Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i WIRED

KEANU REEVES rarely malfunctions. Nearly any interview he does reveals as much. After four decades in Hollywood playing versions of the same fundamentally decent dude-in-crisis, he’s learned to stay in his cyberpunk philosopher/surfing FBI agent/action hero lane. In person, he’s pleasant and playful, but he also holds back, calibrating his remarks just so. Is this why we like him so much? We don’t know who Keanu Reeves is, not really, but maybe we don’t want to know. Or maybe this is all there is to know. He’s a cipher onto whom we can project our own ideas, desires, and hopes for humanity. So when Reeves, sitting with me in a cavernous studio in West Hollywood, ventures a feisty opinion about the latest advance in artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, I perk up.…

WHEN WE WERE TEENAGERS, MY BROTHER AND I RECEIVED KIDNEY transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that all the previous testing had somehow missed. My brother was pushed onto “the list,” where he’d wait, who knows how long, for the kidney of somebody who had died and possessed the generous foresight to be a donor after death. I was next in line for my dad’s kidney. We matched, and the date was set for August 28. Then my parents got a call early in the morning on August 22. There had been a…

—@DaveDyball, via Twitter Honorable Mentions Mad I was, until it worked. —Don Wilkins, via email You say “mad,” I say “disappointed.” —Joseph Ferry, via email Her hair was blue—and undyed. —@jaybirdfitlive, via Instagram “Success!” Too bad the AI disagreed. —Steve Nomax, via email His socks matched her lab coat. —@pmcruise, via Twitter He couldn’t make Earth look triangular. —@pauloahb, via Instagram “Let there be light,” said God. —@charley.desousa, via Instagram “It‘s aliiiive!” Elon opened his eyes. —@ylbertf, via Instagram Want to submit a six-word story for us to consider? At the beginning of each month, we ask for new ideas on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and wired.com/six-word, where you can also see how we’ve illustrated past favorites. Disclaimer: All #WIREDSIXWORD submissions become the property of wired. Submissions will not be acknowledged…

IT’S BEEN SAID THAT ALGORITHMS are “opinions embedded in code.” Few understand this better than Abeba Birhane. While working on her PhD in cognitive science at University College Dublin, Birhane—who was born and raised in Ethiopia—realized no one was asking what goes into the huge data sets often used to train artificial intelligence systems. These data sets are typically scraped from the internet—a cheap and easy process but also one in which the AI can absorb the biases that inhabit the web and end up mirroring society, with all of its ugliness baked in. Ignoring this risks real-world harm: AI has been accused of underestimating the health needs of Black patients, for instance, and of making it harder for people of color to get mortgages. Birhane is on a mission…

SEEN FROM AFAR, THE PARISH OF PONTA DO SOL looks as trim 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 among the hills. All of this is surrounded by dramatic escarpment and made subtropically lush by the many small waterfalls that gurgle from the rock face, filling centuries-old irrigation canals. When Gonçalo Hall first drove through the area in September 2020, the words that came into his mind were: “What the fuck is this?” Ponta do Sol is on the southern coast of Madeira, the main island of the Portuguese archipelago of the same name.…

WHEN YOU HUNT THE TREE OF HEAVEN, you come to know it by its smell. A waft of creamy peanut butter leads you to a tall trunk, silvery and nubbled like cantaloupe rind, rising into a wide crown of papery pink seeds and slender leaves. To kill this tree, you cannot simply cut it down with a chain saw. Ailanthus altissima is a hydra; it counters any assault by sealing off its wounds and sending up a horde of new shoots across its root system. Where you had one tree, now you have a grove of clones extending 25 feet all around you. No, the trick to killing this tree, Triston Kersenbrock explained, is to attack it “without alarming it,” so slowly that it does not even realize it’s dying.…

A DECADE AGO I lost 100 pounds. I did it in my web-nerd way—by building a custom content management system using the Django framework in the Python programming language. Every day I would enter calories ingested, calories expended through exercise, my weight, and whatever thoughts occurred to me. It became a job. I produced charts and compared the results of different kinds of exercise. I put it all online at OHLIH.com, which stood for One Huge Lesson in Humility. It worked very well. For the first time in my life my doctor seemed glad to see me. People noticed. They said: Are you going to open-source this? Sure I was! Of course, I knew that scientists had found, in study after study, that basically everyone who loses weight gains it…

BEST IN TRANSPORTATION Sony and Honda Afeela One of the most anticipated launches this year was the Afeela, an electric vehicle prototype that Sony developed with auto giant Honda and chipmaker Qualcomm. Screens line the car’s interior, making it equal parts multimedia entertainment pod and mode of conveyance. Car owners will benefit from what will presumably be lots of navigation and safety data collected by the vehicle’s sensors. They will also get to program the most important part of the car: its emotive rear lights. Yes, that’s right. Sony says you’ll be able to display anything from sports scores to Spider-Man animations. Preorders begin in 2025, with shipping in 2026. Price is TBD. BEST IN SMART HOME Withings U-Scan We love wrist-worn fitness trackers, but they can’t tell you whether…

ON THE CHILLY, clear afternoon of February 24, 2022—the day Vladimir Putin’s forces launched their full-scale invasion of Ukraine—a handful of Russian opposition politicians gathered in front of Saint Petersburg’s palatial Law, Order, and Security building. They had come to officially request permission to hold a rally opposing the war, which they knew would be denied. Among the group was Marina Matsapulina, the 30-year-old vice chair of Russia’s Libertarian Party. Matsapulina understood that the gathering was a symbolic gesture—and that it posed serious risks. Nine days later, Matsapulina was awoken around 7 am by someone banging at her apartment door. She crept up to the entrance but was too frightened to look through the peephole, and she retreated back to her bedroom. The pounding continued for two hours, as Matsapulina…

ON A CHILLY BUT HUMANE NOVEMBER night in Toronto, Allison Williams and I slip into an expansive conversation about the polite ways one can manipulate an audience. Williams is an actress, one of the more self-aware of her generation; audience manipulation is her not-so-secret weapon. And I’m abundantly aware that, as a writer profiling her for a magazine, I’m an essential part of that audience. I have interviewed Williams several times over the years, and each time is as lovely and warm and full of mutual compliments as the last. I would say, at this point, we like one another. But also, do we? Can we? Is it possible to have an “authentic” connection during a press commitment between two people who know how the personality machine operates and are…