy

Tyler Hamilton has optimized his every waking minute. Between Black Friday and Christmas, five nights a week, he pulls himself out of bed, brushes his teeth, and rushes to his car just before sunset. On his drive to the Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, he stops at Wendy’s to buy two bourbon bacon burgers,

Any platform that supports free speech should have a content warning system pretty much like the one Mastodon offers. I bet Musk won’t implement it, though, because his snowflake fans would find this kind of free speech upsetting (and he’s afraid of them).  Mute People For a Little While Sometimes a person you enjoy following

Musk changed his tune this week after he alleged a “crazy stalker” followed a car carrying his young son. Questions about the incident remain, and it’s not clear how an account tweeting aircraft location data publicly available via many sources could be linked to a car incident. But it was enough to provoke Musk to

In January 2021, after former US president Donald Trump tweeted in support of an insurrection on the Capitol, his account was frozen and he was locked out. But across the world, leaders have tweeted in support of genocide and threatened violence, yet none of them have been banned from the platform. Less than six months

When WIRED asked me to cover this week’s newsletter, my first instinct was to ask ChatGPT—OpenAI’s viral chatbot—to see what it came up with. It’s what I’ve been doing with emails, recipes, and LinkedIn posts all week. Productivity is way down, but sassy limericks about Elon Musk are up 1000 percent. I asked the bot

Browder of DoNotPay is not the only person who sees ChatGPT and the technology behind it as a way to automate persuasion. One doctor posted a video on Twitter showing how the bot might write a letter to help convince an insurer to pay for a certain procedure, even citing scientific literature, albeit with dubious accuracy.

Remote work. Competitive salaries. A streamlined hiring process. They’re all perks being offered to prospective tech workers from an unlikely employer: the US government.  Soaring Silicon Valley salaries, perks, and stocks have allowed Big Tech companies to lure the industry’s top employees for years while government jobs sat open. But as companies like Meta, Amazon,

Seen from afar, the parish of Ponta do Sol looks as compact and picturesque as a postcard. There’s a small roundabout at the center, a gas station, a tiny shopping complex, and a cluster of modest buildings topped by terra-cotta roof tiles. Rippling green slopes of banana, palm, and pine fan out behind, houses dotted

The proposed shareholder resolution also highlights Amazon’s relationship with the United Arab Emirates, which has been documented as targeting human rights defenders, journalists, and political dissidents. One group supporting the new resolution is the faith-based organization Investor Advocates for Social Justice. Founded 40 years ago as the Tri-State Coalition of Responsible Investors, the group’s first

In this month’s newsletter I talk about music—both literally and metaphorically. What are you hearing and listening to? Let me know in the comments. Sturm und Drang In Margin Call, the 2011 movie about the run-up to the 2008 financial crash, the reptilian bank CEO played by Jeremy Irons says to an underling: “Do you care

On November 3, 2021, Meareg Amare, a professor of chemistry at Bahir Dar University in Ethiopia, was gunned down outside his home. Amare, who was ethnically Tigrayan, had been targeted in a series of Facebook posts the month before, alleging that he had stolen equipment from the university, sold it, and used the proceeds to

Sam Bankman-Fried is behind bars. The controversial founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX was taken into custody in the Bahamas yesterday after criminal charges were filed against him by the United States Department of Justice.  In a press conference today, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York said that Bankman-Fried is facing a

Michael Arendt has spent his career on the water. After working his way up through the US Merchant Marines from deckhand to riverboat captain, he came ashore in 2001 to work as a lock and dam operator for the US Army Corps of Engineers. He now guides boats hauling anything from rocks to missiles through Alabama’s

A forest of wind turbines rises out of the fields on both sides of the highway running east out of Vienna. But at the border with Slovakia, which stretches between Austria and Ukraine, they stop. Slovakia gets only 0.4 percent of its energy from wind and solar. Instead it is betting its energy transition on nuclear

“These things are hard to tip over,” geologist Wilson Bonner assures me as the four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle he’s piloting tilts suddenly sideways, pitching me toward the churned up mud beneath our wheels. We’re grinding up the side of a thickly forested hill in rural Ontario, Canada, on a chilly fall day, heading toward a spot

Extremist movements can make people feel significant, give them a sense of purpose, and provide them a narrative that explains why everything seems so screwed up. They also give them a sense of community and support. Kruglanski says the more you feel embraced by a network of people, the more you feel motivated to embrace

It was the first day of April 2022, and I was sitting in a law firm’s midtown Manhattan conference room at a meeting of Meta’s Oversight Board, the independent body the scrutinizes its content decisions. And for a few minutes, it seemed that despair had set in. The topic at hand was Meta’s controversial Cross Check

There was something curious about the US Transportation Security Administration’s data on passenger traffic at airports last month. The Sunday after Thanksgiving was, as usual, very busy, with 2.6 million people screened at security checkpoints. That’s the most on any single day since the pandemic began, and evidence that many people are back to traveling

A week is a long time in politics—particularly when considering whether it’s okay to grant robots the right to kill humans on the streets of San Francisco. In late November, the city’s board of supervisors gave local police the right to kill a criminal suspect using a tele-operated robot, should they believe that not acting would

Fred Thiel, CEO of Marathon Digital, claims that crypto miners participating in demand response schemes have helped to stave off blackouts in Texas this year. Mining facilities acted “like a capacitor,” he says, echoing the battery metaphor, allowing the grid to remain on an even keel. Enthusiasm for the plan from Abbott and other crypto

Like many other people over the past week, Bindu Reddy recently fell under the spell of ChatGPT, a free chatbot that can answer all manner of questions with stunning and unprecedented eloquence.  Reddy, CEO of Abacus.AI, which develops tools for coders who use artificial intelligence, was charmed by ChatGPT’s ability to answer requests for definitions of love or

Kaitlin had been living in the Village of Oak Creek for over two years when she received the notice. It was June 2022 and her landlord had decided to raise the rent on her three-bedroom house by $800 to $3,000, an increase of 36 percent. For Kaitlin, who had been living alone since her sons

Just a month after Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, oversaw massive staff layoffs, former Twitter employees have announced that they’re filing suit over the company’s severance policies. In a press conference with their lawyer Lisa Bloom, former employees Helen-Sage Lee, Adrian Trejo Nuñez, and Amir Shevat alleged that the company’s handling of their termination constituted