Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2023 i WIRED

IN AN AGING WORLD, the ability to spot the early signs of conditions such as osteoporosis and sarcopenia could save billions of dollars in healthcare spending, slow down the onset of frailty, and ultimately improve the quality of life of the older population. It is a vision that has always inspired Wareed Alenaini, first as a young girl growing up in a small town in Saudi Arabia and now as founder and CEO of health technology startup Twinn Health. “The older members of my family would always complain to each other about their chronic conditions and the medications they took,” she remembers. “Even back then I realized that those diseases could have been prevented if they had been detected earlier. Now with artificial intelligence (AI) and modern imaging techniques, we…

Oyster Tempo Cooler The Norwegian company Oyster has taken the same design that keeps your iced coffee cold in a travel mug—double-walled vacuum insulation, which usually only maintains its physical integrity in a cylindrical shape—and applied it to a rectangular cooler. The Tempo’s aluminum body is so efficient at temperature retention that it keeps food and drinks just as cold as a plastic or foam cooler while using less than half as much ice. Less ice means more interior space. Here you get 5 gallons of capacity, enough for 36 cans of whatever you’re drinking. Fill it with cold ones and they’ll stay chill for hours without ice. $500 Nocs Standard Issue Waterproof 8x25 Binoculars These pocket-friendly binoculars are our top pick for kids and grown-ups interested in birds,…

_ONE THING I was never told about reality TV—and I’m willing to bet you weren’t either—is that it can heal. Nobody tells you it’s a curative medium. What they do tell you about reality TV is everything else: how it’s reductive and superficial, how it’s cultural rot. It’s a circus, they shout. It microwaves the mind to mush. It’s also the most dominant form of entertainment today. Reality TV has been called a “volume business”; many of us swallow whole seasons in a single sitting. The shows are operatic, polarizing, and unrepentant about what they are—all id and impulse. Name a setup, pastime, premise, gimmick, and it probably exists as a reality TV show. We refuse to look away. Or maybe it’s that we can’t. Perhaps it’s because we’re addicted…

Relentlessness that helped get this issue out: Waiting nearly an hour for my luggage to appear on the conveyor, even as I became convinced the airline had lost it; listening to “Cannibal Capital” by Guerilla Toss over and over; calling in to the radio station every morning to play trivia for outrageously expensive concert tickets; committing to Heidegger’s Being and Time; a red-eye flight from Indianapolis with a rescue kitten; In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri; PR firms that want to pitch every possible AI-related angle in existence; Netflix’s Beef; pursuing sleep in defiance of my neighbor’s merciless Spotify playlist; wearing the most disgusting and sunbleached hat to the office; pulling, ripping, and whacking invasive thistle in my yard even though it has taken over the surrounding hillside and I…

THE FUTURE OF the metaverse looks shakier than ever. Tech companies that have gone all in on the concept, like Meta, are faced with building out a platform that ostensibly already exists but has failed to achieve any real popularity. Even the video game industry, which has been exploring the idea through virtual worlds like Linden Lab’s Second Life for years, has doubts that the metaverse will ever live up to its promise. But in this nascent stage, there is also potential: The people building the metaverse could avoid repeating the mistakes that are baked into most of the digital platforms we use every day. As it stands, the metaverse is “not yet set,” says Micaela Mantegna, an affliate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, so it…

CHATGPT HAS DAZZLED withits poetry, prose, and academic test scores. Now prepare for the precocious chatbot to find your next flight, recommend a restaurant with good seating, and fetch you a sandwich too. Back in March, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced that a slew of companies—including Expedia, Open& Table, and Instacart—had created plugins to let the bot access their services. Once a user activates a plug&in, they will be able to ask ChatGPT to perform tasks that would normally require using the web or opening an app, and hopefully see the dutiful AI scurry off to do it. The move potentially heralds a big shift in how people use computers, apps, and the web, with clever AI programs completing chores on their behalf. Until now, ChatGPT has been cut…

I COULD SAY it started when I turned 33—my Jesus year, the year I vowed to transcend anxiety and exhaustion and do my most important work, the year I would emerge from my cave of pandemic isolation and early parenthood and couples therapy as the second coming of myself. But I am a millennial, not a messiah. The truth is that my search for rebirth began a few months later, with a Slack message about ball deodorant. “Just been emailed asking if we’d like to review this—am trying not to be offended,” a fellow wired editor wrote in a group channel. A Chicago-based company called Ballsy had developed a pH-balanced scrotal deodorizer made with lavender, aloe vera, green tea, and chamomile. “Your pits aren’t the only place that need deodorant,”…

THE MASSES WHO settled in to remote or hybrid work during the pandemic are waking up to the fact that Zoom-mediated labor isn’t all it was promised to be. Instead of being liberated from unnecessary drudgery, demands on their time have ballooned, they feel permanently on call, and some can’t shake the sense that they’re working harder than ever for less pay. They’re experiencing a lesson that everyone who’s ever used so-called labor-saving devices has learned the hard way: Expectations swell to fill the gaps left by the time you save. Women have always felt this most acutely; if a washing machine saved you hours on doing laundry, then you had to fill that time with other displays of devotion to your family. Zoom is no different: The hour you…

Dear Psychobabble, Sometime in the early 2000s, I came across an essay in which the author argued that no artificial consciousness will ever be believably human unless it can dream. I cannot remember who wrote it or where it was published, though I vividly recall where I was when I read it (the periodicals section of Barbara’s Bookstore, Halsted Street, Chicago) and the general feel of that day (twilight, early spring). I found the argument convincing, especially given the ruling paradigms of that era. A lot of AI research was still fixated on symbolic reasoning, with its logical propositions and if-then rules, as though intelligence were a reductive game of selecting the most rational outcome in any given situation. In hindsight, it’s unsurprising that those systems were rarely capable of…

MOST YEARS, BRANDON Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-ish, neverending, speed-written fantasy books, it’s huge. By Sanderson’s estimation, he’s the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign—$42 million of that $55 million—I came to the wired offces ready to gossip. How’d he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer? Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about. On the one hand, who cares. Sanderson has millions upon millions of fans all over the planet; it doesn’t matter that some losers at a single magazine (even if it is one of the nerdier ones) had…