Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2025 i WIRED

In our March/April issue, Bradley Hope profiled the United Arab Emirates’ spy chief, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, and his attempts to become the AI industry’s indispensable man. Virginia Heffernan chronicled Novo Nordisk’s agonizing attempts to balance demand for its blockbuster products Ozempic and Wegovy—treated as weight-loss miracle drugs in the US—against its lifesaving treatments for type 1 diabetes. And Brendan I. Koerner followed one college student’s journey into the alluring, all-devouring world of door-to-door solar panel sales. RE: “THE KING OF OZEMPIC IS SCARED AS HELL” “I do not envy the CEO of Novo.”—u/you_were_mythtaken RE: “THE SHEIKH’S GAMBIT” We tend to think in American-centric ways when considering the power of the Tech Bro community—this is a mistake. —@ascablander.bsky.social Boy, as Americans, we are screwed! Appreciate the research…

Guillaume Verdon stands before me with a new kind of computer chip in his hand—a piece of hardware he believes is so important to the future of humanity that he’s asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his head-quarters could become the target of industrial espionage. This much I can tell you: We’re in an office a short drive from Boston, and the chip arrived from the foundry just a few days ago. It sits on a circuit board about the width of a Big Mac. The pinky-nail-sized piece of silicon itself is dotted with an exotic set of components: not the transistors of an ordinary semi-conductor, nor the superconducting elements of a quantum chip, but the guts of a radically new paradigm called thermodynamic computing.…

Once I started thinking about the apocalypse, it was hard to stop. An unsettling encounter with the doomsday clock that hangs over New York City’s Union Square got me frantically searching WikiHow for survival tips. I soon found my way to the doomsday writings of a Canadian programmer named Virgil Dupras. He believes the collapse of civilization is imminent and that it will come in two waves. First, global supply chains will crumble. Modern technology relies on a delicate web of factories and international shipping routes that are exquisitely vulnerable to rapid climate change. The iPhone uses memory chips from South Korea, semiconductors from Taiwan, and assembly lines in Brazil and China. The severing of these links will, Dupras says, catalyze total societal breakdown. The second part will happen when…

It’s … alive! Just kidding. The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard when I ran the first worm simulation. I’m no hacker, but it was easy enough: Open a Terminal shell, paste some commands from GitHub, watch characters cascade down the screen. Just like in the movies. I was scanning the passing code for recognizable words—neuron, synapse—when a friend came to pick me up for dinner. “One sec,” I yelled from my office. “I’m just running a worm on my computer.” At the Korean restaurant, the energy was manic; the wind was bending palm trees at the waist and sending shopping carts skating across the parking lot. The atmosphere felt heightened and unreal, like a podcast at double speed. You’re doing, what, a cybercrime? my friend asked. Over the din,…

THE ASSIGNMENT: IN SIX WORDS, WRITE A STORY ABOUT ENTANGLED PARTICLES. —@instaduncc, via Instagram Honorable Mentions Yikes. Spooky action. Time to split. —@FilmMartin, via X Are you here? Are you not? —@jessleycegui, via Instagram Breaking news: Sentient entangled particles divorce. —Rami, via email We spin in unison, galaxies apart. —Mark Richardson, via email Spooky out here! Spook, you there? —Andrew Dawson, via email Once it died, you were born. —@bietorres, via Instagram Tapestry of space, matter sewn together. —@dr.karenorjuela, via Instagram Meet me beyond the double slit.  —@javirz, via Instagram Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? Look for the latest prompt on Instagram, X, and WIRED.com/six-word, where you can also see how we’ve illustrated past favorites.…

One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets. Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity’s intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system. “We’re kind of playing Russian roulette,” says Michele Mosca, who co-authored the most recent “Quantum Threat Timeline” report from the Global Risk Institute, which estimates how long we have left. “You’ll probably win if you only play…

Code created AI. That much is obvious. Less obvious is the extent to which AI is now, in a snake-eats-tail way, creating code. We kept hearing conflicting accounts. This programmer used AI every day; that programmer wouldn’t touch the stuff. This company paid for AI services; that company banned them. So which is it? Are chatbots liberating human programmers—or programming them right out of their jobs? To find out, we blasted a survey to every software engineer and developer in our orbit, from casual dabblers to career vets. The results amazed and surprised us, capturing an industry at fundamental odds with itself. And did we then upload that data to ChatGPT, just to see what it might make of things? Yes. Yes we did.* 1. HOW MUCH DO YOU USE…

Fatal crashes. A door blowout. Grounded planes. ONE On a sticky hot morning in July, Ed Pierson steps into the lobby of a hotel in Washington, DC, completely unwilling to obey the plane-crash life cycle. You’ve seen it: An awful crash dominates the news. The loss of lives is so vastly unjust. Serious investigators look into the causes and issue a report. Regulators and law-makers hatch reforms. Passengers start to forget. Most of us get back on the plane. Pierson—a strapping 62-year-old with a shaved head and rocket-launch levels of energy—does not accept any of it. Instead, he is executing the Ed Pierson plan. He perches on a couch in this lobby, to explain the day’s play: Pierson will walk into a series of federal buildings without an appointment. In…

This is the year of quantum science and technology. Literally: The United Nations said so. But no amount of pomp and hype can make something true. The fact is, it’s been the year of quantum nearly every year for many, many years now. It’s always the next big thing. It’s always just about here. Well, is it? Really? Nearly a century ago, Erwin Schrödinger poked fun at quantum principles by comparing them to a cat that’s both alive and dead. Today, quantum computing finds itself in just such a state: a superposition of here and not-here, a series of world-changing breakthroughs that are, at the same time, also colossal letdowns. So what’s the real story? Let’s open the box and find out.…

Incredibly, Angelina Jolie called it. The year was 1995. Picture Jolie, short of both hair and acting experience, as a teenage hacker in Hackers. Not a lot of people saw this movie. Even fewer appreciated its relevance. Hackers was “grating,” Entertainment Weekly huffed at the time, for the way it embraced “the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like WIRED.” Thirty years later, Entertainment Weekly no longer publishes a magazine, WIRED does, and Hackers ranks among the foundational documents of the digital age. The last time I saw the movie, it was being projected onto the wall of a cool-kids bar down the street from my house. But that’s not the incredible thing. The incredible thing, again, is that Jolie called it. It. The future. Mid-way through Hackers, she’s…