Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2024 i WIRED

THE FIRST TIME someone invited me to a Slack Huddle—an audio call that happens inside the app—I didn’t know that I had to hang up at the end of it. I heard a series of descending bloops after my coworker signed off, so I assumed the huddle was over and moused away into the sad forest of a thousand open browser tabs on my computer. Then, after about 15 seconds, I started to hear something waft up from my MacBook speakers. A very gradual fade-in. Jazz guitar and a vibraphone—maybe a fake vibraphone?—with a saxophone improvising between phrases. Sampled drums, vaguely Latin. Synth strings. Such comically blatant muzak that I laughed out loud. The guffaw was followed by confusion. Where the heck was this music coming from, and why didn’t…

MY GUESS IS that most employees at the Beverly Hills Hotel know who all the big-name movie stars are, but when I arrive at the hotel restaurant and there’s some confusion about the reservation, I find myself unable to say the relevant name. A simple “I’m here to meet Javier Bardem” would instantly clear things up, but the name-drop feels … entitled? Arrogant, somehow? I wait at the bar, worried I’ve soured the interview before it even starts. I’m expecting Bardem to be intense and demanding. He is, after all, scarily good at playing scary people. Silly me. When Bardem arrives a few minutes later, he puts the lie to all that life-imitating-art nonsense. If I feel any unease at all, it’s because I’m naively surprised at how deferential, how…

“BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACES have been around for a few decades, and there are different kinds of implants now. Some have electrodes attached to your brain with wires sticking out of your head and connecting to a computer. I think that’s great as a proof of concept, but it requires an engineer sitting there and a big computer next to you all the time. You can’t just use it in your bedroom. The beauty of a BCI like the Stentrode, which is what I’ve worked with, is that nothing is sticking out of your brain. The electrodes are in blood vessels next to the brain, and you get there by going through the patient’s jugular. The receiver is underneath the skin in their chest and connected to a device that decodes the…

Nike Alphafly 3 With a time of two hours, 35 seconds, the late Kelvin Kiptum held the world marathon record; Eliud Kipchoge had previously managed 1:59:40 in unofficial conditions. Both wore a version of Nike’s Alphafly 3 training shoe. With a carbon-fiber plate, Air Zoom units, and chunky ZoomX foam midsole, this is the lightest (7.7 ounces), fastest, and most performance-focused shoe Nike has ever made available to the public. $285 Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 Adidas however, leads the pack with its Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1. The 4.9-ounce shoe is 40 percent lighter than any of Adidas’ previous race shoes, and it helped Tigst Assefa knock two minutes, 11 seconds off the women’s marathon world record, with a finish time of 2:11:53. Its featherweight mesh is combined…

THE TROUBLE IN ANTARCTICA started in Boston. It was August 1999, and Stanford geologist Jane Willenbring was then a 22-year-old self-described “country bumpkin.” She had just arrived to start her master’s in earth science at Boston University. As an undergrad with an oboe scholarship at North Dakota State University, she’d studied beetle fossils found in Antarctica and learned how, millions of years ago, the now frozen continent once pooled with freshwater lakes. “That’s not so different from the conditions we might expect in the future,” she says. She wanted to explore this critical science. “It seemed really important for future global climate change,” she says. Of all the geologists, few were more renowned than the one Willenbring had gone to Boston to study under: 37-year-old David Marchant. Marchant, a scruffy…

Dear Cloud Support: My boyfriend says he must meditate for one hour every day. Why does this annoy me so much? He works in tech, if that’s relevant.—Seeking Enlightenment Dear Seeking, I think it’s pretty obvious. On the one hand, meditation is the most self-centered, antisocial habit there is—or one of them, at least. (I can think of another intensely solitary act that some people insist they “must” do daily to maintain a clear head.) Its motives are usually brazenly egotistical: personal productivity, sleep hacking, enhanced creativity. On the other hand, it is also a spiritual discipline whose highest aim, traditionally, is ego death, self-transcendence, and the eventual enlightenment of the entire world. The contradictions pile up. No wonder meditation is so popular in tech, an industry in which the…

Eight names are listed as authors on “Attention Is All You Need,” a scientific paper written in the spring of 2017. They were all Google researchers, though by then one had left the company. When the most tenured contributor, Noam Shazeer, saw an early draft, he was surprised that his name appeared first, suggesting his contribution was paramount. “I wasn’t thinking about it,” he says. It’s always a delicate balancing act to figure out how to list names—who gets the coveted lead position, who’s shunted to the rear. Especially in a case like this one, where each participant left a distinct mark in a true group effort. As the researchers hurried to finish their paper, they ultimately decided to “sabotage” the convention of ranking contributors. They added an asterisk to…

TALKING TO JENSEN HUANG should come with a warning label. The Nvidia CEO is so invested in where AI is headed that, after nearly 90 minutes of spirited conversation, I came away convinced the future will be a neural net nirvana. I could see it all: a robot renaissance, medical godsends, self-driving cars, chatbots that remember. The buildings on the company’s Santa Clara campus weren’t helping. Wherever my eyes landed I saw triangles within triangles, the shape that helped make Nvidia its first fortunes. No wonder I got sucked into a fractal vortex. I had been Jensen-pilled. Huang is the man of the hour. The year. Maybe even the decade. Tech companies literally can’t get enough of Nvidia’s supercomputing GPUs. This is not the Nvidia of old, the supplier of…