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"Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/2017/03/elon-musks-neural-lace-really-look-like"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Cade Metz Science Elon Musk Isn’t the Only One Trying to Computerize Your Brain Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Elon Musk wants to merge the computer with the human brain, build a " neural lace ," create a " direct cortical interface ," whatever that might look like. In recent months, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI has repeatedly hinted at these ambitions, and then, earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has now launched a company called Neuralink that aims to implant tiny electrodes in the brain "that may one day upload and download thoughts." And he's not the only one. Bryan Johnson, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who previously sold a startup to PayPal for $800 million, is now building a company called Kernel , pledging to fund the operation with $100 million of his own money. He says the company aims to build a new breed of "neural tools" in hardware and software---ultimately, in a techno-utopian way, allowing the brain to do things it has never done before. "What I really care about is being able to read and write the underlying functions of the brain," says Johnson.
In other words, Musk and Johnson are applying the Silicon Valley playbook to neuroscience. They're talking about a technology they want to build well before they can actually build it. They're setting the agenda for this intriguing yet frightening idea before anyone else sets it for them. And they're pumping money into the idea in ways no one else ever has. Throw in all those science fiction tropes involving brain interfaces---that's where the term "neural lace" comes from---and you've got a brand new and potentially very important industry that's ridiculously difficult to make sense of.
Let's start here: According to David Eagleman, a Stanford University neuroscientist and an advisor to Kernel, the notion of implanting a computer interface in a healthy human brain is a non-starter---not only now, but even if we look many, many years down the road. "With any neurosurgery, there's a certain risk---of infection, of death on the operating table, and so on. Neurosurgeons are completely reluctant to do any surgery that is not a required surgery because the person has a disease state," he says. "The implanting of electrodes idea is doomed from the start." That said, surgeons have already implanted devices that can help treat epilepsy, Parkinson's, and other maladies with what's called deep brain stimulation. In these situations, the risk is worthwhile. Researchers at IBM are exploring a similar project , analyzing brain readings during epileptic seizures in an effort to build implants that could stop seizures before they happen.
The immediate aim of Kernel and, apparently, Neurolink is to work with devices along the same lines. Such devices would not only send signals to the brain as a means of treatment, but also gather data about the nature of these maladies. As Johnson explains, those devices could also help gather far more data about how the brain works in general---and ultimately, could feed all sorts of other neuroscience research. "If you have much higher quality neural data from more regions of the brain, it will inform all sorts of other possibilities," Johnson says. "We just haven't had the right tools to acquire these datasets." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg As Eagleman explains, this could not just fix unhealthy brains, but get more out of healthy ones too. "In these situations where you have reasons to open the head anyway," he says, "then you can look for ways of improving the brain." What Johnson and presumably Musk hope to do is gather data that could, years and years down the road, help us build a kind of interface that lets humans connect their brains to machines. Musk believes this kind of thing will help us keep pace with artificial intelligence. "Under any rate of advancement in AI, we will be left behind by a lot," he said at a conference last summer. "The benign situation with ultra-intelligent AI is that we would be so far below in intelligence we’d be like a pet, or a house cat. I don't love the idea of being a house cat." But Eagleman is adamant that this kind of interface will not involve implanting devices in healthy brains. And you hear much the same from others working in the field. Chad Bouton, a vice president of advanced engineering and technology at the Feinstein Institute of Medical Research, which is working to develop bioelectronic technology for treating disease, also warns that brain surgery is an incredibly invasive procedure.
It is far more likely, Eagleman says, that scientists will develop better ways of reading and simulating the brain from the outside. Today, doctors use techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to read what's happening in the brain, and they use methods like trans-cranial magnetic stimulation to change its behavior. But these are rather crude techniques. If scientists can better understand the brain, Eagleman says, they could potentially improve these methods and build on them, creating something far more useful.
Researchers could also develop genetic techniques to modify neurons so that machines can "read and write" to them from outside our bodies. Or they could develop nano-robots that we ingest into our bodies for the same purpose. All this, Eagleman says, is more plausible than an implanted neural lace.
If you strip away all the grandiose language around these efforts from Johnson and Musk, however, Eagleman admires what they are doing, mainly because they are pumping money into research. "Because they are wealthy, they can set their sights on a big problem we're trying to solve, and they can work their way toward their problem," he says.
That doesn't sound quite as revolutionary as a neural lace. But it's also not quite as frightening. And, well, it's a lot more real.
Correction: This story has been corrected to properly identify functional magnetic resonance imaging.
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"Racing Self-Driving Cars Will Make Roads Safer for Everyone | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/2015/12/roborace-autonomous-vehicle-racing"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Alex Davies Gear Racing Self-Driving Cars Will Make Roads Safer for Everyone FIA Formula E Test Day, Donington Park, UK. 11th August 2015.Bruno Senna (BRA), Mahindra Racing M2ELECTRO Photo: Sam Bloxham/FIA Formula E/LATref: Digital Image: _G7C5023 Formula E Save this story Save Save this story Save In motorsports, Formula One has long been considered the pinnacle, the sport where the most advanced technology is ruthlessly developed and brutally tested. That's set to change with a racing series that finally eliminates the most archaic component of an F1 car: the driver.
Formula E, the all-electric racing series currently in its second season, is launching "Roborace," a global motorsports series for autonomous vehicles.
Roborace, started in conjunction with automaker Kinetik, promises to be more than a thoroughly awesome demonstration of what the technology can do when humans get out of the way. In the long tradition of "What wins on Sunday, sells on Monday," developing self-driving cars that chase each another around intricate circuits at nearly 200 mph could provide vital lessons about how such technology will work in our daily lives.
Details are scarce at the moment, but we know the events are scheduled to start with the 2016-2017 season and will precede Formula E races. There will be 10 teams—though no one has confirmed participating—including a "crowd-sourced community team." The cars will be electric, of course, but event organizers say they will be nearly as fast as Formula One cars. Kinetik CEO Denis Sverdlov promises "really crazy speeds" up to 186 mph, but says limits almost certainly will be required for racing. The cars could look radically different from conventional race cars, given that there's no need for a human inside.
By developing cars that can post triple-digit speeds on the challenging street circuits used in Formula E, the Roborace teams will necessarily be making systems that can be applied to consumer vehicles.
Even more exciting than the idea of robots racing is how teaching those cars to race could advance the systems headed for consumer vehicles.
Driving at high speeds is rather like practicing basketball while wearing ankle weights—it makes you more capable when it's time to compete.
"There are certain problems you have to solve at these high speeds that could improve performance at low speeds," says John Dolan, who studies autonomous technology at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. One of those is reducing latency—the time it takes the computer to process the data coming from a sensor and transmit instructions to various systems. "At 180 mph, you're gonna have to do that faster," Dolan says. Reducing that time, which is mostly a software issue, in racing creates a more robust system in the cars the rest of us will use.
Developing a car that can handle racing dynamics helps, too. That's why we've seen autonomous cars on the track before. Last year, Audi's driverless RS7 lapped Germany’s Hockenheimring F1 track , hitting all 17 turns with precision and topping out at 149 mph. Audi sent an autonomous TTS racing up the 156-turn Pikes Peak mountain circuit in 2010, then around California's Thunderhill Race Track in 2012. Last month, Stanford University researchers showed off an autonomous DeLorean they taught to drift and do killer donuts. Both projects were aimed at understanding how autonomous vehicles behave at the limit of traction and grip, and applying that knowledge to technology meant for consumers.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft By developing cars that can post triple-digit speeds on the challenging street circuits used in Formula E, the Roborace teams will necessarily be making systems that can be applied to consumer vehicles.
Lastly, the Roborace cars will face a challenge the Audi and Stanford vehicles didn't have to deal with: competition. They'll be racing, and the only way to come in first—if you don't start in pole position and hold the lead—is to pass the robot ahead of you. For a human, whether on the racetrack or a two-lane country race, passing is a complicated maneuver. You have to pick the perfect moment, the right direction, the proper steering angle and degree of acceleration, all while balancing the risk of crashing with the reward of moving ahead. The ability to make that kind of complex decision in near real time is key to safely handling all sorts of everyday driving situations. "That's one to one, that's a direct transfer," says Red Whittaker, who has studied autonomous technology at Carnegie Mellon since the early 80s.
As a bonus, the way teams program their software could create distinct personalities of sorts. Someday soon, motorsports fans may talk about the rivalries between two computer programs the way they now talk about Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost.
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"How Russian Spam King Peter Levashov Was Arrested, and His Kelihos Botnet Dismantled | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/2017/04/fbi-took-russias-spam-king-massive-botnet"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Garrett M. Graff Security How the FBI Took Down Russia's Spam King---And His Massive Botnet Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save One of the world’s most notorious spammers appears to have been tripped up by a basic cybersecurity no-no, according to the FBI: He used the same log-in credentials to both run his criminal enterprise and also log into sites like iTunes.
The Justice Department announced Monday that it had successfully targeted a man prosecutors called “one of the world’s most notorious criminal spammers,” a Russian hacker known as Peter Yuryevich Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, or “Peter of the North.” Levashov had long run the Kelihos botnet, a global network of infected computers that collectively flooded email inboxes worldwide with spam, stole banking credentials from infected users, and spread malware across the internet.
Spanish authorities arrested Levashov, who normally resides in St. Petersburg, Russia, while he was on vacation with his family. Rumors had swirled over the weekend, sourced only to a vague report on the Russian propaganda network RT, that he’d been involved in that country’s meddling with the 2016 US presidential election, but there was no hint of that in Monday’s Justice Department complaint, which focused instead on Levashov’s role in developing and running one of the internet’s most pernicious and longest-running botnets. Levashov's operation had infected as many as 100,000 computers worldwide, roughly five to ten percent of which were inside the United States.
Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker Russian Hackers Have Used the Same Backdoor for Two Decades Russian Spies Helped Hack Yahoo, as if Tensions Weren’t High Enough Russia? Nah. The House GOP Goes After Leakers Instead Prosecutors described Kelihos as a sophisticated malware variant that harvested user credentials from victim computers, and was used to send massive quantities of spam emails. The complaints and court orders associated with the case also laid out details of how Levashov operated his business, offering a million spam messages promoting “legal” products such as “adult, mortgage, leads, pills, replics [i.e., counterfeit goods], etc.” for just $200, while that price went to $300 per million messages for “Job spam,” that is, messages that attempted to recruit job seekers into fraudulent positions, including “money mules” who would help launder stolen money and goods. According to the Justice Department, Levashov also offered to deploy his network on behalf of online fraudsters to execute phishing attacks for $500 per million messages.
As part of the operation, security researchers and the FBI teamed up to dismantle the Kelihos botnet itself, targeting three domains used to run the network—gorodkoff.com, goloduha.info, and combach.com---and redirecting traffic from infected computers to new servers controlled by authorities and the ShadowServer Foundation, a volunteer anti-cybercrime group, a process that’s known in cybersecurity circles as “sink-holing.” The arrest of Levashov---and the complex, sophisticated assault on his long-running botnet---marked another victory in the US government’s rising war against Russian aggression in cyberspace, coming just weeks after another Justice Department indictment charged both Russian criminals and intelligence officer with conspiring to hack Yahoo’s user database.
It also, for the time being at least, perhaps marked the end of one of the most powerful spam networks on the internet, a global network of malware-infected computers that had proven uniquely difficult to dismantle, reappearing multiple times and evolving even as its chief output---multitudes upon multitudes of unwanted junk emails advertising Viagra, adult entertainment, and, at worst, phishing emails that spread even more malware---continued unabated for the better part of a decade.
“The ability of botnets like Kelihos to be weaponized quickly for vast and varied types of harms is a dangerous and deep threat to all Americans, driving at the core of how we communicate, network, earn a living, and live our everyday lives,” said Kenneth Blanco, the acting assistant attorney general overseeing the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The case also marks one of the first times that the Justice Department has acknowledged using what’s known as “Rule 41,” a controversial change to federal criminal procedures that took effect last December and allows the government to seek powerful search warrants to investigate cybercrime no matter where infected computers might be physically located. (The Justice Department, though, was quick to caution Monday that it didn’t actually use warrants to penetrate any infected computer, merely to help attack the botnet nationwide.) While the newly unsealed case against Levashov sprawled internationally and included agents from multiple FBI field offices, as well as numerous international partners, it’s hard to miss the fingerprints of Special Agent Elliott Peterson---a veteran of the FBI’s crack cyber squad in Pittsburgh who transferred recently to the Anchorage Field Office, where Monday’s announcement was made.
It perhaps marks the end of one of the most powerful spam networks on the internet.
To defeat Kelihos technically, Peterson worked closely with two Crowdstrike engineers, Brett Stone-Gross and Tillman Werner, who traveled to Alaska last week. The three men had also teamed up in Pittsburgh in 2014 to defeat the GameOver Zeus botnet, built by Evgeny Bogachev, who today is America’s most wanted hacker, with a $3 million reward for his capture. ( That case, involving Russian hackers, botnets, and bank theft, was the subject of WIRED’s April cover story.
) Both Werner and Stone-Gross had long battled Kelihos. Stone-Gross had come into the botnet’s source code years ago and had worked to dismantle it since, and Werner had previously “sink-holed” an earlier variant of the network live onstage during a security conference in 2012, only to see it bounce back even more sophisticated and resilient later on.
As for the tenuous election hacking connection, it may have stemmed from rumors online that Levashov may have ties to Russian security forces or intelligence agencies, relationships that would be consistent with other high-profile, powerful Russian hackers. That alleged affiliation wouldn't be unusual; Bogachev’s GameOver Zeus botnet was deployed to help gather intelligence on Ukrainian targets during Russia’s invasion of Crimea in the spring of 2014, and, more recently, the March Yahoo indictment documented ties between one well-known hacker, Alexsey Belan, and Russian officials with the FSB, its domestic intelligence agency that succeeded the KGB. This indictment, though, doesn't mention the presidential campaign whatsoever.
According to court documents, the investigators tracking Levashov figured out this spring that there was a brief window to possibly arrest him while he was traveling with his family in Spain---a country that’s proven a strong US ally on cybercrime, and previously been the site of arrest of Russian hackers on vacation. Indeed, there are hints that the operation might have been moved up to coincide with the opportunity to arrest the hacker; the original date on the search warrant was crossed out and moved up by two weeks.
Levashov, who for years has been featured on SpamHaus’s list of the most notorious spammers and currently occupies the sixth spot on its list, has long operated beyond the arm of US law enforcement. He was indicted more than a decade ago in Michigan for email and wire fraud for using spam as part of a penny-stock pump-and-dump scheme. Later, in 2009, DC prosecutors again indicted him for computer fraud, stemming from his operation of the “Storm” botnet, a predecessor to his later development of Kelihos.
Investigators eventually linked Levashov to Kelihos by painstakingly matching IPs and log-in credentials on sites like FourSquare, Apple, and Google. Whether, if, and how long it might take to extradite the spam king from Spain to the United States remains an open question; while US law enforcement have had recent success in getting friendly foreign governments to arrest suspected Russian criminals abroad, they’ve been less successful in returning all of those suspects to US soil. Other cases in Thailand and Austria have been tied up in court for extended periods of time.
Regardless of which country has him for now, Levashov remains in custody. That's a relief for authorities, and to spam-besieged inboxes and vulnerable computers around the world.
Contributing Editor Topics hacks malware Russia security Spam Lily Hay Newman Scott Gilbertson Lily Hay Newman Matt Burgess Vittoria Elliott David Gilbert David Gilbert Dell Cameron Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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916 | 2,016 |
"Inside the Hunt for Russia's Most Notorious Hacker | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/2017/03/russian-hacker-spy-botnet"
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"WIRED Logo Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker Click to share this story on Facebook Click to share this story on Twitter Click to email this story Click to comment on this story. (will open new tab) Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker Inside the Hunt for Russia’s Most Notorious Hacker by Garrett M. Graff | illustrations by Chad Hagen 3.21.17 On the morning of December 30, the day after Barack Obama imposed sanctions on Russia for interfering in the 2016 US election, Tillmann Werner was sitting down to breakfast in Bonn, Germany. He spread some jam on a slice of rye bread, poured himself a cup of coffee, and settled in to check Twitter at his dining room table.
The news about the sanctions had broken overnight, so Werner, a researcher with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, was still catching up on details. Following a link to an official statement, Werner saw that the White House had targeted a short parade’s worth of Russian names and institutions—two intelligence agencies, four senior intelligence officials, 35 diplomats, three tech companies, two hackers. Most of the details were a blur. Then Werner stopped scrolling. His eyes locked on one name buried among the targets: Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev.
Related Stories The Botnet That Broke the Internet Isn’t Going Away By Lily Hay Newman Inside the Cyberattack That Shocked the US Government By Brendan I. Koerner Say Hello to the Super-Stealthy Malware That’s Going Mainstream By Lily Hay Newman Werner, as it happened, knew quite a bit about Evgeniy Bogachev. He knew in precise, technical detail how Bogachev had managed to loot and terrorize the world’s financial systems with impunity for years. He knew what it was like to do battle with him.
But Werner had no idea what role Bogachev might have played in the US election hack. Bogachev wasn’t like the other targets—he was a bank robber. Maybe the most prolific bank robber in the world.
“What on earth is he doing on this list?” Werner wondered.
America’s war with Russia’s greatest cybercriminal began in the spring of 2009, when special agent James Craig, a rookie in the FBI’s Omaha, Nebraska, field office, began looking into a strange pair of electronic thefts. A square-jawed former marine, Craig had been an agent for just six months, but his superiors tapped him for the case anyway, because of his background: For years, he’d been an IT guy for the FBI. One of his nicknames in college was “the silent geek.” While you log into seemingly secure websites, the malware modifies pages before they load, siphoning away your credentials and your account balance.
The leading victim in the case was a subsidiary of the payments-processing giant First Data, which lost $450,000 that May. That was quickly followed by a $100,000 theft from a client of the First National Bank of Omaha. What was odd, Craig noticed, was that the thefts seemed to have been executed from the victims’ own IP addresses, using their own logins and passwords. Examining their computers, he saw that they were infected with the same malware: something called the Zeus Trojan horse.
In online security circles, Craig discovered, Zeus was notorious. Having first appeared in 2006, the malware had a reputation among both criminals and security experts as a masterpiece—smooth, effective, versatile. Its author was a phantom. He was only known online, where he went by the handle Slavik, or lucky12345, or a half-dozen other names.
Zeus infected computers through fairly typical means: fake IRS emails, say, or illegitimate UPS shipping notices that tricked recipients into downloading a file. But once it was on your computer, Zeus let hackers play God: They could hijack websites and use a keystroke logger to record usernames, passwords, and PINs. Hackers could even modify login forms to request further valuable security information: a mother’s maiden name, a Social Security number. The ruse is known as a “man in the browser” attack. While you sit at your computer logging into seemingly secure websites, the malware modifies pages before they load, siphoning away your credentials and your account balance. Only when you log in from a different computer do you even realize the money is gone.
By the time Craig started his investigation, Zeus had become the digital underground’s malware of choice—the Microsoft Office of online fraud. Slavik was something rare in the malware world: a genuine professional. He regularly updated the Zeus code, beta-testing new features. His product was endlessly adaptable, with variants optimized for different kinds of attacks and targets. A computer infected with Zeus could even be folded into a botnet, a network of infected computers that can be harnessed together to run spam servers or distributed denial-of-service attacks, or send out more deceptive emails to spread the malware further.
But sometime shortly before Craig picked up his case in 2009, Slavik had begun to change tack. He started cultivating an inner circle of online criminals, providing a select group with a variant of his malware, called Jabber Zeus. It came equipped with a Jabber instant-message plug-in, allowing the group to communicate and coordinate attacks—like in the two Omaha thefts. Rather than rely on broad infection campaigns, they began to specifically target corporate accountants and people with access to financial systems.
As Slavik turned increasingly to organized crime, he dramatically narrowed his retail malware business. In 2010 he announced his “retirement” online and then released what security researchers came to call Zeus 2.1, an advanced version of his malware protected by an encryption key—effectively tying each copy to a specific user—with a price tag upwards of $10,000 per copy. Now, Slavik was only dealing with an elite, ambitious group of criminals.
“We had no idea how big this case was,” Craig says. “The amount of activity from these guys was phenomenal.” Other institutions began to come forward with losses and accounts of fraud. Lots of them. Craig realized that, from his desk in suburban Omaha, he was chasing a well-organized international criminal network. “The victims started falling out of the sky,” Craig says. It dwarfed any other cybercrime the FBI had tackled before.
Craig’s first major break in the case came in September 2009. With the help of some industry experts, he identified a New York–based server that seemed to play some sort of role in the Zeus network. He obtained a search warrant, and an FBI forensics team copied the server’s data onto a hard drive, then overnighted it to Nebraska. When an engineer in Omaha examined the results, he sat in awe for a moment. The hard drive contained tens of thousands of lines of instant message chat logs in Russian and Ukrainian. Looking over at Craig, the engineer said: “You have their Jabber server.” This was the gang’s whole digital operation—a road map to the entire case. The cybersecurity firm Mandiant dispatched an engineer to Omaha for months just to help untangle the Jabber Zeus code, while the FBI began cycling in agents from other regions on 30- or 90-day assignments. Linguists across the country pitched in to decipher the logs. “The slang was a challenge,” Craig says.
One woman explained that she’d become a money mule after a job at a grocery store fell through, telling an agent: “I could strip, or I could do this.” The messages contained references to hundreds of victims, their stolen credentials scattered in English throughout the files. Craig and other agents started cold-calling institutions, telling them they had been hit by cyberfraud. He found that several businesses had terminated employees they suspected of the thefts—not realizing that the individuals’ computers had been infected by malware and their logins stolen.
The case also expanded beyond the virtual world. In New York one day in 2009, three young women from Kazakhstan walked into the FBI field office there with a strange story. The women had come to the States to look for work and found themselves participating in a curious scheme: A man would drive them to a local bank and tell them to go inside and open a new account. They were to explain to the teller that they were students visiting for the summer. A few days later, the man had them return to the bank and withdraw all of the money in the account; they kept a small cut and passed the rest on to him. Agents pieced together that the women were “money mules” : Their job was to cash out the funds that Slavik and his comrades had siphoned from legitimate accounts.
By the summer of 2010, New York investigators had put banks across the region on alert for suspicious cash-outs and told them to summon FBI agents as they occurred. The alert turned up dozens of mules withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars. Most were students or newly arrived immigrants in Brighton Beach. One woman explained that she’d become a mule after a job at a grocery store fell through, telling an agent: “I could strip, or I could do this.” Another man explained that he’d be picked up at 9 am, do cash-out runs until 3 pm, and then spend the rest of the day at the beach. Most cash-outs ran around $9,000, just enough to stay under federal reporting limits. The mule would receive 5 to 10 percent of the total, with another cut going to the recruiter. The rest of the money would be sent overseas.
“The amount of organization these kids—they’re in their twenties—were able to pull together would’ve impressed any Fortune 100 company,” the FBI’s James Craig says.
The United States, moreover, was just one market in what investigators soon realized was a multinational reign of fraud. Officials traced similar mule routes in Romania, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, and Russia. All told, investigators could attribute around $70 million to $80 million in thefts to the group—but they suspected the total was far more than that.
Banks howled at the FBI to shut the fraud down and stanch the losses. Over the summer, New York agents began to close in on high-ranking recruiters and the scheme’s masterminds in the US. Two Moldovans were arrested at a Milwaukee hotel at 11 pm following a tip; one suspect in Boston tried to flee a raid on his girlfriend’s apartment and had to be rescued from the fire escape.
Meanwhile, Craig’s case in Omaha advanced against the broader Jabber Zeus gang. The FBI and the Justice Department had zeroed in on an area in eastern Ukraine around the city of Donetsk, where several of the Jabber Zeus leaders seemed to live. Alexey Bron, known online as “thehead,” specialized in moving the gang’s money around the world. Ivan Viktorvich Klepikov, who went by the moniker “petr0vich,” ran the group’s IT management, web hosting, and domain names. And Vyacheslav Igorevich Penchukov, a well-known local DJ who went by the nickname “tank,” managed the whole scheme, putting him second in command to Slavik. “The amount of organization these kids—they’re in their twenties—were able to pull together would’ve impressed any Fortune 100 company,” Craig says. The gang poured their huge profits into expensive cars (Penchukov had a penchant for high-end BMWs and Porsches, while Klepikov preferred Subaru WRX sports sedans), and the chat logs were filled with discussions of fancy vacations across Turkey, Crimea, and the United Arab Emirates.
By the fall of 2010, the FBI was ready to take down the network. As officials in Washington called a high-profile press conference, Craig found himself on a rickety 12-hour train ride across Ukraine to Donetsk, where he met up with agents from the country’s security service to raid tank’s and petr0vich’s homes. Standing in petr0vich’s living room, a Ukrainian agent told Craig to flash his FBI badge. “Show him it’s not just us,” he urged. Craig was stunned by the scene: The hacker, wearing a purple velvet smoking jacket, seemed unperturbed as agents searched his messy apartment in a Soviet-style concrete building; his wife held their baby in the kitchen, laughing with investigators. “This is the gang I’ve been chasing?” Craig thought. The raids lasted well into the night, and Craig didn’t return to his hotel until 3 am. He took nearly 20 terabytes of seized data back to Omaha.
With 39 arrests around the world—stretching across four nations—investigators managed to disrupt the network. But crucial players slipped away. One top mule recruiter in the US fled west, staying a step ahead of investigators in Las Vegas and Los Angeles before finally escaping the country inside a shipping container. More important, Slavik, the mastermind himself, remained almost a complete cipher. Investigators assumed he was based in Russia. And once, in an online chat, they saw him reference that he was married. Other than that, they had nothing. The formal indictment referred to the creator of the Zeus malware using his online pseudonym. Craig didn’t even know what his prime suspect looked like. “We have thousands of photos from tank, petr0vich—not once did we see Slavik’s mug,” Craig says. Soon even the criminal’s online traces vanished. Slavik, whoever he was, went dark. And after seven years of chasing Jabber Zeus, James Craig moved on to other cases.
About a year after the FBI shut down the Jabber Zeus ring, the small community of online cybersecurity researchers who watch for malware and botnets began to notice a new variant of Zeus emerge. The malware’s source code had been leaked online in 2011—perhaps purposefully, perhaps not—effectively turning Zeus into an open source project and setting off an explosion of new variants. But the version that caught the eyes of researchers was different: more powerful and more sophisticated, particularly in its approach to assembling botnets.
Until then, most botnets used a hub-and-spoke system—a hacker would program a single command server to distribute orders directly to infected machines, known as zombie computers. The undead army could then be directed to send out spam emails, distribute malware, or target websites for denial-of-service attacks. That hub-and-spoke design, though, made botnets relatively easy for law enforcement or security researchers to dismantle. If you could knock the command server offline, seize it, or disrupt a hacker’s ability to communicate with it, you could usually break the botnet.
The gang’s strategy represented an evolutionary leap in organized crime: Now they could do everything remotely, never touching a US jurisdiction.
This new Zeus variant, however, relied on both traditional command servers and peer-to-peer communication between zombie machines, making it extremely difficult to knock down. Infected machines kept a constantly updated list of other infected machines. If one device sensed that its connection with the command server had been interrupted, it would rely on the peer-to-peer network to find a new command server.
The network, in effect, was designed from the start to be takedown-proof; as soon as one command server was knocked offline, the botnet owner could just set up a new server somewhere else and redirect the peer-to-peer network to it. The new version became known as GameOver Zeus, after one of its file names, gameover2.php. The name also lent itself naturally to gallows humor: Once this thing infects your computer, went a joke among security experts, it’s game over for your bank accounts.
As far as anyone could tell, GameOver Zeus was controlled by a very elite group of hackers—and the group’s leader was Slavik. He had reemerged, more powerful than ever. Slavik’s new crime ring came to be called the Business Club. A September 2011 internal announcement to the group—introducing members to a new suite of online tools for organizing money transfers and mules—concluded with a warm welcome to Slavik’s select recipients: “We wish you all successful and productive work.” Like the Jabber Zeus network, the Business Club’s prime directive was knocking over banks, which it did with even more ruthless inventiveness than its predecessor. The scheme was multipronged: First, the GameOver Zeus malware would steal a user’s banking credentials, intercepting them as soon as someone with an infected computer logged into an online account. Then the Business Club would drain the bank account, transferring its funds into other accounts they controlled overseas. With the theft complete, the group would use its powerful botnet to hit the targeted financial institutions with a denial-of-service attack to distract bank employees and prevent customers from realizing their accounts had been emptied until after the money had cleared. On November 6, 2012, the FBI watched as the GameOver network stole $6.9 million in a single transaction, then hit the bank with a multiday denial-of-service attack.
Unlike the earlier Jabber Zeus gang, the more advanced network behind GameOver focused on larger six- and seven-figure bank thefts—a scale that made bank withdrawals in Brooklyn obsolete. Instead, they used the globe’s interconnected banking system against itself, hiding their massive thefts inside the trillions of dollars of legitimate commerce that slosh around the world each day. Investigators specifically identified two areas in far eastern China, close to the Russian city of Vladivostok, from which mules funneled huge amounts of stolen money into Business Club accounts. The strategy, investigators realized, represented an evolutionary leap in organized crime: Bank robbers no longer had to have a footprint inside the US. Now they could do everything remotely, never touching a US jurisdiction. “That’s all it takes to operate with impunity,” says Leo Taddeo, a former top FBI official.
Chad Hagan Banks weren’t the gang’s only targets. They also raided the accounts of nonfinancial businesses large and small, nonprofits, and even individuals. In October 2013, Slavik’s group began deploying malware known as CryptoLocker, a form of ransomware that would encrypt the files upon an infected machine and force its owner to pay a small fee, say, $300 to $500, to unlock the files. It quickly became a favorite tool of the cybercrime ring, in part because it helped transform dead weight into profit. The trouble with building a massive botnet focused on high-level financial fraud, it turns out, is that most zombie computers don’t connect to fat corporate accounts; Slavik and his associates found themselves with tens of thousands of mostly idle zombie machines. Though ransomware didn’t yield huge amounts, it afforded the criminals a way to monetize these otherwise worthless infected computers.
The concept of ransomware had been around since the 1990s, but CryptoLocker took it mainstream. Typically arriving on a victim’s machine under the cover of an unassuming email attachment, the Business Club’s ransomware used strong encryption and forced victims to pay using bitcoin. It was embarrassing and inconvenient, but many relented. The Swansea, Massachusetts, police department grumpily ponied up $750 to get back one of its computers in November 2013; the virus “is so complicated and successful that you have to buy these bitcoins, which we had never heard of,” Swansea police lieutenant Gregory Ryan told his local newspaper.
“When a bank gets attacked en masse—100 transactions a week—you stop caring about the specific malware and the individual attacks; you just need to stop the bleeding,” says one Dutch security expert.
The following month, the security firm Dell SecureWorks estimated that as many as 250,000 machines worldwide had been infected with CryptoLocker that year. One researcher traced 771 ransoms that netted Slavik’s crew a total of $1.1 million. “He was one of the first to realize how desperate people would be to regain access to their files,” Brett Stone-Gross, a researcher with Dell SecureWorks at the time, says of Slavik. “He didn’t charge an exorbitant amount, but he made a lot of money and created a new type of online crime.” As the GameOver network continued to gain strength, its operators kept adding revenue streams—renting out their network to other criminals to deliver malware and spam or to carry out projects like click fraud, ordering zombie machines to generate revenue by clicking on ads on fake websites.
With each passing week, the cost to banks, businesses, and individuals from GameOver grew. For businesses, the thefts could easily wipe out a year’s profits, or worse. Domestically, victims ranged from a regional bank in north Florida to a Native American tribe in Washington state. As it haunted large swathes of the private sector, GameOver absorbed more and more of the efforts of the private cybersecurity industry. The sums involved were staggering. “I don’t think anyone has a grasp of the full extent—one $5 million theft overshadows hundreds of smaller thefts,” explains Michael Sandee, a security expert at the Dutch firm Fox-IT. “When a bank gets attacked en masse—100 transactions a week—you stop caring about the specific malware and the individual attacks; you just need to stop the bleeding.” Many tried. From 2011 through 2013, cybersecurity researchers and various firms mounted three attempts to take down GameOver Zeus. Three European security researchers teamed up to make a first assault in the spring of 2012. Slavik easily repelled their attack. Then, in March 2012, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit took civil legal action against the network, relying upon US marshals to raid data centers in Illinois and Pennsylvania that housed Zeus command-and-control servers and aiming legal action against 39 individuals thought to be associated with the Zeus networks. (Slavik was first on the list.) But Microsoft’s plan failed to put a dent in GameOver. Instead it merely clued Slavik in to what investigators knew about his network and allowed him to refine his tactics.
Botnet fighters are a small, proud group of engineers and security researchers—self-proclaimed “internet janitors” who work to keep online networks running smoothly. Within that group, Tillmann Werner—the tall, lanky German researcher with the security firm CrowdStrike—had become known for his flair and enthusiasm for the work. In February 2013 he seized control of the Kelihos botnet, an infamous malware network built on Viagra spam, live onstage during a presentation at the cybersecurity industry’s biggest conference. But Kelihos, he knew, was no GameOver Zeus. Werner had been watching GameOver since its inception, marveling at its strength and resilience.
In 2012 he had linked up with Stone-Gross—who was just a few months out of graduate school and was based in California—plus a few other researchers to map out an effort to attack GameOver. Working across two continents largely in their spare time, the men plotted their attack via online chat. They carefully studied the previous European effort, identifying where it had failed, and spent a year preparing their offensive.
At the peak of their attack, the researchers controlled 99 percent of Slavik’s network—but they’d overlooked a critical source of resilience in GameOver’s structure.
In January 2013, they were ready: They stocked up on pizza, assuming they were in for a long siege against Slavik’s network. (When you go against a botnet, Werner says, “you have one shot. It either goes right or wrong.”) Their plan was to reroute GameOver’s peer-to-peer network, centralize it, and then redirect the traffic to a new server under their control—a process known as “sinkholing.” In doing so, they hoped to sever the botnet’s communication link to Slavik. And at first, everything went well. Slavik showed no signs of fighting back, and Werner and Stone-Gross watched as more and more infected computers connected to their sinkhole by the hour.
At the peak of their attack, the researchers controlled 99 percent of Slavik’s network—but they’d overlooked a critical source of resilience in GameOver’s structure: a small subset of infected computers were still secretly communicating with Slavik’s command servers. “We missed that there’s a second layer of control,” Stone-Gross says. By the second week, Slavik was able to push a software update to his whole network and reassert his authority. The researchers watched with dawning horror as a new version of GameOver Zeus propagated across the internet and Slavik’s peer-to-peer network began to reassemble. “We immediately saw what happened—we’d completely neglected this other channel of communication,” Werner says.
The researchers’ ploy—nine months in the making—had failed. Slavik had won. In a trollish online chat with a Polish security team, he crowed about how all the efforts to seize his network had come to naught. “I don’t think he thought it was possible to take down his botnet,” Werner says. Dejected, the two researchers were eager to try again. But they needed help—from Pittsburgh.
Over the past decade, the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office has emerged as the source of the government’s biggest cybercrime indictments, thanks in no small part to the head of the local cybersquad there, a onetime furniture salesman named J. Keith Mularski.
An excitable and gregarious agent who grew up around Pittsburgh, Mularski has become something of a celebrity in cybersecurity circles. He joined the FBI in the late ’90s and spent his first seven years in the bureau working espionage and terrorism cases in Washington, DC. Jumping at the chance to return home to Pittsburgh, he joined a new cyber initiative there in 2005, despite the fact that he knew little about computers. Mularski trained on the job during a two-year undercover investigation chasing identity thieves deep in the online forum DarkMarket. Under the screen name Master Splyntr—a handle inspired by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—Mularski managed to become a DarkMarket administrator, putting himself at the center of a burgeoning online criminal community. In his guise, he even chatted online with Slavik and reviewed an early version of the Zeus malware program. His DarkMarket access eventually helped investigators arrest 60 people across three continents.
Even after millions of dollars in thefts, neither the FBI nor the security industry had so much as a single Business Club member’s name.
In the years that followed, the head of the Pittsburgh office decided to invest aggressively in combating cybercrime—a bet on its increasing importance. By 2014, the FBI agents in Mularski’s squad, together with another squad assigned to a little-known Pittsburgh institution called the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance, were prosecuting some of the Justice Department’s biggest cases. Two of Mularski’s agents, Elliott Peterson and Steven J. Lampo, were chasing the hackers behind GameOver Zeus, even as their desk-mates simultaneously investigated a case that would ultimately indict five Chinese army hackers who had penetrated computer systems at Westinghouse, US Steel, and other companies to benefit Chinese industry.
The FBI’s GameOver case had been under way for about a year by the time Werner and Stone-Gross offered to join forces with the Pittsburgh squad to take down Slavik’s botnet. If they had approached any other law-enforcement agency, the response might have been different. Government cooperation with industry was still a relatively rare phenomenon; the Feds’ style in cyber cases was, by reputation, to hoover up industry leads without sharing information. But the team in Pittsburgh was unusually practiced at collaboration, and they knew that the two researchers were the best in the field. “We jumped at the chance,” Mularski says.
Both sides realized that in order to tackle the botnet, they needed to work on three simultaneous fronts. First, they had to figure out once and for all who was running GameOver—what investigators call “attribution”—and build up a criminal prosecution; even after millions of dollars in thefts, neither the FBI nor the security industry had so much as a single Business Club member’s name. Second, they needed to take down the digital infrastructure of GameOver itself; that’s where Werner and Stone-Gross came in. And third, they needed to disable the botnet’s physical infrastructure by assembling court orders and enlisting the help of other governments to seize its servers across the globe. Once all that was done, they needed partners in the private sector to be ready with software updates and security patches to help recover infected computers the moment the good guys had control of the botnet. Absent any one of those moves, the next effort to take down GameOver Zeus was likely to fail just as the previous ones had.
The network was run through two password-protected British websites, which contained careful records, FAQs, and a “ticket” system for resolving technical issues.
With that, Mularski’s squad began to stitch together an international partnership unlike anything the US government had ever undertaken, enlisting the UK’s National Crime Agency, officials in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, Luxembourg, and a dozen other countries, as well as industry experts at Microsoft, CrowdStrike, McAfee, Dell SecureWorks, and other companies.
First, to help nail down Slavik’s identity and get intelligence on the Business Club, the FBI teamed up with Fox-IT, a Dutch outfit renowned for its expertise in cyber-forensics. The Dutch researchers got to work tracing old usernames and email addresses associated with Slavik’s ring to piece together an understanding of how the group operated.
The Business Club, it turned out, was a loose confederation of about 50 criminals, who each paid an initiation fee to access GameOver’s advanced control panels. The network was run through two password-protected British websites, Visitcoastweekend.com and Work.businessclub.so, which contained careful records, FAQs, and a “ticket” system for resolving technical issues. When investigators got legal permission to penetrate the Business Club server, they found a highly detailed ledger tracking the group’s various ongoing frauds. “Everything radiated professionalism,” Fox-IT’s Michael Sandee explains. When it came to pinpointing the precise timing of transactions between financial institutions, he says, “they probably knew better than the banks.” Chad Hagan One Day, after months of following leads, the investigators at Fox-IT got a tip from a source about an email address they might want to look into. It was one of many similar tips they’d chased down. “We had a lot of bread crumbs,” Mularski says. But this one led to something vital: The team was able to trace the email address to a British server that Slavik used to run the Business Club’s websites. More investigative work and more court orders eventually led authorities to Russian social media sites where the email address was connected to a real name: Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev. At first it was meaningless to the group. It took weeks’ more effort to realize that the name actually belonged to the phantom who had invented Zeus and created the Business Club.
Slavik, it turned out, was a 30-year-old who lived an upper-middle-class existence in Anapa, a Russian resort city on the Black Sea. Online photos showed that he enjoyed boating with his wife. The couple had a young daughter. One photo showed Bogachev posing in leopard-print pajamas and dark sunglasses, holding a large cat. The investigative team realized that he had written the first draft of Zeus when he was just 22 years old.
The team couldn’t find specific evidence of a link between Bogachev and the Russian state, but some entity seemed to be feeding Slavik specific terms to search for in his vast network of zombie computers.
But that wasn’t the most astounding revelation that the Dutch investigators turned up. As they continued their analysis, they noticed that someone at the helm of GameOver had been regularly searching tens of thousands of the botnet’s infected computers in certain countries for things like email addresses belonging to Georgian intelligence officers or leaders of elite Turkish police units, or documents that bore markings designating classified Ukrainian secrets. Whoever it was was also searching for classified material linked to the Syrian conflict and Russian arms dealing. At some point, a light bulb went off. “These are espionage commands,” Sandee says.
GameOver wasn’t merely a sophisticated piece of criminal malware; it was a sophisticated intelligence-gathering tool. And as best as the investigators could determine, Bogachev was the only member of the Business Club who knew about this particular feature of the botnet. He appeared to be running a covert operation right under the noses of the world’s most prolific bank robbers. The FBI and Fox-IT team couldn’t find specific evidence of a link between Bogachev and the Russian state, but some entity seemed to be feeding Slavik specific terms to search for in his vast network of zombie computers. Bogachev, it appeared, was a Russian intelligence asset.
In March 2014, investigators could even watch as an international crisis played out live inside the snow globe of Bogachev’s criminal botnet. Weeks after the Sochi Olympics, Russian forces seized the Ukrainian region of Crimea and began efforts to destabilize the country’s eastern border. Right in step with the Russian campaign, Bogachev redirected a section of his botnet to search for politically sensitive information on infected Ukrainian computers—trawling for intelligence that might help the Russians anticipate their adversaries’ next moves.
The team was able to construct a tentative theory and history of Bogachev’s spycraft. The apparent state connection helped explain why Bogachev had been able to operate a major criminal enterprise with such impunity, but it also shed new light on some of the milestones in the life of Zeus. The system that Slavik used to make his intelligence queries dated back approximately to the moment in 2010 when he faked his retirement and made access to his malware far more exclusive. Perhaps Slavik had appeared on the radar of the Russian security services at some point that year, and in exchange for a license to commit fraud without prosecution—outside Russia, of course—the state made certain demands. To carry them out with maximum efficacy and secrecy, Slavik asserted tighter control over his criminal network.
The discovery of Bogachev’s likely intelligence ties introduced some trickiness to the operation to take down GameOver—especially when it came to the prospect of enlisting Russian cooperation. Otherwise, the plan was rumbling along. Now that the investigators had zeroed in on Bogachev, a grand jury could finally indict him as the mastermind behind GameOver Zeus. American prosecutors scrambled to bring together civil court orders to seize and disrupt the network. “When we were really running, we had nine people working this—and we only have 55 total,” says Michael Comber of the US Attorney’s office in Pittsburgh. Over a span of months, the team painstakingly went to internet service providers to ask permission to seize GameOver’s existing proxy servers, ensuring that at the right moment, they could flip those servers and disable Slavik’s control. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security, Carnegie Mellon, and a number of antivirus companies readied themselves to help customers regain access to their infected computers. Weekly conference calls spanned continents as officials coordinated action in Britain, the US, and elsewhere.
By late spring 2014, as pro-Russian forces fought in Ukraine proper, the American-led forces got ready to move in on GameOver. They’d been plotting to take down the network for more than a year, carefully reverse-engineering the malware, covertly reading the criminal gang’s chat logs to understand the group’s psychology, and tracing the physical infrastructure of servers that allowed the network to propagate around the globe. “By this point, these researchers knew the malware better than the author,” says Elliott Peterson, one of the lead FBI agents on the case. As Mularski recalls, the team checked off all the crucial boxes: “Criminally, we can do it. Civilly, we can do it. Technically we can do it.” Working with a cast of dozens, communicating with more than 70 internet service providers and a dozen other law enforcement agencies from Canada to the United Kingdom to Japan to Italy, the team readied an attack to commence on Friday, May 30.
The week leading up to the attack was a frantic scramble. When Werner and Stone-Gross arrived in Pittsburgh, Peterson had them over to his family’s apartment, where his kids gawked at Werner and his German accent. Over dinner and Fathead beer, they took stock of their looming attempt. They were running way behind—Werner’s code wasn’t close to being ready. Over the rest of the week, as Werner and Stone-Gross raced to finish writing, another team assembled the last court orders, and still others ran herd on the ad hoc group of two dozen governments, companies, and consultants who were helping to take GameOver Zeus down. The White House had been briefed on the plan and was waiting for results. But the effort seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
For instance, the team had known for months that the GameOver botnet was controlled by a server in Canada. But then, just days before the attack, they discovered that there was a second command server in Ukraine. The realization made hearts drop. “If you’re not even aware of the second box,” Werner says, “how sure are you that there’s not a third box?” Bogachev readied for battle—wrestling for control of his network, testing it, redirecting traffic to new servers, and deciphering the Pittsburgh team’s method of attack.
On Thursday, Stone-Gross carefully talked more than a dozen internet service providers through the procedures they needed to follow as the attack launched. At the last minute, one key service provider backed out, fearful that it would incur Slavik’s wrath. Then, on Friday morning, Werner and Stone-Gross arrived at their office building on the banks of the Monongahela River to find that one of the operation’s partners, McAfee, had prematurely published a blog post announcing the attack on the botnet, titled “It’s ‘Game Over’ for Zeus and Cryptolocker.” After frantic calls to get the post taken down, the attack finally began. Canadian and Ukrainian authorities shut down GameOver’s command servers, knocking each offline in turn. And Werner and Stone-Gross began redirecting the zombie computers into a carefully built “sinkhole” that would absorb the nefarious traffic, blocking the Business Club’s access to its own systems. For hours, the attack went nowhere; the researchers struggled to figure out where the bugs lay in their code.
By 1 pm, their sinkhole had drawn in only about a hundred infected computers, an infinitesimal percentage of the botnet that had grown to as many as half a million machines. A line of officials stood behind Werner and Stone-Gross in a conference room, literally watching over their shoulders as the two engineers debugged their code. “Not to put any pressure on you,” Mularski urged at one point, “but it’d be great if you could get it running.” Finally, by evening Pittsburgh time, the traffic to their sinkhole began to climb. On the other side of the world, Bogachev came online. The attack had interrupted his weekend. Perhaps he didn’t think much of it at first, given that he had easily weathered other attempts to seize control of his botnet. “Right away, he’s kicking the tires. He doesn’t know what we’ve done,” Peterson recalls. That night, yet again, Bogachev readied for battle—wrestling for control of his network, testing it, redirecting traffic to new servers, and deciphering the Pittsburgh team’s method of attack. “It was cyber-hand-to-hand combat,” recalls Pittsburgh US attorney David Hickton. “It was amazing to watch.” The team was able to monitor Bogachev’s communication channels without his knowledge and knock out his Turkish proxy server. Then they watched as he tried to come back online using the anonymizing service Tor, desperate to get some visibility into his losses. Finally, after hours of losing battles, Slavik went silent. The attack, it appeared, was more than he had bargained for. The Pittsburgh team powered on through the night. “He must’ve realized it was law enforcement. It wasn’t just the normal researcher attack,” Stone-Gross says.
By Sunday night, nearly 60 hours in, the Pittsburgh team knew they’d won. On Monday, June 2, the FBI and Justice Department announced the takedown and unsealed a 14-count indictment against Bogachev.
Over the coming weeks, Slavik and the researchers continued to do occasional battle—Slavik timed one counterattack for a moment when Werner and Stone-Gross were presenting at a conference in Montreal—but ultimately the duo prevailed. Amazingly, more than two years later, the success has largely stuck: The botnet has never reassembled, though about 5,000 computers worldwide remain infected with Zeus malware. The industry partners are still maintaining the server sinkhole that’s swallowing up the traffic from those infected computers.
For about a year after the attack, so-called account-takeover fraud all but disappeared in the US. Researchers and investigators had long assumed that dozens of gangs must have been responsible for the criminal onslaught that the industry endured between 2012 and 2014. But nearly all of the thefts came from just a small group of highly skilled criminals—the so-called Business Club. “You come into this and hear they’re everywhere,” Peterson says, “and actually it’s a very tiny network, and they’re much easier to disrupt than you think.” In 2015, the State Department put a $3 million bounty on Bogachev’s head, the highest reward the US has ever posted for a cybercriminal. But he remains at large. According to US intelligence sources, the government does not, in fact, suspect that Bogachev took part in the Russian campaign to influence the US election. Rather, the Obama administration included him in the sanctions to put pressure on the Russian government. The hope is that the Russians might be willing to hand over Bogachev as a sign of good faith, since the botnet that made him so useful to them is defunct. Or maybe, with the added attention, someone will decide they want the $3 million reward and tip off the FBI.
The uncomfortable truth is that Bogachev and other Russian cybercriminals lie pretty far beyond America’s reach.
But the uncomfortable truth is that Bogachev and other Russian cybercriminals lie pretty far beyond America’s reach. The huge questions that linger over the GameOver case—like those surrounding Bogachev’s precise relationship to Russian intelligence and the full tally of his thefts, which officials can only round to the nearest $100 million or so—foreshadow the challenges that face the analysts looking into the election hacks. Fortunately, the agents on the case have experience to draw from: The DNC breach is reportedly being investigated by the FBI’s Pittsburgh office.
In the meantime, Mularski’s squad and the cybersecurity industry have also moved on to new threats. The criminal tactics that were so novel when Bogachev helped pioneer them have now grown commonplace. The spread of ransomware is accelerating. And today’s botnets—especially Mirai , a network of infected Internet of Things devices—are even more dangerous than Bogachev’s creations.
Nobody knows what Bogachev himself might be cooking up next. Tips continue to arrive regularly in Pittsburgh regarding his whereabouts. But there are no real signs he has reemerged. At least not yet.
Garrett M. Graff ( @vermontgmg ) wrote about James Clapper in issue 24.12.
This article appears in the April issue.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Kim Zetter Security Hacker Lexicon: What Are DoS and DDoS Attacks? Then One/WIRED Save this story Save Save this story Save You see them mentioned in the news all the time. DoS and DDoS attacks are on the rise, and they are getting more sophisticated and intense every year. The US government accused Iran of conducting a prolonged series of DDoS against the web sites of Bank of America and other financial institutions, presumably as retaliation for economic sanctions levied against Iran for its nuclear program. Recently DDoS attacks by extortionists have targeted banks in Greece and Sweden. So what are DoS and DDoS attacks? DoS stands for "denial of service" and refers to an attack that overwhelms a system with data---most commonly a flood of simultaneous requests sent to a website to view its pages, causing the web server to crash or simply become inoperable as it struggles to respond to more requests than it can handle. As a result, legitimate users who try to access the web site controlled by the server are unable to do so. There are other types of DoS attacks that use different tactics, but they all have the same effect: preventing legitimate users from accessing a system or site.
TL;DR: A DoS, or denial-of-service attack, floods a system, often a web server, with data in order to overwhelm it and prevent users from accessing a website. DDoS refers to a distributed denial-of-service attack that comes from multiple systems distributed in various locations on the internet.
Simple DoS attacks, performed from a single machine, are uncommon these days. Instead, they've been supplanted by DDoS attacks, distributed denial-of-service attacks that come from many computers distributed across the internet, sometimes hundreds or thousands of systems at once. The attacking machines are generally not initiating the assault on their own but are compromised machines that are part of a botnet controlled by hackers who use the machines as an army to target a website or system. Because these attacks emanate from thousands of machines at once, they can be difficult to combat by simply blocking traffic from machines, especially when attackers forge the IP address of attacking computers, making it difficult for defenders to filter traffic based on IP addresses.
Perpetrators launch DDoS attacks for a variety of reasons. Hacktivists have used them to express displeasure against targets---for example when members of Anonymous launched attacks against the sites of PayPal, Visa, and MasterCard in 2011 after the payment service providers refused to process financial donations intended for WikiLeaks.
In 2013, spammers apparently launched a punishing attack against the spam-fighting site Spamhaus , after the site added a Dutch hosting company called Cyberbunker to its spam blacklist. Spamhaus provides blacklists to email providers to help them filter out spam sent from known spammers. Cyberbunker got on the list because it was accused of providing hosting services to spammers. At the attack's peak, 75 gigabits of traffic per second reportedly flooded Spamhaus servers.
The online gaming industry has also been plagued with DDoS attacks for several years, with the blame going to disgruntled players and even to competitors. A number of DDoS-for-hire services, for examples, will take down a competitor's website for any business that wants to hire them.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Some DDoS attacks are launched for political purposes. The most famous of these were the DDoS attacks that targeted Estonia and Georgia. In 2007, a barrage of traffic knocked government and media sites in Estonia offline and was later attributed to Russian nationalists who were angry about Estonia's decision to relocate a Soviet war monument in Tallinn from the center of the city to a military cemetery.
In 2008, web sites in Georgia were hit with DDoS attacks weeks before Russian troops invaded South Ossetia , prompting Georgia and others to blame Russia for the digital attacks.
More recently, DDoS attacks have been used as a criminal extortion technique.
Several encrypted email providers like ProtonMail and Hushmail, as well as banks in Sweden and Greece, have been struck with DDoS attacks after declining to pay a "ransom" the attackers had demanded to not assault their web sites.
DDoS attacks can also be used as a smokescreen to camouflage or draw attention away from other nefarious activity an attacker might be doing, such as stealing data from the victim's network. Hackers who targeted the UK telecom TalkTalk last year used a DDoS attack as a smokescreen while they siphoned data on 4 million of the company's customers.
DDoS attacks are not limited to computers and web servers, however. A variation of the attack can also target phones and phone systems. In December, when hackers caused a power outage at two plants in Ukraine, they also launched a telephony denial-of-service attack against customer call centers , to prevent local residents from reporting the outage to the companies.
DDoS attacks have become more powerful over time, with hackers varying their techniques to amplify their effects and make them more difficult to mitigate or thwart. Every year it seems, a new mega-DDoS attack shows up that dwarfs those that preceded it.
Last year the San Francisco-based security firm CloudFlare, which helps sites improve their performance and security in part by mitigating DDoS attacks, said it had battled a massive DDoS attack against an unidentified client in Europe. The attack, at its peak, spewed nearly 400 gigabits of data per second at its target.
The average DDoS attack is about 50 gbps.
Though the power of DDoS attacks is growing, the media often mischaracterize them and exaggerate their significance. Many news outlets, for example, have erroneously referred to the attacks against Estonia's websites in 2007 as cyberwarfare (among them, a WIRED magazine article). And in a 2012 Bloomberg story describing DDoS attacks against US banks, the news outlet wrote that the assaults had " breached some of the nation's most advanced computer defenses " and that such attacks rank "among the worse-case scenarios envisioned by the National Security Agency." In truth, DDoS attacks alone are an annoyance to web users and can cost a company lost business during the time they deny access to customers, but they're fairly easy to defend against. When used in conjunction with a data breach or some other nefarious activity they can certainly assist in the success of that breach, but they hardly qualify as catastrophic or a worst-case scenario under anyone's definition of the term.
X X Topics Hacker Lexicon hacks Threat Level Andy Greenberg Lily Hay Newman Andy Greenberg Andy Greenberg Matt Burgess Lily Hay Newman Dhruv Mehrotra Matt Burgess Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Quantum Computing Is Coming for Your Data | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Meredith Rutland Bauer Backchannel Quantum Computing Is Coming for Your Data Marco_Piunti/iStock Save this story Save Save this story Save The news that disturbed my digital life came two years ago in a snail mail letter strewn with phrases like “malicious cyber intrusion” and “identity theft.” A relative’s company had been part of a massive hack, the note said, leaving my information exposed. Before the letter came, I was a cyber security neophyte: I didn’t use a VPN and encrypted websites were just for banking. I often shopped online, depositing my credit card number over coffee shop wifi.
Meredith Rutland Bauer is a freelance journalist focusing on science, the environment, and technology.
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Since then, I’ve gotten better. My Android is filled with WhatsApp and Signal—which use end-to-end encryption—and my finance apps encrypt my data with both hardware and software. With things outside of my control, like my now-compromised social security number, I reassure myself that big organizations use encryption to house sensitive data, so my social must be unreadable to hackers.
But it turns out that all this encryption might not matter. Internet users like me have long relied on encryption for security and peace of mind, but cryptography experts are becoming aware of its faults—namely, that encryption can only protect against the tools we have now, and better, smarter tools are on the horizon. Quantum computers, which are fundamentally different from traditional computers because they leverage quantum mechanics to do calculations, could easily decrypt the advanced encryption we use widely. So even if encrypted data is safe from today’s hackers, it’s potentially vulnerable to hackers of the future.
Experts are concerned that cybercriminals might exploit this vulnerability with a scheme called harvest and decrypt. It’s a long-game attack where hackers scrape encrypted data and hold it, sometimes for decades, while they wait for quantum computers to become widespread enough for them to buy one. As soon as they have access to the device, they’ll use it to decrypt the stored data, which could contain anything from social security numbers to health information to a slew of nuclear missile codes.
More From This Edition Steven Levy John Pavlus Karen Wickre Scott Rosenberg And sure, nuclear missile codes will likely have changed over time—but according to John Schanck, a Ph.D student at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, plenty of information still needs to be secure. He imagines a 20-year-old’s health data getting leaked — a childhood illness or a teenage abortion suddenly becomes a target for blackmail. Social security numbers are sensitive for a person’s entire lifetime. Names of CIA spies need to be kept secret, along with lots of classified military information.
Schanck even suspects that the NSA is using the technique. When Edward Snowden leaked secret information in 2013, it came to light that the NSA’s protocols allowed for storing encrypted communication because “they can’t judge at the time of interception if it’s going to be useful for law enforcement,” Schanck says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Quantum computers have been on cryptographers’ radars as a security threat for years. In theory, they can already shred through public key cryptography, a system that exchanges passwords between a sender and receiver to decrypt. RSA and elliptic curve cryptography—algorithms that are widely used for all types of data encryption online, including making that “s” in “https” possible—have been broken in tests using Shor’s algorithm. That algorithm is run on a quantum computer, says Mike Brown, CTO of ISARA, a Canada-based post-quantum cryptography company.
Luckily, the quantum computers available today sell for millions of dollars, keeping them mostly in the hands of large companies, research labs, and government offices. You can’t exactly buy a quantum computer at Best Buy. The only way to even get access to one, outside of a major tech company or research lab, is to buy time on IBM’s quantum computing cloud-based services or buy a quantum annealer from D-Wave to the tune of about $15 million.
But that doesn’t mean quantum computers won’t ever be a household item. “It is possible it takes another 20 or 30 years from today for someone to have a quantum computer and be able to decrypt messages in real time,” Schanck says. And getting your hands on encrypted data isn’t nearly as hard. Anyone with a wifi connection and some technical knowledge about the process can do it, as long as they’re able to be proximate to their target. It’s not just nation states who could get their hands on encrypted data: Someone could copy your data over the Starbucks wifi network.
Quantum computers will open a whole new world of scientific advancement. But the “dark side” of that tool is quantum computers’ ability to take an impossible problem and make it “trivial,” Brown says. Defending against quantum computers will require techniques that don’t exist yet. Securing data will require protection against quantum algorithms, or a system of public and private keys that erase themselves over time. This means that hackers would scrape data that would become useless in the future—because the keys necessary to access that information would have already self-destructed.
Still, some experts believe that multi-decade encryption is overkill. While information is being stored, waiting to be decrypted, the information contained within it will become obsolete. “There are actually very few long-term secrets in our society,” says computer security expert and cryptographer Bruce Schneier. “We don’t have 30-year secrets. There are no military secrets from the 1970s that are secret today.” Others suggest that quantum computers are a far-off dream. No one is sure when they will become common fixtures in homes and businesses, let alone tools for blackhat hackers—so why panic? Especially considering the patience required for a perpetrator to pull off a decades-long con.
Maybe that’s comforting to some. While my social security number is probably being bought and sold somewhere on the dark web, I’m crossing my fingers that my encrypted hospital records and ID cards aren’t also being scraped.
I don’t know want to find out how my data could be leveraged against me in the age of the quantum internet—but something tells me that the culprits will have their eyes on a self-driving spacecraft, rather than a fancy car. For all I know, those hackers are probably infants right now, swiping mashed peas on their first iPhones.
Topics Backchannel quantum encryption data hacking Andy Greenberg Angela Watercutter Lauren Smiley Brandi Collins-Dexter Steven Levy Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Will Artificial Intelligence Enhance or Hack Humanity? | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Nicholas Thompson Business Will Artificial Intelligence Enhance or Hack Humanity? Fei-Fei Li, codirector of Stanford's Center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Ethics Human-computer interaction End User Research This week, I interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, the author of three best-selling books about the history and future of our species, and Fei-Fei Li , one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence. The event was hosted by the Stanford Center for Ethics and Society , the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence , and the Stanford Humanities Center.
A transcript of the event follows, and a video is posted below.
Nicholas Thompson: Thank you, Stanford, for inviting us all here. I want this conversation to have three parts: First, lay out where we are; then talk about some of the choices we have to make now; and last, talk about some advice for all the wonderful people in the hall.
Yuval, the last time we talked , you said many, many brilliant things, but one that stuck out was a line where you said, “We are not just in a technological crisis. We are in a philosophical crisis.” So explain what you meant and explain how it ties to AI. Let's get going with a note of existential angst.
Yuval Noah Harari : Yeah, so I think what's happening now is that the philosophical framework of the modern world that was established in the 17th and 18th century, around ideas like human agency and individual free will, are being challenged like never before. Not by philosophical ideas, but by practical technologies. And we see more and more questions, which used to be the bread and butter of the philosophy department being moved to the engineering department. And that's scary, partly because unlike philosophers who are extremely patient people, they can discuss something for thousands of years without reaching any agreement and they're fine with that, the engineers won't wait. And even if the engineers are willing to wait, the investors behind the engineers won't wait. So it means that we don't have a lot of time. And in order to encapsulate what the crisis is,maybe I can try and formulate an equation to explain what's happening. And the equation is: B times C times D equals HH, which means biological knowledge multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans. And the AI revolution or crisis is not just AI, it's also biology. It's biotech. There is a lot of hype now around AI and computers, but that is just half the story. The other half is the biological knowledge coming from brain science and biology. And once you link that to AI, what you get is the ability to hack humans. And maybe I’ll explain what it means, the ability to hack humans: to create an algorithm that understands me better than I understand myself, and can therefore manipulate me, enhance me, or replace me. And this is something that our philosophical baggage and all our belief in, you know, human agency and free will, and the customer is always right, and the voter knows best, it just falls apart once you have this kind of ability.
NT: Once you have this kind of ability, and it's used to manipulate or replace you, not if it's used to enhance you? YNH: Also when it’s used to enhance you, the question is, who decides what is a good enhancement and what is a bad enhancement? So our immediately, our immediate fallback position is to fall back on the traditional humanist ideas, that the customer is always right, the customers will choose the enhancement. Or the voter is always right, the voters will vote, there will be a political decision about the enhancement. Or if it feels good, do it. We’ll just follow our heart, we’ll just listen to ourselves. None of this works when there is a technology to hack humans on a large scale. You can't trust your feelings, or the voters, or the customers on that. The easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe in free will, because they think they cannot be manipulated. So how do you how do you decide what to enhance if, and this is a very deep ethical and philosophical question—again that philosophers have been debating for thousands of years—what is good? What are the good qualities we need to enhance? So if you can't trust the customer, if you can't trust the voter, if you can't trust your feelings, who do you trust? What do you go by? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: All right, Fei-Fei, you have a PhD, you have a CS degree, you’re a professor at Stanford, does B times C times D equals HH? Is Yuval’s theory the right way to look at where we're headed? Fei-Fei Li: Wow. What a beginning! Thank you, Yuval. One of the things—I've been reading Yuval’s books for the past couple of years and talking to you—and I'm very envious of philosophers now because they can propose questions but they don't have to answer them. Now as an engineer and scientist, I feel like we have to now solve the crisis.
And I'm very thankful that Yuval, among other people, have opened up this really important question for us. When you said the AI crisis, I was sitting there thinking, this is a field I loved and feel passionate about and researched for 20 years, and that was just a scientific curiosity of a young scientist entering PhD in AI. What happened that 20 years later it has become a crisis? And it actually speaks of the evolution of AI that, that got me where I am today and got my colleagues at Stanford where we are today with Human-Centered AI, is that this is a transformative technology. It's a nascent technology. It's still a budding science compared to physics, chemistry, biology, but with the power of data, computing, and the kind of diverse impact AI is making, it is, like you said, is touching human lives and business in broad and deep ways. And responding to those kinds of questions and crisis that's facing humanity, I think one of the proposed solutions, that Stanford is making an effort about is, can we reframe the education, the research and the dialog of AI and technology in general in a human-centered way ? We're not necessarily going to find a solution today, but can we involve the humanists, the philosophers, the historians, the political scientists, the economists, the ethicists, the legal scholars, the neuroscientists, the psychologists, and many more other disciplines into the study and development of AI in the next chapter, in the next phase.
"Maybe I can try and formulate an equation to explain what's happening. And the equation is: B times C times D equals HH, which means biological knowledge multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans." Yuval Noah Harari NT: Don't be so certain we're not going to get an answer today. I've got two of the smartest people in the world glued to their chairs, and I've got 72 more minutes. So let's let's give it a shot.
FL: He said we have thousands of years! NT: Let me go a little bit further on Yuval’s opening statement. There are a lot of crises about AI that people talk about, right? They talk about AI becoming conscious and what will that mean. They talk about job displacement ; they talk about biases.
And Yuval has very clearly laid out what he thinks is the most important one, which is the combination of biology plus computing plus data leading to hacking. Is that specific concern what people who are thinking about AI should be focused on? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: Absolutely. So any technology humanity has created starting with fire is a double-edged sword. So it can bring improvements to life, to work, and to society, but it can bring the perils, and AI has the perils. You know, I wake up every day worried about the diversity, inclusion issue in AI.
We worry about fairness or the lack of fairness, privacy, the labor market. So absolutely we need to be concerned and because of that, we need to expand the research, and the development of policies and the dialog of AI beyond just the codes and the products into these human rooms, into the societal issues. So I absolutely agree with you on that, that this is the moment to open the dialog, to open the research in those issues.
NT: Okay.
YNH: Even though I will just say that again, part of my fear is the dialog. I don't fear AI experts talking with philosophers, I'm fine with that. Historians, good. Literary critics, wonderful. I fear the moment you start talking with biologists. That's my biggest fear. When you and the biologists realize, “Hey, we actually have a common language. And we can do things together.” And that's when the really scary things, I think… FL: Can you elaborate on what is scaring you? That we talk to biologists? YNH: That's the moment when you can really hack human beings, not by collecting data about our search words or our purchasing habits, or where do we go about town, but you can actually start peering inside, and collect data directly from our hearts and from our brains.
FL: Okay, can I be specific? First of all the birth of AI is AI scientists talking to biologists, specifically neuroscientists , right. The birth of AI is very much inspired by what the brain does. Fast forward to 60 years later, today's AI is making great improvements in healthcare.
There's a lot of data from our physiology and pathology being collected and using machine learning to help us. But I feel like you're talking about something else.
YNH: That's part of it. I mean, if there wasn't a great promise in the technology, there would also be no danger because nobody would go along that path. I mean, obviously, there are enormously beneficial things that AI can do for us, especially when it is linked with biology. We are about to get the best healthcare in the world, in history, and the cheapest and available for billions of people by their smartphones. And this is why it is almost impossible to resist the temptation. And with all the issues of privacy , if you have a big battle between privacy and health, health is likely to win hands down. So I fully agree with that. And you know, my job as a historian, as a philosopher, as a social critic is to point out the dangers in that. Because, especially in Silicon Valley, people are very much familiar with the advantages, but they don't like to think so much about the dangers. And the big danger is what happens when you can hack the brain and that can serve not just your healthcare provider, that can serve so many things for a crazy dictator.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: Let's focus on what it means to hack the brain. Right now, in some ways my brain is hacked, right? There's an allure of this device, it wants me to check it constantly, like my brain has been a little bit hacked. Yours hasn't because you meditate two hours a day, but mine has and probably most of these people have. But what exactly is the future brain hacking going to be that it isn't today? YNH: Much more of the same, but on a much larger scale. I mean, the point when, for example, more and more of your personal decisions in life are being outsourced to an algorithm that is just so much better than you. So you know, you have we have two distinct dystopias that kind of mesh together. We have the dystopia of surveillance capitalism, in which there is no like Big Brother dictator, but more and more of your decisions are being made by an algorithm. And it's not just decisions about what to eat or where to shop, but decisions like where to work and where to study, and whom to date and whom to marry and whom to vote for. It's the same logic. And I would be curious to hear if you think that there is anything in humans which is by definition unhackable. That we can't reach a point when the algorithm can make that decision better than me. So that's one line of dystopia, which is a bit more familiar in this part of the world. And then you have the full fledged dystopia of a totalitarian regime based on a total surveillance system. Something like the totalitarian regimes that we have seen in the 20th century, but augmented with biometric sensors and the ability to basically track each and every individual 24 hours a day.
And you know, which in the days of Stalin or Hitler was absolutely impossible because they didn't have the technology, but maybe might be possible in 20 years, 30 years. So, we can choose which dystopia to discuss but they are very close...
NT: Let's choose the liberal democracy dystopia. Fei-Fei, do you want to answer Yuval’s specific question, which is, Is there something in Dystopia A, liberal democracy dystopia, is there something endemic to humans that cannot be hacked? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: So when you asked me that question, just two minutes ago, the first word that came to my mind is Love. Is love hackable? YNH: Ask Tinder, I don’t know.
FL: Dating! YNH: That's a defense… FL: Dating is not the entirety of love, I hope.
YNH: But the question is, which kind of love are you referring to? if you're referring to Greek philosophical love or the loving kindness of Buddhism, that's one question, which I think is much more complicated. If you are referring to the biological, mammalian courtship rituals, then I think yes. I mean, why not? Why is it different from anything else that is happening in the body? FL: But humans are humans because we're—there's some part of us that is beyond the mammalian courtship, right? Is that part hackable? YNH: So that's the question. I mean, you know, in most science fiction books and movies, they give your answer. When the extraterrestrial evil robots are about to conquer planet Earth, and nothing can resist them, resistance is futile, at the very last moment, humans win because the robots don’t understand love.
FL: The last moment is one heroic white dude that saves us. But okay so the two dystopias, I do not have answers to the two dystopias. But what I want to keep saying is, this is precisely why this is the moment that we need to seek for solutions. This is precisely why this is the moment that we believe the new chapter of AI needs to be written by cross-pollinating efforts from humanists, social scientists, to business leaders, to civil society, to governments, to come at the same table to have that multilateral and cooperative conversation. I think you really bring out the urgency and the importance and the scale of this potential crisis. But I think, in the face of that, we need to act.
"The easiest people to manipulate are the people who believe in free will, because they think they cannot be manipulated." Yuval Noah Harari YNH: Yeah, and I agree that we need cooperation that we need much closer cooperation between engineers and philosophers or engineers and historians. And also from a philosophical perspective, I think there is something wonderful about engineers, philosophically— FL: Thank you! YNH: — that they really cut the bullshit. I mean, philosophers can talk and talk, you know, in cloudy and flowery metaphors, and then the engineers can really focus the question. Like I just had a discussion the other day with an engineer from Google about this, and he said, “Okay, I know how to maximize people's time on the website. If somebody comes to me and tells me, ‘Look, your job is to maximize time on this application.’ I know how to do it because I know how to measure it. But if somebody comes along and tells me, ‘Well, you need to maximize human flourishing, or you need to maximize universal love.’ I don't know what it means.” So the engineers go back to the philosophers and ask them, “What do you actually mean?” Which, you know, a lot of philosophical theories collapse around that, because they can't really explain that—and we need this kind of collaboration.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: Yeah. We need an equation for that.
NT: But Yuval, is Fei-Fei right? If we can't explain and we can't code love, can artificial intelligence ever recreate it, or is it something intrinsic to humans that the machines will never emulate? YNH: I don't think that machines will feel love. But you don't necessarily need to feel it, in order to be able to hack it, to monitor it, to predict it, to manipulate it. So machines don’t like to play Candy Crush, but they can still— NT: So you think this device, in some future where it's infinitely more powerful than it is right now, it could make me fall in love with somebody in the audience? YNH: That goes to the question of consciousness and mind, and I don't think that we have the understanding of what consciousness is to answer the question whether a non-organic consciousness is possible or is not possible, I think we just don't know. But again, the bar for hacking humans is much lower. The machines don't need to have consciousness of their own in order to predict our choices and manipulate our choices. If you accept that something like love is in the end and biological process in the body, if you think that AI can provide us with wonderful healthcare, by being able to monitor and predict something like the flu, or something like cancer, what's the essential difference between flu and love? In the sense of is this biological, and this is something else, which is so separated from the biological reality of the body, that even if we have a machine that is capable of monitoring or predicting flu, it still lacks something essential in order to do the same thing with love.
FL: So I want to make two comments and this is where my engineering, you know, personally speaking, we’re making two very important assumptions in this part of the conversation. One is that AI is so omnipotent, that it's achieved to a state that it's beyond predicting anything physical, it's getting to the consciousness level, it’s getting to even the ultimate love level of capability. And I do want to make sure that we recognize that we're very, very, very far from that.
This technology is still very nascent. Part of the concern I have about today's AI is that super-hyping of its capability. So I'm not saying that that's not a valid question. But I think that part of this conversation is built upon that assumption that this technology has become that powerful and I don't even know how many decades we are from that. Second related assumption, I feel our conversation is being based on this that we're talking about the world or state of the world that only that powerful AI exists, or that small group of people who have produced the powerful AI and is intended to hack humans exists. But in fact, our human society is so complex, there's so many of us, right? I mean humanity in its history, have faced so much technology if we left it in the hands of a bad player alone, without any regulation, multinational collaboration, rules, laws, moral codes, that technology could have, maybe not hacked humans, but destroyed humans or hurt humans in massive ways. It has happened, but by and large, our society in a historical view is moving to a more civilized and controlled state. So I think it's important to look at that greater society and bring other players and people into this dialog. So we don't talk like there's only this omnipotent AI deciding it's gonna hack everything to the end. And that brings me to your topic that in addition to hacking humans at that level that you're talking about, there are some very immediate concerns already: diversity, privacy, labor, legal changes, you know, international geopolitics. And I think it's, it's critical to to tackle those now.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: I love talking to AI researchers, because five years ago, all the AI researchers were saying it's much more powerful than you think.
And now they're like, it's not as powerful as you think.
Alright, so I'll just let me ask— FL: It’s because five years ago, you had no idea what AI is, now you're extrapolating too much.
NT: I didn't say it was wrong. I just said it was the thing. I want to go into what you just said. But before we do that, I want to take one question here from the audience, because once we move into the second section we’ll be able to answer it. So the question is for Yuval, How can we avoid the formation of AI powered digital dictatorships? So how do we avoid dystopia number two, let's enter that. And then let's go, Fei-Fei, into what we can do right now, not what we can do in the future.
YNH: The key issue is how to regulate the ownership of data.
Because we won't stop research in biology, and we won't stop researching computer science and AI. So from the three components of biological knowledge, computing power and data, I think data is is the easiest, and it's also very difficult, but still the easiest kind to regulate, to protect. Let’s place some protections there. And there are efforts now being made.
And they are not just political efforts, but you know, also philosophical efforts to really conceptualize, What does it mean to own data or to regulate the ownership of data? Because we have a fairly good understanding of what it means to own land. We had thousands of years of experience with that. We have a very poor understanding of what it what it actually means to own data and how to regulate it. But this is the very important front that we need to focus on in order to prevent the worst dystopian outcomes.
And I agree that AI is not nearly as powerful as some people imagine. But this is why I think we need to place the bar low, to reach a critical threshold. We don't need the AI to know us perfectly, which will never happen. We just need the AI to know us better than we know ourselves, which is not so difficult because most people don't know themselves very well and often make huge mistakes in critical decisions. So whether it's finance or career or love life, to have this shifting authority from humans to algorithm, they can still be terrible. But as long as they are a bit less terrible than us, the authority will shift to them.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: In your book, you tell a very illuminating story about your own self and your own coming to terms with who you are and how you could be manipulated. Will you tell that story here about coming to terms with your sexuality and the story you told about Coca-Cola in your book? Because I think that will make it clear what you mean here very well.
YNH: Yes. So I I said, I only realized that I was gay when I was 21. And I look back at the time and I was I don't know 15, 17 and it should have been so obvious. It's not like I’m a stranger. I'm with myself 24 hours a day. And I just don't notice any of like the screaming signs that are saying, “You are gay.” And I don't know how, but the fact is, I missed it. Now in AI, even a very stupid AI today, will not miss it.
FL: I’m not so sure! YNH: So imagine, this is not like a science fiction scenario of a century from now, this can happen today that you can write all kinds of algorithms that, you know, they're not perfect, but they are still better, say, than the average teenager. And what does it mean to live in a world in which you learn about something so important about yourself from an algorithm? What does it mean, what happens if the algorithm doesn't share the information with you, but it shares the information with advertisers? Or with governments? So if you want to, and I think we should, go down from the cloud, the heights, of you know, the extreme scenarios, to the practicalities of day-to-day life. This is a good example, because this is already happening.
NT: Well, let's take the elevator down to the more conceptual level. Let's talk about what we can do today, as we think about the risks of AI, the benefits of AI, and tell us you know, sort of your your punch list of what you think the most important things we should be thinking about with AI are.
FL: Oh boy, there's so many things we could do today. And I cannot agree more with Yuval, that this is such an important topic. Again, I'm gonna try to speak about all the efforts that have been made at Stanford because I think this is a good representation of what we believed are so many efforts we can do. So in human-centered AI, in which this is the overall theme, we believe that the next chapter of AI should be human-centered, we believe in three major principles. One principle is to invest in the next generation of AI technology that reflects more of the kind of human intelligence we would like. I was just thinking about your comment about as dependence on data and how the policy and governance of data should emerge in order to regulate and govern the AI impact. Well, we should be developing technology that can explain AI, we call it explainable AI, or AI interpretability studies; we should be focusing on technology that has a more nuanced understanding of human intelligence. We should be investing in the development of less data-dependent AI technology, that will take into considerations of intuition, knowledge, creativity and other forms of human intelligence. So that kind of human intelligence inspired AI is one of our principles.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The second principle is to, again, welcome in the kind of multidisciplinary study of AI. Cross-pollinating with economics, with ethics, with law, with philosophy, with history, cognitive science and so on. Because there is so much more we need to understand in terms of a social, human, anthropological, ethical impact. And\ we cannot possibly do this alone as technologists. Some of us shouldn't even be doing this. It’s the ethicists, philosophers who should participate and work with us on these issues. So that's the second principle. And within this, we work with policymakers. We convene the kind of dialogs of multilateral stakeholders.
Then the third, last but not least, I think, Nick, you said that at the very beginning of this conversation, that we need to promote the human-enhancing and collaborative and argumentative aspect of this technology. You have a point. Even there, it can become manipulative. But we need to start with that sense of alertness, understanding, but still promote the kind of benevolent application and design of this technology. At least, these are the three principles that Stanford’s Human-centered AI Institute is based on. And I just feel very proud, within the short few months since the birth of this institute, there are more than 200 faculty involved on this campus in this kind of research, dialog, study, education, and that number is still growing.
NT: Of those three principles, let's start digging into them. So let's go to number one, explainability, because this is a really interesting debate in artificial intelligence. So there's some practitioners who say you should have algorithms that can explain what they did and the choices they made. Sounds eminently sensible. But how do you do that? I make all kinds of decisions that I can't entirely explain. Like, why did I hire this person, not that person? I can tell a story about why I did it. But I don't know for sure. If we don't know ourselves well enough to always be able to truthfully and fully explain what we did, how can we expect a computer, using AI, to do that? And if we demand that here in the West, then there are other parts of the world that don't demand that who may be able to move faster. So why don't I ask you the first part of that question, and Yuval all the second part of that question. So the first part is, can we actually get explainability if it's super hard even within ourselves? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: Well, it's pretty hard for me to multiply two digits, but, you know, computers can do that. So the fact that something is hard for humans doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get the machines to do it. Especially, you know, after all these algorithms are based on very simple mathematical logic. Granted, we're dealing with neural networks these days that have millions of nodes and billions of connections. So explainability is actually tough. It's ongoing research. But I think this is such fertile ground. And it's so critical when it comes to healthcare decisions, financial decisions, legal decisions. There's so many scenarios where this technology can be potentially positively useful, but with that kind of explainable capability, so we've got to try and I'm pretty confident with a lot of smart minds out there, this is a crackable thing.
On top of that, I think you have a point that if we have technology that can explain the decision-making process of algorithms, it makes it harder for it to manipulate and cheat. Right? It's a technical solution, not the entirety of the solution, that will contribute to the clarification of what this technology is doing.
YNH: But because, presumably, the AI makes decisions in a radically different way than humans, then even if the AI explains its logic, the fear is it will make absolutely no sense to most humans. Most humans, when they are asked to explain a decision, they tell a story in a narrative form, which may or may not reflect what is actually happening within them. In many cases, it doesn't reflect, it's just a made up rationalization and not the real thing. Now an AI could be much different than a human in telling me, like I applied to the bank for loans. And the bank says no. And I asked why not? And the bank says okay, we will ask our AI. And the AI gives this extremely long statistical analysis based not on one or two salient feature of my life, but on 2,517 different data points, which it took into account and gave different weights. And why did you give this this weight? And why did you give... Oh, there is another book about that. And most of the data points to a human would seem completely irrelevant. You applied for a loan on Monday, and not on Wednesday, and the AI discovered that for whatever reason, it's after the weekend, whatever, people who apply for loans on a Monday are 0.075 percent less likely to repay the loan. So it goes into into the equation. And I get this book of the real explanation. And finally, I get a real explanation. It's not like sitting with a human banker that just bullshits me.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: So are you rooting for AI? Are you saying AI is good in this case? YNH: In many cases, yes. I mean, I think in many cases, it's two sides of the coin. I think that in many ways, the AI in this scenario will be an improvement over the human banker. Because for example, you can really know what the decision is based on presumably, right, but it's based on something that I as a human being just cannot grasp. I just don't—I know how to deal with simple narrative stories. I didn't give you a loan because you're gay. That's not good. Or because you didn't repay any of your previous loans. Okay, I can understand that. But my mind doesn't know what to do with the real explanation that the AI will give, which is just this crazy statistical thing … "Part of the concern I have about today's AI is that super-hyping of its capability. Part of this conversation is built upon that assumption that this technology has become that powerful and I don't even know how many decades we are from that." Fei-Fei Li FL: So there's two layers to your comment. One is how do you trust and be able to comprehend AI’s explanation? Second is actually can AI be used to make humans more trustful or be more trustworthy as humans. The first point, I agree with you, if AI gives you 2,000 dimensions of potential features with probability, it's not understandable, but the entire history of science in human civilization is to be able to communicate the results of science in better and better ways. Right? Like I just had my annual physical and a whole bunch of numbers came to my cell phone. And, well, first of all my doctors, the experts, can help me to explain these numbers. Now even Wikipedia can help me to explain some of these numbers, but the technological improvements of explaining these will improve. It's our failure as a technologists if we just throw 200 or 2,000 dimensions of probability numbers at you.
YNH: But this is the explanation. And I think that the point you raised is very important. But I see it differently. I think science is getting worse and worse in explaining its theories and findings to the general public, which is the reason for things like doubting climate change, and so forth. And it's not really even the fault of the scientists, because the science is just getting more and more complicated. And reality is extremely complicated. And the human mind wasn't adapted to understanding the dynamics of climate change, or the real reasons for refusing to give somebody a loan. But that's the point when you have an — and let's put aside the whole question of manipulation and how can I trust. Let's assume the AI is benign. And let's assume there are no hidden biases and everything is ok. But still, I can't understand.
FL: But that's why people like Nick, the storyteller, has to explain… What I'm saying, You're right. It's very complex.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: I’m going to lose my job to a computer like next week, but I'm happy to have your confidence with me! FL: But that's the job of the society collectively to explain the complex science. I'm not saying we're doing a great job at all. But I'm saying there is hope if we try.
YNH: But my fear is that we just really can't do it. Because the human mind is not built for dealing with these kinds of explanations and technologies. And it's true for, I mean, it's true for the individual customer who goes to the bank and the bank refused to give them a loan. And it can even be on the level, I mean, how many people today on earth understand the financial system? How many presidents and prime ministers understand the financial system? NT: In this country, it's zero.
YNH: So what does it mean to live in a society where the people who are supposed to be running the business… And again, it's not the fault of a particular politician, it's just the financial system has become so complicated. And I don't think that economists are trying on purpose to hide something from the general public. It's just extremely complicated. You have some of the wisest people in the world, going to the finance industry, and creating these enormously complex models and tools, which objectively you just can't explain to most people, unless first of all, they study economics and mathematics for 10 years or whatever. So I think this is a real crisis. And this is again, this is part of the philosophical crisis we started with. And the undermining of human agency. That's part of what's happening, that we have these extremely intelligent tools that are able to make perhaps better decisions about our healthcare, about our financial system, but we can't understand what they are doing and why they're doing it. And this undermines our autonomy and our authority. And we don't know as a society how to deal with that.
NT: Ideally, Fei-Fei’s institute will help that. But before we leave this topic, I want to move to a very closely related question, which I think is one of the most interesting, which is the question of bias in algorithms, which is something you've spoken eloquently about. And let's start with the financial system. So you can imagine an algorithm used by a bank to determine whether somebody should get a loan. And you can imagine training it on historical data and historical data is racist. And we don't want that. So let's figure out how to make sure the data isn't racist, and that it gives loans to people regardless of race. And we probably all, everybody in this room agrees that that is a good outcome.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But let's say that analyzing the historical data suggests that women are more likely to repay their loans than men. Do we strip that out? Or do we allow that to stay in? If you allow it to stay in, you get a slightly more efficient financial system? If you strip it out, you have a little more equality before between men and women. How do you make decisions about what biases you want to strip and which ones are okay to keep? FL: Yeah, that's an excellent question, Nick. I mean, I'm not going to have the answers personally, but I think you touch on the really important question, which is, first of all, machine learning system bias is a real thing. You know, like you said, it starts with data, it probably starts with the very moment we're collecting data and the type of data we’re collecting all the way through the whole pipeline, and then all the way to the application. But biases come in very complex ways. At Stanford, we have machine learning scientists studying the technical solutions of bias, like, you know, de-biasing data or normalizing certain decision making. But we also have humanists debating about what is bias, what is fairness, when is bias good, when is bias bad? So I think you just opened up a perfect topic for research and debate and conversation in this in this topic. And I also want to point out that you've already used a very closely related example, a machine learning algorithm has a potential to actually expose bias. Right? You know, one of my favorite studies was a paper a couple of years ago analyzing Hollywood movies and using a machine learning face-recognition algorithm, which is a very controversial technology these days , to recognize Hollywood systematically gives more screen time to male actors than female actors. No human being can sit there and count all the frames of faces and whether there is gender bias and this is a perfect example of using machine learning to expose. So in general there's a rich set of issues we should study and again, bring the humanists, bring the ethicist, bring the legal scholars, bring the gender study experts.
NT: Agreed. Though, standing up for humans, I knew Hollywood was sexist even before that paper. but yes, agreed.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: You're a smart human.
NT: Yuval, on that question of the loans, do you strip out the racist data, you strip out the gender data? What biases you get rid of what biases do you not? YNH: I don't think there is a one size fits all. I mean, it's a question we, again, we need this day-to-day collaboration between engineers and ethicists and psychologists and political scientists NT: But not biologists, right? YNH: And increasingly, also biologists! And, you know, it goes back to the question, what should we do? So, we should teach ethics to coders as part of the curriculum, that the people today in the world that most need a background in ethics, are the people in the computer science departments. So it should be an integral part of the curriculum. And also in the big corporations, which are designing these tools, should be embedded within the teams, people with backgrounds in things like ethics, like politics, that they always think in terms of what biases might we inadvertently be building into our system? What could be the cultural or political implications of what we're building? It shouldn't be a kind of afterthought that you create this neat technical gadget, it goes into the world, something bad happens, and then you start thinking, “Oh, we didn't see this one coming. What do we do now?” From the very beginning, it should be clear that this is part of the process.
FL: I do want to give a shout out to Rob Reich, who introduced this whole event. He and my colleagues, Mehran Sahami and a few other Stanford professors have opened this course called Computers, Ethics and Public Policy. This is exactly the kind of class that’s needed. I think this quarter the offering has more than 300 students signed up for that.
"We should be focusing on technology that has a more nuanced understanding of human intelligence." Fei-Fei Li NT: Fantastic. I wish that course has existed when I was a student here. Let me ask an excellent question from the audience that ties into this. How do you reconcile the inherent trade-offs between explainability and efficacy and accuracy of algorithms? FL: Great question. This question seems to be assuming if you can explain that you're less good or less accurate? NT: Well, you can imagine that if you require explainability, you lose some level of efficiency, you're adding a little bit of complexity to the algorithm.
FL: So, okay, first of all, I don't necessarily believe in that. There's no mathematical logic to this assumption. Second, let's assume there is a possibility that an explainable algorithm suffers in efficiency. I think this is a societal decision we have to make. You know, when we put the seatbelt in our car driving, that's a little bit of an efficiency loss because I have to do the seat belt movement instead of just hopping in and driving. But as a society, we decided we can afford that loss of efficiency because we care more about human safety. So I think AI is the same kind of technology. As we make these kind of decisions going forward in our solutions, in our products, we have to balance human well-being and societal well-being with efficiency.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: So Yuval, let me ask you the global consequences of this. This is something that a number of people have asked about in different ways and we've touched on but we haven't hit head on. There are two countries, imagine you have Country A and you have Country B. Country A says all of you AI engineers, you have to make it explainable. You have to take ethics classes, you have to really think about the consequences and what you're doing. You got to have dinner with biologists, you have to think about love, and you have to like read John Locke, that's Country A. Country B says, just go build some stuff, right? These two countries at some point are going to come in conflict, and I'm going to guess that Country B’s technology might be ahead of Country A’s. Is that a concern? YNH: Yeah, that's always the concern with arms races, which become a race to the bottom in the name of efficiency and domination. I mean, what is extremely problematic or dangerous about the situation now with AI, is that more and more countries are waking up to the realization that this could be the technology of domination in the 21st century. So you're not talking about just any economic competition between the different textile industries or even between different oil industries, like one country decides to we don't care about the environment at all, we’ll just go full gas ahead and the other countries are much more environmentally aware. The situation with AI is potentially much worse, because it could be really the technology of domination in the 21st century. And those left behind could be dominated, exploited, conquered by those who forge ahead. So nobody wants to stay behind. And I think the only way to prevent this kind of catastrophic arms race to the bottom is greater global cooperation around AI. Now, this sounds utopian because we are now moving in exactly the opposite direction of more and more rivalry and competition. But this is part of, I think, of our job, like with the nuclear arms race, to make people in different countries realize that this is an arms race, that whoever wins, humanity loses. And it's the same with AI. If AI becomes an arms race, then this is extremely bad news for all humans. And it's easy for, say, people in the US to say we are the good guys in this race, you should be cheering for us. But this is becoming more and more difficult in a situation when the motto of the day is America First. How can we trust the USA to be the leader in AI technology, if ultimately it will serve only American interests and American economic and political domination? So I think, most people when they think arms race in AI, they think USA versus China, but there are almost 200 other countries in the world. And most of them are far, far behind. And when they look at what is happening, they are increasingly terrified. And for a very good reason.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: The historical example you've made is a little unsettling. Because, if I heard your answer correctly, it's that we need global cooperation. And if we don't, we're going to need an arms race. In the actual nuclear arms race, we tried for global cooperation from, I don't know, roughly 1945 to 1950. And then we gave up and then we said, We're going full throttle in the United States. And then, Why did the Cold War end the way it did? Who knows but one argument would be that the United States and its relentless buildup of nuclear weapons helped to keep the peace until the Soviet Union collapsed. So if that is the parallel, then what might happen here is we’ll try for global cooperation and 2019, 2020, and 2021 and then we’ll be off in an arms race.
A, is that likely and B, if it is, would you say well, then the US needs to really move full throttle on AI because it will be better for the liberal democracies to have artificial intelligence than totalitarian states? YNH: Well, I'm afraid it is very likely that cooperation will break down and we will find ourselves in an extreme version of an arms race. And in a way it's worse than the nuclear arms race because with nukes, at least until today, countries developed them, but never use them. AI will be used all the time. It's not something you have on the shelf for some Doomsday war. It will be used all the time to create potentially total surveillance regimes and extreme totalitarian systems, in one way or the other. And so, from this perspective, I think the danger is far greater. You could say that the nuclear arms race actually saved democracy and the free market and, you know, rock and roll and Woodstock and then the hippies and they all owe a huge debt to nuclear weapons. Because if nuclear weapons weren't invented, there would have been a conventional arms race and conventional military buildup between the Soviet bloc and the American bloc. And that would have meant total mobilization of society. If the Soviets are having total mobilization, the only way the Americans can compete is to do the same.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Now what actually happened was that you had an extreme totalitarian mobilized society in the communist bloc. But thanks to nuclear weapons, you didn't have to do it in the United States or in Western Germany, or in France, because we relied on nukes. You don't need millions of conscripts in the army.
And with AI it is going to be just the opposite, that the technology will not only be developed, it will be used all the time. And that's a very scary scenario.
FL: Wait, can I just add one thing? I don't know history like you do, but you said AI is different from nuclear technology. I do want to point out, it is very different because at the same time as you're talking about these scarier situations, this technology has a wide international scientific collaboration that is being used to make transportation better, to improve healthcare, to improve education. And so it's a very interesting new time that we haven't seen before because while we have this kind of competition, we also have massive international scientific community collaboration on these benevolent uses and democratization of this technology. I just think it's important to see both sides of this.
YNH: You're absolutely right here. There are some, as I said, there's also enormous benefits to this technology.
FL: And in a in a globally collaborative way, especially between and among scientists.
YNH: The global aspect is is more complicated, because the question is, what happens if there is a huge gap in abilities between some countries and most of the world? Would we have a rerun of the 19th century Industrial Revolution when the few industrial powers conquer and dominate and exploit the entire world, both economically and politically? What’s to prevent that from repeating? So even in terms of, you know, without this scary war scenario, we might still find ourselves with global exploitation regime, in which the benefits, most of the benefits, go to a small number of countries at the expense of everybody else.
FL: So students in the audience will laugh at this but we are in a very different scientific research climate. The kind of globalization of technology and technique happens in a way that the 19th century, even the 20th century, never saw before. Any paper that is a basic science research paper in AI today or technical technique that is produced, let's say this week at Stanford, it's easily globally distributed through this thing called arXiv or GitHub repository or— Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg YNH: The information is out there. Yeah.
FL: The globalization of this scientific technology travels in a different way from the 19th and 20th century. I don't doubt there is confined development of this technology, maybe by regimes. But we do have to recognize that this global reach, the differences are pretty sharp now. And we might need to take that into consideration. That the scenario you're describing is harder, I’m not saying impossible, but harder to happen.
YNH: I'll just say that it's not just the scientific papers. Yes, the scientific papers are there. But if I live in Yemen, or in Nicaragua, or in Indonesia or in Gaza, yes, I can connect to the internet and download the paper. What will I do with that? I don't have the data, I don't have the infrastructure. I mean, you look at where the big corporations are coming from, that hold all the data of the world, they're basically coming from just two places. I mean, even Europe is not really in the competition. There is no European Google, or European Amazon, or European Baidu, of European Tencent. And if you look beyond Europe, you think about Central America, you think about most of Africa, the Middle East, much of Southeast Asia, it’s, yes, the basic scientific knowledge is out there, but this is just one of the components that go to creating something that can compete with Amazon or with Tencent, or with the abilities of governments like the US government or like the Chinese government. So I agree that the dissemination of information and basic scientific knowledge are in a completely different place than the 19th century.
NT: Let me ask you about that, because it's something three or four people have asked in the questions, which is, it seems like there could be a centralizing force of artificial intelligence that will make whoever has the data and the best computer more powerful and it could then accentuate income inequality, both within countries and within the world, right? You can imagine the countries you've just mentioned, the United States, China, Europe lagging behind, Canada somewhere behind, way ahead of Central America, it could accentuate global income inequality. A, do you think that's likely and B, how much does it worry you? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg YNH: As I said, it's very likely it's already happening. And it's extremely dangerous. Because the economic and political consequences could be catastrophic. We are talking about the potential collapse of entire economies and countries, countries that depend on cheap manual labor, and they just don't have the educational capital to compete in a world of AI. So what are these countries going to do? I mean, if, say, you shift back most production from, say, Honduras or Bangladesh to the USA and to Germany, because the human salaries are no longer part of the equation and it's cheaper to produce the shirt in California than in Honduras, so what will the people there do? And you can say, okay, but there will be many more jobs for software engineers. But we are not teaching the kids in Honduras to be software engineers. So maybe a few of them could somehow immigrate to the US. But most of them won’t and what will they do? And we, at present, we don't have the economic answers and the political answers to these questions.
FL: I think that's fair enough, I think Yuval definitely has laid out some of the critical pitfalls of this and, and that's why we need more people to be studying and thinking about this. One of the things we over and over noticed, even in this process of building the community of human-centered AI and also talking to people both internally and externally, is that there are opportunities for businesses around the world and governments around the world to think about their data and AI strategy. There are still many opportunities outside of the big players, in terms of companies and countries, to really come to the realization that it's an important moment for their country, for their region, for their business, to transform into this digital age. And I think when you talk about these potential dangers and lack of data in parts of the world that haven't really caught up with this digital transformation, the moment is now and we hope to, you know, raise that kind of awareness and encourage that kind of transformation.
YNH: Yeah, I think it's very urgent. I mean, what we are seeing at the moment is, on the one hand, what you could call some kind of data colonization, that the same model that we saw in the 19th century that you have the imperial hub, where they have the advanced technology, they grow the cotton in India or Egypt, they send the raw materials to Britain, they produce the shirts, the high tech industry of the 19th century in Manchester, and they send the shirts back to sell them in in India and outcompete the local producers. And we, in a way, might be beginning to see the same thing now with the data economy, that they harvest the data in places also like Brazil and Indonesia, but they don't process the data there. The data from Brazil and Indonesia, goes to California or goes to eastern China being processed there. They produce the wonderful new gadgets and technologies and sell them back as finished products to the provinces or to the colonies.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Now it's not a one-to-one. It's not the same, there are differences. But I think we need to keep this analogy in mind. And another thing that maybe we need to keep in mind in this respect, I think, is the reemergence of stone walls---originally my speciality was medieval military history. This is how I began my academic career with the Crusades and castles and knights and so forth. And now I'm doing all these cyborgs and AI stuff. But suddenly, there is something that I know from back then, the walls are coming back. I try to kind of look at what's happening here. I mean, we have virtual realities. We have 3G, AI and suddenly the hottest political issue is building a stone wall. Like the most low-tech thing you can imagine. And what is the significance of a stone wall in a world of interconnectivity and and all that? And it really frightens me that there is something very sinister there. The combination of data is flowing around everywhere so easily, but more and more countries and also my home country of Israel, it's the same thing. You have the, you know, the startup nation, and then the wall. And what does it mean this combination? NT: Fei-Fei, you want to answer that? FL: Maybe we can look at the next question! NT: You know what? Let's go to the next question, which is tied to that. And the next question is: you have the people here at Stanford who will help build these companies, who will either be furthering the process of data colonization, or reversing it or who will be building, you know, the efforts to create a virtual wall and world based on artificial intelligence are being created, or funded at least by a Stanford graduate. So you have all these students here in the room, how do you want them to be thinking about artificial intelligence? And what do you want them to learn? Let's, let's spend the last 10 minutes of this conversation talking about what everybody here should be doing.
FL: So if you're a computer science or engineering student, take Rob's class. If you're humanists take my class. And all of you read Yuval’s books.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: Are his books on your syllabus? FL: Not on mine. Sorry! I teach hardcore deep learning. His book doesn't have equations. But seriously, what I meant to say is that Stanford students, you have a great opportunity. We have a proud history of bringing this technology to life. Stanford was at the forefront of the birth of AI. In fact, our Professor John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence and came to Stanford in 1963 and started this nation's, one of the two oldest, AI labs in this country. And since then, Stanford's AI research has been at the forefront of every wave of AI changes. And in 2019 we're also at the forefront of starting the human-centered AI revolution or the writing of the new AI chapter. And we did all this for the past 60 years for you guys, for the people who come through the door and who will graduate and become practitioners, leaders, and part of the civil society and that's really what the bottom line is about. Human-centered AI needs to be written by the next generation of technologists who have taken classes like Rob's class, to think about the ethical implications, the human well being. And it's also going to be written by those potential future policymakers who came out of Stanford’s humanities studies and Business School, who are versed in the details of the technology, who understand the implications of this technology, and who have the capability to communicate with the technologists. That is, no matter how we agree and disagree, that's the bottom line, is that we need this kind of multilingual leaders and thinkers and practitioners. And that is what Stanford's Human-centered AI Institute is about.
NT: Yuval, how do you answer that question? YNH: On the individual level, I think it's important for every individual whether in Stanford, whether an engineer or not, to get to know yourself better, because you're now in a competition. It's the oldest advice in all the books in philosophies is know yourself. We've heard it from Socrates, from Confucius, from Buddha: get to know yourself. But there is a difference, which is that now you have competition. In the day of Socrates or Buddha, if you didn't make the effort, okay, so you missed on enlightenment. But still, the king wasn't competing with you. They didn't have the technology. Now you have competition. You're competing against these giant corporations and governments. If they get to know you better than you know yourself, the game is over. So you need to buy yourself some time and the first way to buy yourself some time is to get to know yourself better, and then they have more ground to cover. For engineers and students, I would say—I'll focus on it on engineers maybe—the two things that I would like to see coming out from the laboratories and and the engineering departments, is first, tools that inherently work better in a decentralized system than in a centralized system. I don't know how to do it. But I hope this is something that engineers can can work with. I heard that blockchain is like the big promise in in that area, I don't know. But whatever it is, part of when you start designing the tool, part of the specification of what this tool should be like, I would say, this tool should work better in a decentralized system than in a centralized system. That's the best defense of democracy.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: I don't want to cut you off, because I want you to get to the second thing. But how do you make a tool work better in a democracy? YNH: I'm not an engineer, I don't know.
NT: Okay. Go to part two. Someone in this room, figure that out, because it's very important.
YNH: And I can give you historical examples of tools that work better in this way or in that way. But I don't know how to translate it into present day technology.
NT: Go to part two because I got a few more questions from the audience.
YNH: Okay, so the other thing I would like to see coming is an AI sidekick that serves me and not some corporation or government. I mean, we can't stop the progress of this kind of technology, but I would like to see it serving me. So yes, it can hack me but it hacks me in order to protect me. Like my computer has an antivirus but by brain hasn't. It has a biological antivirus against the flu or whatever, but not against hackers and trolls and so forth. So, one project to work on is to create an AI sidekick, which I paid for, maybe a lot of money and it belongs to me, and it follows me and it monitors me and what I do in my interactions, but everything it learns, it learns in order to protect me from manipulation by other AIs, by other outside influencers. So this is something that I think with the present day technology, I would like to see more effort in in the direction.
FL: Not to get into technical terms, but I think you I think you would feel confident to know that the budding efforts in this kind of research is happening you know, trustworthy AI, explainable AI, security-motivated or aware AI. So I'm not saying we have the solution, but a lot of technologists around the world are thinking along that line and trying to make that happen.
YNH: It's not that I want an AI that belongs to Google or to the government that I can trust. I want an AI that I'm its master. It's serving me.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg NT: And it's powerful, it's more powerful than my AI because otherwise my AI could manipulate your AI.
YNH: It will have the inherent advantage of knowing me very well. So it might not be able to hack you. But because it follows me around and it has access to everything I do and so forth, it gives it an edge in this specific realm of just me. So this is a kind of counterbalance to the danger that the people— FL: But even that would have a lot of challenges in their society. Who is accountable, are you accountable for your actions or your sidekick? YNH: This is going to be a more and more difficult question that we will have to deal with.
NT: Alright Fei-Fei, let's go through a couple questions quickly. We often talk about top-down AI from the big companies, how should we design personal AI to help accelerate our lives and careers? The way I interpret that question is, so much of AI is being done at the big companies. If you want to have AI at a small company or personally, can you do that? FL: So well, first of all, one of the solutions is what Yuval just said.
NT: Probably those things were built by Facebook.
FL: So first of all, it's true, there is a lot of investment and effort and resource putting big companies in AI research and development, but it's not that all the AI is happening there. I want to say that academia continues to play a huge role in AI’s research and development, especially in the long term exploration of AI. And what is academia? Academia is a worldwide network of individual students and professors thinking very independently and creatively about different ideas. So from that point of view, it's a very grassroots kind of effort in AI research that continues to happen. And small businesses and independent research Institutes also have a role to play. There are a lot of publicly available data sets. It’s a global community that is very open about sharing and disseminating knowledge and technology. So yes, please, by all means, we want global participation in this.
NT: All right, here's my favorite question. This is from anonymous, unfortunately. If I am in eighth grade, do I still need to study? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg FL: As a mom, I will tell you yes. Go back to your homework.
NT:.
Alright Fei-Fei, What do you want Yuval’s next book to be about? FL: Wow, I need to think about that.
NT: Alright. Well, while you think about that, Yuval, what area of machine learning you want Fei-Fei to pursue next? FL: The sidekick project.
YNH: Yeah, I mean, just what I said. Can we create the kind of AI which can serve individual people, and not some kind of big network? I mean, is that even possible? Or is there something about the nature of AI, which inevitably will always lead back to some kind of network effect, and winner takes all and so forth.
FL: Ok, his next book is going to be a science fiction book between you and your sidekick.
NT: Alright, one last question for Yuval, because we've got the top voted question. Without the belief in free will, what gets you up in the morning? YNH: Without the belief in free will? I don't think that's the question … I mean, it’s very interesting, very central, it has been central in Western civilization because of some kind of basically theological mistake made thousands of years ago. But really it's a misunderstanding of the human condition.
The real question is, how do you liberate yourself from suffering? And one of the most important steps in that direction is to get to know yourself better. For me, the biggest problem was the belief in free will, is that it makes people incurious about themselves and about what is really happening inside themselves because they basically say, “I know everything. I know why I make decisions, this is my free will.” And they identify with whatever thought or emotion pops up in their mind because this is my free will. And this makes them very incurious about what is really happening inside and what is also the deep sources of the misery in their lives. And so this is what makes me wake up in the morning, to try and understand myself better to try and understand the human condition better. And free will is just irrelevant for that.
NT: And if we lose your sidekick and get you up in the morning. Fei-Fei, 75 minutes ago, you said we weren't gonna reach any conclusions Do you think we got somewhere? FL: Well, we opened the dialog between the humanist and the technologist and I want to see more of that.
NT: Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, Fei Fei. Thank you, Yuval. wonderful to be here.
15 months of fresh hell inside Facebook Are humans fit for space ? A study says maybe not The hunt for rocket boosters in Russia's far north Tips for getting the most out of Spotify Coding is for everyone—as long as you speak English 🎧 Things not sounding right? Check out our favorite wireless headphones , soundbars , and bluetooth speakers 📩 Want more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories Editor in Chief X LinkedIn Topics artificial intelligence machine learning Steven Levy Steven Levy Khari Johnson Will Knight Will Knight Will Knight Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Arielle Pardes Gear Everything Big Google Announced at I/O Today Jeff Chiu/AP Save this story Save Save this story Save In the past, Google's mission was to organize the world's information, making it possible to know the size of a great white shark or the capital of Belarus with a few keystrokes. These days, Google has greater ambitions. This much was clear at Google I/O , the company's annual developer conference, which kicked off this morning at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Executives presented their vision for the future of the company—one where its services work everywhere, for everyone, and for everything.
Google is doing this in ways both big and small. It’s trying to make the Google Assistant work more seamlessly in your life—so that, for example, you can simply say “Stop” to turn off the alarm on your smart speaker or ask it to do a few things without having to say “Hey Google” between every request. It's helping automate some of the inane tasks of online life, like filling out web forms, with Google Duplex.
It’s also drilling down on its mission to merge the digital world with the physical one. Want to understand the scale of that great white shark? Look it up on Google—then bring the shark to life before your eyes in augmented reality.
All of this came together in a keynote speech with CEO Sundar Pichai and other Google executives. Missed the show? You can watch the whole thing here , read a play-by-play on WIRED’s liveblog , or read on for the TL;DR.
Google For years, the price of a smartphone has steadily crept up, to the point where we now expect to spend $1,000 or more on a new one.
Not anymore. Google’s latest Pixel devices, the Pixel 3a and 3a Plus , pack all of the premium features at half the price. For $400, you get some of the Pixel’s best tricks—night sight in the camera, an adaptive battery, augmented reality built into Google Maps—plus a headphone jack! You won’t find bells and whistles like wireless charging or a 1440p display—but for all the money you’ll save, we don’t think you’ll notice the difference.
Read WIRED's review of the Pixel 3a here.
Both phones go on sale May 8.
Whether you opt for a new Pixel 3a or stick with your old Android phone, you’ll soon be able to do a whole lot more, thanks to the newest version of Android. The as yet unnamed Android Q comes with some cool updates, like a Smart Reply feature that works across all your messaging apps and a Live Caption tool that translates videos when the sound isn’t on. The key here, Google says, is that none of this data leaves your phone—the focus is on-device machine learning. You can more easily monitor your app permissions, and Google will prompt you to review which apps have access to data like your location. For families, new parental controls offer better oversight of kids’ screen time, and a new Focus Mode lets you neuter distracting apps like email and the news when you’re trying to be productive.
Android Q also offers a glimpse at what Google sees as the future of mobile technology: It’s built to support foldable phones, 5G connectivity, and Dark Mode. A beta version is now available on more than 21 Android devices, with the full thing rolling out later this year.
Google says Assistant can now deliver answers and respond to requests up to 10 times faster. During an onstage demo, Google showed how you can fluidly switch between tasks and toggle across apps without having to say “Hey Google” between requests. Assistant can also better understand the difference between requesting an action, like a command to “send an email to Jessica,” and dictating the message itself. This zippier Assistant comes to Pixel phones later this year.
A few other on-phone features: Personal References lets Google Assistant better understand what you mean when you say “What’s the weather like at Mom’s house” or “Show me pictures of my son.” And Driving Mode pulls up a personalized dashboard designed for when you’re in the car. Say “Hey Google, let’s drive” and it surfaces the things you’re most likely to need while driving—your favorite podcasts, the navigation screen—with voice controls to control everything hands-free. That feature will be available this summer on Android phones with the Google Assistant.
Remember Duplex , Google’s eerily humanlike bot that can make restaurant reservations and schedule appointments for you over the phone? Now it can help you on the web too. Let’s say you’re traveling to San Francisco and need to rent a car. Open the car rental website and Duplex automatically fills in all of the required fields—the dates of your trip, your time of arrival, and so on—without you entering anything. You can double-check that everything is right before booking. Definitely not creepy.
Last year, Google introduced a set of accessibility apps called Live Transcribe and Sound Amplifier , aimed at the 466 million people in the world who are deaf or hard of hearing. Those apps leveraged Google’s speech-to-text smarts to transcribe conversations in real time.
Now, Google has a few new tricks. An assistive chat feature called Live Relay gives people the option to “type” instead of talk on a phone call. Pichai suggested the feature could make phone calls easier for those whose speech can be difficult to understand—those who have suffered strokes, who are deaf, or who have ALS. To that end, Google is also building out a bigger data set of voices to train its technology, so that Google Assistant and other voice interfaces can better understand those who have nontypical speech patterns.
Photograph: Google Google’s new smart display, the Nest Hub Max , works like a command center for your smart home. It can control your Nest Thermostat or your smart lights. It has a camera, so you can use it to watch cooking tutorials on YouTube, and a microphone, so you can shout at Google Assistant to turn off the timer. (You can now use a hand-waving gesture for that too.) The camera and microphone also support video chat—but if having a camera-enabled device in your home freaks you out, there’s a physical toggle to turn them both off. Like Google’s other home devices, this one supports multiple users.
Voice Match recognizes each person in your household by the sound of their voice, and the new Face Match tells them apart through the camera. It ships this summer for $229; the older Nest Hub (née Google Home Hub) is now $129.
Like everyone else in Silicon Valley, Google is getting serious about your privacy. At least, that’s what it wants you to think. Today’s presentation included more than a few mentions of Google’s commitment to privacy and some features to let you better control it. You can now enable Incognito Mode in Google Maps, so that the places you search and navigate won’t be linked to your account; soon, you’ll be able to do the same in YouTube. All of your privacy and security settings have been moved to a more accessible place on your Google account, with the most relevant controls appearing first. And you can now choose to auto-delete your data after a certain number of months.
Why I love my teeny-tiny knockoff Nokia Donald Glover, Adidas, Nike, and the fight for cool The quietly lucrative business of donating human eggs Are we there yet? A reality check on self-driving cars The Battle of Winterfell: a tactical analysis 📱 Torn between the latest phones? Never fear—check out our iPhone buying guide and favorite Android phones 📩 Hungry for even more deep dives on your next favorite topic? Sign up for the Backchannel newsletter Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Senior Writer X Topics Google Sundar Pichai Simon Hill Eric Ravenscraft Jaina Grey Adrienne So Jaina Grey Adrienne So Brenda Stolyar Simon Hill WIRED COUPONS Dyson promo code Extra 20% off sitewide - Dyson promo code GoPro Promo Code GoPro Promo Code: save 15% on your next order Samsung Promo Code +30% Off with this Samsung promo code Dell Coupon Code American Express Dell Coupon Code: Score 10% off select purchases Best Buy Coupon Best Buy coupon: Score $300 off select laptops VistaPrint promo code 15% off VistaPrint promo code when you sign up for emails Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"What Google's Fitbit Buy Means for the Future of Wearables | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Lauren Goode Gear What Google's Fitbit Buy Means for the Future of Wearables Illustration: Sam Whitney/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save When Fitbit launched its first product in 2009, the activity tracker didn’t even share data to a smartphone app. Instead, it wirelessly connected to a base station that had to be tethered to your computer. The clip-on itself displayed some information, but Fitbit’s website was where you’d find visualizations of your personal activity data. It was a kind of gateway drug to what would become our full-fledged, 2010’s, quantified-self addictions.
Over the years Fitbit would become known for its accessible hardware, but it was its software—its mobile app, social network, sleep tracking, subscription coaching—that made it stand out in an ocean of fitness wearables.
Now Fitbit has come full (activity) circle, and is being bought by one of the largest software companies in the world. Google says it is acquiring Fitbit to bring together “the best AI, software and hardware” in order to “spur innovation in wearables and build products to benefit even more people around the world.” It complements Google’s vision for “ambient computing,” as my WIRED colleague Louise Matsakis points out ; gives it more technological armor to compete with Apple Watch; and could help Google do deeper in the healthcare market.
Although Fitbit’s position in wearables has weakened over the past three years, it was for a long time the clear leader in activity-tracking wearables. It opened the floodgates for a decade of innovation around Bluetooth and Wi-Fi-connected wrist dongles, ones packed with sensors, displays, and batteries that got better each year. Things got weird in wearable land. Many wearable startups didn’t make it, while others, like Fitbit, got bought by Big Tech.
But now that giant tech corporations are fully invested in health trackers—Apple, Xiaomi, and Huawei held the lead in the global wearables market as of the second quarter of this year—the future remains uncertain for smaller players who are still trying to have an impact. And even though there’s a chance that Google’s plan to buy Fitbit may not pass muster with regulators, it is possible that there might even be some upside to having massive tech companies become the central repositories for our daily health stats.
Not long after Fitbit launched its first tracker in 2009, the private company Jawbone, which was already a successful maker of audio products, pivoted to wearables. The company’s first wristband, called the Jawbone Up , actually plugged into a phone’s 3.5mm headphone jack to sync the band’s data (back when phones actually had headphone jacks). A year after that, in 2012, Nike launched FuelBand , another polymer wristband that was supposed to motivate its wearers, in this case through a proprietary—and seemingly arbitrary—metric labeled “Fuel.” Others soon crowded the space. In late 2012, a company called Basis Science launched the B1 body monitor , which stood out because of its optical heart rate sensors, something the earlier wristbands didn’t include. A Bay Area startup called Lark shipped the Larklife band , which tracked both daytime activity and nighttime sleep and was so clunky that one of my editors at the time referred to it as a celibacy band. A Canadian company called Mio Global launched the Mio Link in early 2014, a device that was recognized as one of the first fitness trackers that transmitted continuous heart rate readings. A company called Misfit even had a low-powered wearable that ran on coin-cell batteries and never needed to be plugged in.
The fitness watch stalwarts, Garmin and Polar, start jamming even more sensors into their already capable watches, and beefing up their mobile applications. Microsoft shipped something called the Microsoft Band , and after that, the Microsoft Band 2.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft And then there was Pebble. After a remarkably successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012, Pebble started selling its smartwatch—this was a smartwatch, not a wristband—in 2013. In many ways, Pebble was emblematic of this era of wearables. It was scrappy (designed in a Palo Alto garage), it was agnostic (it played nice with both iPhone and Android), it had its own smartwatch operating system and app store (An app store! For a tiny watch!) Later versions of Pebble would also embrace health and fitness-tracking as a core feature set.
Pebble, of course, was eventually acquired by Fitbit, which makes Google’s purchase today a kind of “wearable turducken,” as CNET’s Scott Stein put it on Twitter.
Jawbone failed, badly. Basis Science sold itself to Intel. Misfit went to Fossil. Lark become a software company focused on chronic conditions. Mio Global was split into two businesses; the software still exists under a different name, while its hardware became a part of Lifesense. Microsoft never bothered to ship another Band.
Fitbit continued to develop new wrist wearables at a steady pace, evolving its product line from clip-on trackers to wristbands to a sport watch to smartwatches and back again to lightweight wristbands. Since its inception, Fitbit has sold nearly 100 million devices.
“Fitbit has really been an early success story,” says Jitesh Ubrani, research director at IDC. “They were early in the space, and they became the de facto standard. Consumers would look at other wearables and still call it a Fitbit.” Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft That wouldn’t always be the case, though, and analysts say two major factors contributed to this: The launch of the shiny, covetable Apple Watch in the spring of 2015, and the squeeze from Chinese electronics giants Xiaomi and Huawei. Xiaomi’s Mi Band, launched in 2014, cost just $15, and could do most of the things a $130 Fitbit could do.
On the day that Fitbit became a publicly-traded company, in June of 2015, Fitbit cofounder and CEO James Park sat for an interview on Marketplace that might be haunting him a bit today.
“Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, Tim Cook comes to you and says, ‘I’ll give you, James, $2 billion for your company.’ What do you say?” the reporter asks Park.
“Um,” Park says, and after a pause continues, “We’ve never really been focused on exits as a company. Really, the key to our success has been being really heads-down and focused on growing the business over the years.” Now that Google has scooped up Fitbit, the question becomes whether it’s good for the personal health-tracking market that few wearable startups still exist, and that the power and control over our data lies in the hands of a few giants: Apple, Google, Samsung, and prominent Chinese companies whose internal operations are even more opaque.
That’s what regulators will likely be asking as they examine the deal. In the immediate term, Google says it will “never sell personal information to anyone” and that “Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.” Fitbit, likewise, says the company never sells personal information, and that Fitbit health and wellness data won’t be used for Google ads. (Both companies declined requests for interviews.) By Louise Matsakis One of the potential negatives for consumers, says Ubrani, is that even if Google vows not to sell ads against your health data, it could find other creative ways to monetize whatever you’re sharing through your wrist.
“They have the data, so they can tie software and services together to try to sell more of their other services,” he says. That’s both the upside and downside of interoperability, of your software working across your phone, your laptop, your smartwatch, or potentially even your smart glasses—when it works, it works, but it’s another access point into your life for one of the tech giants.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Consumers may also be rightfully concerned about privacy and security. Facebook’s privacy missteps have been a “watershed moment” for these issues in the tech sector, Ubrani says, and privacy policies are being scrutinized more.
But ultimately, it’s these same large tech companies that should, in theory, have the resources to address privacy and security problems as they pertain to consumer health, too. “When it comes to my own data, I would trust a much larger company that has checks and balances in place and the resources to secure my data,” Ubrani says, “because they also have the best talent that’s out there.” Alan Antin, a senior director at Gartner Research who has long covered the wearables space (and worked for Polar many years before), doesn’t agree that dominant tech companies are better positioned to handle our wearables data responsibly, simply because they have the resources to do so.
“There will always be some skepticism—and this is going to be a big one for Google—around the fact that they have too much data on us,” Antin says. “There will always be some segment of people thinking, ‘Well, Google is going to send ads to me based on what I’m doing with these other devices.’ And this applies more broadly to other technology devices as well.” On the other hand, Google owning a successful wearable brand could allow it to compete more effectively with Apple.
So far, Google has tried to edge into Cupertino's wearable share by licensing out its WearOS software to fashion brands, or by acquiring part of Fossil’s business. Neither strategy has made a huge dent. But now that Google will control both the software and the hardware on whatever new wrist-computers bloom from this acquisition, it's likely that its Android-powered smartwatches are going to become that much smarter.
“Google’s been really great at using AI to predict what you’re searching for when you use its search engine, or to know, OK, at 5:30, I’m going to pick up my kid from school, and here’s how much time it’s going to take,” Antin says. “If you think about applying that intelligence to your fitness, your health, and your wellbeing, you might be able to create more utility.” “The tradeoff will be ‘I don’t want one company knowing all of this about me’ versus ‘I can see the value,’” he says.
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"Nintendo Switch Tips (2023): 21 Surprising Things It Can Do (OLED, Lite, Standard) | WIRED"
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Until then, you'll have to use what you have to play The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
While you're playing, it's time to brush up on how to use it. There are plenty of hidden features and little tricks that can help you get the most out of the console, and we've rounded up the best ones here.
We also have 11 Nintendo Switch Lite tips if you have the handheld-only version of the console.
Updated May 2023: We've added a couple of new tips and a section about Nintendo Switch Online.
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True to its name, the Switch will turn on your TV for you, or switch its input when you boot it up. Booting it up is also wireless. Just press the Home button on your Joy-Con or Pro controller. If you don’t like the feature (not all TVs are compatible with it), you can turn it off in Settings > TV Settings > Match TV Power State.
If you lose a Joy-Con controller, the Switch has a panic-free way to find it. Click on the gray Controllers button on the home screen, then click Find Controllers.
Once there, you can make any paired Joy-Con or controller vibrate at will. Grab the Switch and tip toe around, pressing vibrate on and off until you find that sucker.
The Switch technically has an online service, but it's still a pain to play with friends. Every game is a little different, but generally, you will need to first talk to them over text or in real life and get their friend code. To find a friend code, click on your Mii picture in the upper left of the home screen then tap Add Friend.
Tap Search with Friend Code and type in their digits. If needed, you can also see your friend code in the lower right. Once you've established friendship, make sure you both own the game you want to play, then enter it and start an online room or battle with friends and invite them. You will need a Nintendo Online subscription to play online multiplayer and save games to the cloud.
Once you've become Friends with someone (see above), you can voice chat with them using the Switch Online mobile phone app.
A few games like Fortnite support their own on-console chat, but for some Nintendo games you'll need to download the Switch Online app or your Android or iPhone.
All players will need to have it open when you begin a play session and then you can chat together using your phones. No, it's not the most intuitive system.
Our Best Gaming Headsets and Best Wireless Gaming Headsets guides have recommendations for Switch-compatible headphones and mic combos.
It took a long time, but the Switch finally supports Bluetooth audio. If you want to listen to your games without having a wire dangling from your ears, you can finally do so by heading to System settings > Bluetooth Audio > Pair Device and connect your headphones. You can check out our guides to the best wireless headphones and the best wireless gaming headsets to find the ones that work best for you.
Joy-Cons Photograph: Nintendo Joy-Cons live up to their name. I couldn’t help but smile when I discovered I could pair my Joy-Con or Pro Controller with an Android phone. Better yet, it works with Mac and PCs, too (though you’ll need an app like JoyToKey to map the buttons correctly on Windows). They work because Nintendo uses Bluetooth to connect them. Just hold down the small sync button on the top of the controllers for a few seconds and the lights on them will flash, letting you know they’re in pairing mode. Find them in the Bluetooth menu of your phone or computer and you’re good to go.
If the way certain buttons are configured is difficult for you to use, or you just want to optimize your layout to get a better Hades time, you can now remap any button on the Switch. Head to System Settings > Controllers and Sensors > Change Button Mapping.
Here, you can change any button to any other. So if you'd rather swap ZL and ZR, or use one of the triggers as a jump button, you can do it. You'll also find options to swap the left and right control sticks, or change their default orientation.
The Switch OLED gets slightly better battery life than the original Switch thanks to its comparatively more efficient OLED screen, but neither will last so long you won't need to check the battery from time to time. To see the battery life, and adjust a few other settings like volume and brightness, hold down the Home button while playing a game. After a second, the menu will pop right up! You can also have the Switch show the exact percent of battery remaining in the upper right of the home screen by holding ZL and ZR together, or toggle it on permanently in Settings > System > Console Battery (%).
The biggest battery drain on the Switch (like most devices) is going to be the screen. If you dock your Switch that's not a problem, but in handheld mode the screen will stay on for 10 minutes before going to sleep. You can cut down on a lot of wasted charge if you lower this setting. Head to System Settings > Sleep Mode > Auto-Sleep (Console) and you can set your Switch to sleep after as little as one minute of inactivity.
The Switch lets you unlock by pressing any button three times. Have you tried it? If you have, you’ll notice this software Easter egg. Most buttons sound the same, but the left control stick, right control stick, ZL trigger, and ZR trigger make odd, fun noises, like a clown horn. One other thing to try: the clicky noise that the Switch makes when you tap in a random location is pressure sensitive. It gets deeper or higher pitched depending on how hard or soft you touch.
When the novelty wears off and you'd rather just unlock your Switch directly, disable the screen lock entirely by heading to System Settings > Screen Lock and disable the “Lock Console in Sleep Mode” option.
Ever wonder just how many hours you sunk into Zelda ? It’s easy to check. Click on your Mii picture in the upper left corner of the Switch home screen. Click Profile once you’re in there to see a rough estimate of how much time you’ve wasted collecting Korok seeds. If you’ve added friends (you need their Friend Code), you can see what they’ve played lately, too! You can make a profile or stop sharing your playtimes in Settings > Users > [Your Name] > Friend settings.
The days of needing a Japan-specific console to play some Japanese games are over. You can easily toggle your region in Settings > System > Region.
Most games are usually available globally, but some titles may arrive in one region first.
This list might help, if there’s a specific game you’re looking to play. One other benefit of switching from US to a region like Europe: the box art changes for some games, like Breath of the Wild.
You could also create a new user for each region.
Nintendo Switch OLED in Dark Mode Photograph: Julian Chokkattu Try out the Dark Mode by selecting "Basic Black" in Settings > Themes.
It may be easier on your eyes than the default white background, especially if you’re using the Switch in handheld mode.
There are three USB ports on the Switch dock. You can plug in most any USB keyboard and it should work, letting you type in menus to enter stuff like passwords. Just keep in mind that you can’t actually play games with the keyboard. USB Bluetooth headsets also work. We were surprised to find that some of our old PS4 headsets plugged right into the Switch.
There are a number of games that only give you one save slot. If you want more, there's an easy fix. Just make a second User (Mii). Navigate to Settings > Users > Add User to make an extra user. Once made, it will appear as a choice when you open a lot of games. Choosing the new user will create a new, separate save file.
If you want the exact opposite, you can get rid of the User Selection screens and get the system to always default to your core account in games by turning "Skip Selection Screen" to On.
If you upgraded to the new Switch OLED (or just need to transfer to a new unit), you can bring your old profiles, game save data, and even your screenshots and recordings from your old console to your new one. We have a full guide to the process here and it's worth reading the whole thing since there are steps you won't want to do out of order, but make sure you have both consoles handy when you get started.
Sharing screenshots used to be a pain on the Switch, but now there's an easier way. From the Home menu, open up your screenshot Album. Then you can select Sharing and Editing, then Send to Smartphone. This will give you a QR code that you can scan with your phone's camera app that will direct you to a page where you can download your screenshots and videos. Much easier than posting them to Twitter! By default, your game save data will be stored on the internal storage of your Switch. However, if you want to clear up some space on the system, you can move your game saves to a MicroSD card.
Head to System Settings > Data Management and choose “Move Data Between System / MicroSD Card.” Select “Move to MicroSD card” and then you can choose which games you want to move over.
Note: While this will store your game saves on the MicroSD card, you won't be able to just swap that card to another Switch and access game saves on that console. If you just got a new console, see our guide on How to Transfer Save Data From One Nintendo Switch to Another.
The Switch is pretty stable, but it's not immune to the occasional freeze. Turning the Switch off usually works by holding Power for a few seconds, until the restart menu opens. If that doesn’t happen, the best solution is to do a hard reset by holding down the power button for about 12 seconds or so (just keep holding). Once it powers down, wait at least 30 seconds and power it back up.
If your problems continue, you can try booting it into Maintenance Mode by holding the power button as you turn it on and then when the Nintendo logo appears, also pressing down on both volume buttons right next to it. This will let you factory reset it, or clean it out while attempting to save your data. Good luck! If you’re feeling nostalgic, the Joy-Cons can be used with motion controls in some games. For instance, grab World of Goo on the Nintendo eShop, install it, and open it with a Joy-Con. The game will ask you to set the Joy-Con on a flat surface, then point it at the screen. Do this and then you can use it just like a Wii Remote, with an onscreen cursor and everything! It's not strictly necessary as an accessory, but if you frequently travel or play in multiple rooms of the house, buying a second dock can be one of the best decisions you make. I have a spare dock I keep in my suitcase for when I travel so I can play games on the TV in a hotel room. But anywhere you want another dock, an extra can be extremely handy! Be sure to check out our list of Must-Have Nintendo Switch Accessories.
You will most definitely need a 128-gigabyte MicroSD card (many games are 10+ gigabytes and the Switch has 32 - 64) and may also want to buy this screen protector (I’ve used it and it doesn’t bubble) and a USB 3.0 Ethernet Adapter if you want to speed up your internet connection on the older dock, though the new Switch OLED dock comes with its own Ethernet port built in, which is convenient! Nintendo's Switch Online service is one of the cheapest subscriptions in gaming and seems almost like a no-brainer. For $20 a year (or $35 a year for a family plan), you can play online, save your games in the cloud, and use voice chat in certain games. Also include is a library of NES and SNES games.
There's also the Expansion Pack which costs $50 per year for an individual and $80 per year for a family. This version adds a selection of N64 and Sega Genesis games, plus some Animal Crossing: New Horizons DLC. This isn't quite as obvious of a deal, but if you're looking to play Banjo Kazooie , Majora's Mask or Goldeneye 007 on your Switch, this is the way to do it.
Overall, Switch Online isn't strictly necessary unless you play games online or want a retro gaming library, but the basic version is an absurdly cheap value, and the Expansion Pack is a solid buy for fans of the N64 generation.
Finally, if you’re hunting for games, check our Best Nintendo Switch Games guide. Here are a few random fun ones to try other than Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey , which should be your first three purchases: Metroid Dread Animal Crossing: New Horizons Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Stardew Valley Hades Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle Luigi's Mansion 3 Shovel Knight New Pokémon Snap Sonic Mania Untitled Goose Game Star Link: Battle for Atlas (with Star Fox) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Splatoon 2 Arms Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker Rocket League Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Reviews Director X Product Writer and Reviewer X Topics tips Shopping how-to Nintendo Console Games video games gaming tips Eric Ravenscraft Simon Hill Julian Chokkattu Boone Ashworth Simon Hill Simon Hill Brenda Stolyar Jaina Grey WIRED COUPONS Dyson promo code Extra 20% off sitewide - Dyson promo code GoPro Promo Code GoPro Promo Code: save 15% on your next order Samsung Promo Code +30% Off with this Samsung promo code Dell Coupon Code American Express Dell Coupon Code: Score 10% off select purchases Best Buy Coupon Best Buy coupon: Score $300 off select laptops VistaPrint promo code 15% off VistaPrint promo code when you sign up for emails Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"How to Set Up an Apple Watch for Your Kids | WIRED"
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On a sunny weekend, I sent my 7-year-old a block ahead to the playground while I helped her little brother sort out his new pedal bike. We must have taken a long time because I started getting a bunch of calls from an unknown number. When we finally caught up, my daughter was standing with a stranger and crying. He was holding his phone. “You weren’t here,” he said accusingly.
“I was 500 feet away!” I protested. It was no use. It was time for an Apple Watch.
The Apple Watch is one of the company’s most versatile (and popular) products. Some people use it for texting or as a style accessory. I mainly use mine as a fitness tracker.
In 2020, Apple released Family Setup with WatchOS 7 , which explicitly marketed the more affordable, and older, versions of the Apple Watch to children and elderly relatives. I don’t want to give my kid an expensive cell phone that she’ll use to watch YouTube Kids and then immediately lose or break. I do want her to be able to find me, and vice versa, as she exercises her growing independence.
If you have an iPhone, you probably have an old Apple Watch that you can repurpose for your older or younger family members. The Series 7 has been a game-changer for my kid. Did you want to buy a watch? Check out our guides to the Best Apple Watch or the Top Features in WatchOS 9 for more.
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Apple introduced Family Setup in 2020 with WatchOS 7.
To use Family Setup, you need an Apple Watch Series 4 or later with cellular capabilities that you will add to your cell phone plan. You also need an iPhone with iOS 14 or later.
Both you and your child also need an Apple ID.
If both of you already have one, you can go to Settings on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and click Family.
Then click Add Member.
If your child doesn’t have an Apple ID, you will be given the option to Create Child Account.
From there, follow the instructions to add the child’s name, birth date, and email address. If they don’t already have an email address, you can use the suggested iCloud option.
First, unpair and erase your old Apple Watch. Open the Apple Watch app on your phone and click All Watches.
Tap the info button next to your old watch and click Unpair Apple Watch.
You can opt to keep your cellular plan (you’ll need it for your kid).
Unpairing is supposed to erase all content and settings on your watch, but in my case it did not. If it doesn’t work for you either, tap Settings on the watch, then General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings.
Since my kid is 7, I found it easier to set the watch up on my own. But at this point, you can have your kid put it on (if it’s charged). The watch will say Bring iPhone Near Apple Watch.
If you open the Watch app, it lets you choose to Set Up for a Family Member.
Aim the phone’s viewfinder at the slowly moving animation to pair, or select Pair Manually.
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I also chose to limit my daughter’s contacts on the watch. First, go to Settings > iCloud > Contacts on your phone and make sure it’s toggled on. Then click out, go back to Settings > Screen Time > Family Member > Communication Limits.
You need to request your child’s permission to manage their contacts and approve it from the kid’s watch. On their watch, you can add and rename contacts from your contact list (Dad becomes “Grandpa,” Tim becomes “Uncle Timmy,” and so on).
The last and most important step is turning on Schooltime , which is basically a remote-controlled version of an adult Work Focus.
It blocks apps and complications, but emergency calls can still come through. The setup tutorial walks you through how to set up Schooltime on your child’s watch, but if you skip it during setup, you can manage it later. On your iPhone, tap All Watches > Your Child’s Watch > Schooltime > Edit Schedule.
I elected to turn Schooltime on when my child is in school and turn it off during afterschool care, but you can also click Add Time if you’d like to turn it on during a morning class, take a break for lunch, and then turn it back on again. Your kid can just turn the digital crown to exit Schooltime, but that’s OK—you can check their Schooltime reports on your iPhone too.
To manage your child’s watch, go to your Watch > All Watches > Family Watches > Your Kid’s Apple Watch.
This is how you install updates and manage settings, like managing the Activity app or setting up Express Transit if your child uses public transportation.
Just as with a grown-up Apple Watch , the first thing you’ll probably want to do is switch the watch face. Hold down the screen and wait for the face to shrink, and swipe to switch. (You probably also want to buy a tiny kid-specific watch band.
) We got my daughter an Apple Watch so I’d be able to see her on Find My and she could contact me via phone or the Messages app, which she does with regrettable frequency (I’m hoping she gets tired of texting “poop” pretty soon).
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When we were at a crowded neighborhood event, we toggled Walkie Talkie on both of our Apple Watches. My daughter was able to keep in touch with me on a minute-to-minute basis. It was reassuring that she was able to reach out and say she couldn’t see me, even if she was only 10-20 feet away.
We also like the Mindfulness app, which can persuade my sensitive kid to take a deep breath before screaming about the annoying sound her brother is making. And although I explicitly wanted to get her a watch instead of a phone so that she wouldn’t stare at a screen all day, I did cave and buy her one game, Coloring Watch , which lets her choose images, fine-tune color selections, and send her creations to us.
The most useful feature she’s found on her Apple Watch has been Siri , which makes sense. She’s not allowed unfettered access to a phone, tablet, or computer, so where else can she ask questions that adults would normally type into Google? The past week, I have eavesdropped on questions as varied as: Hey Siri, what is Russia? How many stars are on the American flag? Can you show me pictures of the grossest animal? In case you were wondering, the world’s grossest animals are truly revolting. We were eating dinner, and I couldn’t even click on the pictures to find out what these animals were. That’s the thing about children, though—you’re learning from them, even as you think they’re learning from you. Maybe if more of us used technology to relate to the world around us, instead getting away from it, we’d all be better off.
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"The Best Hiking Gear (2023): Backpacks, Tents, and More | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Matt Jancer Gear Hiking 101: Everything You Need to Head for the Hills Photograph: xmocb/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Whoever called indoors the Great Indoors? Nobody. Look, it might be a fine place to spend on a rainy day or an evening after a tough day of work, but that wide, gorgeous world on the other side of your window glass is too breathtaking to keep as background scenery all the time. We're in the thick of summer right now, and that means much of the countryside is wide open for exploring.
No matter where you live, there are most likely trails near you.
Yet getting started can be daunting. Fear not. It's easier than you might think to stay dry, warm, hydrated, and safe. In this guide, we have recommendations for everything you need to take to the outdoors, whether it's just a peaceful afternoon hike or a roving weekend-long backpacking trip.
Be sure to check out our other buying guides , like How to Layer Outdoor Clothing , Best Baselayers , and Best Camping Gear.
Updated August 2023: We've added picks for gear maintenance and self-care, such as picaridin insect repellent, permethrin insecticide, face sunscreen, and more. We've also updated pricing and availability.
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Apparel Shoes and Socks Clothing Accessories A Backpack Water Bottles and Purification Safety Equipment Knowledge Fitness Trackers A Few More Things For apparel, think in terms of layers so you can easily add or remove clothes before you start to sweat. Check out our Best Base Layers and How to Layer guides for more advice.
Patagonia Capilene Photograph: Patagonia Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing For all but the coldest hikes, you can wear a short-sleeve base layer next to your skin and build your clothing system out from there. Synthetics, like this 100-percent recycled polyester shirt, are affordable and dry sweat quickly. For warm-weather activities, merino wool is suitable, and I recommend SmartWool's Merino Tee ($75), which is available in women's and men's sizing.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing Your mid-layer goes between your base layer and shell, even though it's usually too warm to wear while hiking. More often, you'll throw it on during breaks and while doing camp chores. I'm a fan of fleece for mid-layers because it's durable and doesn't lose loft after being compressed in your pack.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing Made up of 87-percent buttery soft merino wool (with 13-percent nylon mixed in), the Merino 150 is warm but not too warm. It's important not to go for the thickest, warmest base layer, even in very cold weather, because you'll work up a sweat that'll chill you as soon as you stop moving. The seams lie flat and off the shoulders, which keeps pack straps from rubbing them raw.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing Base layers are thin layers that go next to your skin. They can be made from a variety of materials, but they need to wick sweat away and keep you warm. For bottoms, even in the coldest weather, you'll be fine with short underwear, like these briefs from ExOfficio.
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Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing REI's sub-$100 Rainier jacket uses high-quality laminate waterproofing to keep you from getting soaked. It's well made and has a weatherproof center zip, along with pit zips for improved ventilation. It's a great and well-priced option for casual day hikes. Read our Best Rain Jackets guide for more recommendations.
You won't have any fun on a hike—of any length—if you have bloody blisters on your feet. You may need to experiment to find out which shoes and socks you like best. Be sure to check out our Best Trail-Running Shoes , Best Barefoot Shoes , and Best High-Tech Socks guides for more.
Salomon X Ultra 3 Photograph: Salomon Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing For moderate temperatures we prefer low-top, non-Gore-Tex mesh trail shoes, like these from Salomon. They'll dry out much more quickly when wet than Gore-Tex-lined shoes, and speaking from experience they're warm enough when moving, even in 45-degree temperatures. We also like the comparable Merrell Moab 2 Ventilator ( women's sizing , men's sizing ) for $67.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing Where I will recommend Gore-Tex-lined boots is on snowy and icy trails. Constant contact with snow will soak through shoes that lack water resistance. Renegades have been around forever, and they're durable and comfortable, although a bit heavy at roughly 3 pounds per pair. The mid-height helps keep snow from spilling in over the top of the boot too.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing For those looking to speed over the hills and bound down trails, these were our favorite trail running shoes.
Thanks to their wide toe box, low 5-mm heel drop, and sturdy rubber toe protection, they beat out lighter competitors. For running 3-5 miles a day, they're our top pick.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing We don't recommend everyone choose thick leather hiking boots for most adventures, but if it's really cold, you want your feet to stay warm, and you don't mind trekking with a bit of extra weight, these are a great option. They work best as lifestyle shoes that you can take directly from the trail to the bar with just a quick rinse. They're also great for wandering around town between trips to the trail, since they're so classic and stylish.
If your feet run hot, you'll want synthetic socks, which dry out faster than wool. These by Wrightsock are synthetic and have two layers to avoid blisters. Anyone can wear them, but Wrightsock also makes a version in women's sizing ($14) that's more tapered and slim-fitting.
Photograph: Darn Tough From experience climbing on glaciers and hiking in deep snow, I strongly believe a thin sock like the Wrightsocks above is the best bet to keep your feet from overheating. However, for slow-paced day hikes and low-intensity camping, you may be better off with a thicker sock to retain warmth, since you won't be burning as many calories. Darn Toughs have a lifetime warranty(!) and are ultra-comfortable. No itchy wool here.
You probably don't need gaiters, but if you're walking through dusty environments, you'll welcome them. They prevent crud from entering the tops of your shoes.
For icy terrain, these traction devices slip over your hiking shoes so the stainless-steel spikes on the bottom can dig in. The elastomer material is flexible enough to fit a variety of shoes. Just squeeze them on when needed and toss them in your pack when you're past the icy part of the trail. They shouldn't be a substitute for common sense; if the terrain is too icy to cross, come back when it's warmer.
Don't forget about your head and hands. Once you've swaddled yourself in warm top layers, bottom layers, and shoes, make sure to keep your vulnerable noggin and paws warm with these gloves and hats.
Photograph: Amazon Forget tying a bandana around your neck. The Buff is easier to use. It's a tubular piece of thin polyester that you slip over your head, and you can wear it in several ways. Leave it loose to keep the sun from scorching your neck, yank it up over your nose and mouth on chilly days for warmth, or pull it up over your head completely, like a balaclava. It's versatile enough that I bring one everywhere I go, from off-road motorcycle rides to winter mountain climbs to sweltering summer hikes.
Merino wool is the good stuff, silky smooth and not at all itchy. These 100-percent merino gloves are good for chilly-but-not-sub-freezing days, and they're also touchscreen-compatible so you don't have to wrestle off a glove to use your phone.
Depending on the weather, you may need a sun hat or beanie to protect your head. I like a wool beanie to guard my neck against sunburn in cool weather, and this Smartwool is quite comfy. Check out our other guides, like the Best Sun Protection Clothing and Best Sunglasses for more suggestions.
Men's Sizing , Women's Sizing Warmth doesn't come cheap. These are serious winter gloves that'll keep your hands warm and dry, even when there's snow spread all over the ground at higher altitudes. Synthetic puffy PrimaLoft insulation traps heat, and Gore-Tex keeps it in, so feel free to spend a whole afternoon tossing snowballs without water leaking through.
Now that you have all your gear, you need something to carry it in. The most important aspect of a backpack is that it fits you properly. Outdoor retailers like REI offer in-person fittings. Features like water bottle pockets, loops for hitching gear, and chest or waist straps will probably vary depending on the level of activity you're facing.
REI Co-Op Flash 22 Photograph: REI The sweet spot for a daypack is between 15 and 25 liters—enough to hold rain layers, a fleece, maps, water, sunscreen, lunch, and snacks, plus room for a book or camera gear. If this one's out of stock, I also like the Mountain Hardwear UL 20 ($80).
If you get caught in the rain, a pack cover is a quick and convenient solution. However, it's worth noting that water will still soak your pack's uncovered back pad. If you're hiking overgrown and under-maintained trails, a pack cover could also act as a sacrificial protective barrier that keeps your expensive pack from getting cut up.
Use a small trash compactor bag as a water-resistant pack liner inside your pack to keep everything dry in case it rains. They're more durable than trash bags and almost as cheap. For a second layer of defense against moisture, pack your clothing and shelter in water-resistant stuff sacks or dry sacks.
One of the biggest beginner mistakes is to not bring enough water, even on short hikes. Depending on the heat and your level of exertion, you could get thirstier than you think. For a short day hike, a liter bottle should be enough. If you're heading out all day or it's particularly hot or dry, read travelogues and park ranger recommendations and pack accordingly. Check out our Best Water Bottles guide for more suggestions.
Miir Insulated Narrow Mouth Water Bottle Photograph: Amazon Metal water bottles are unnecessarily heavy for longer trips, but they're fine for day hikes when it's not freezing (watch A Christmas Story if you want to know why). Of course, if you have plastic bottles lying around at home, you can use those. Just remember not to leave them on the trail.
I gave this one an honorary mention in my guide to the Best Reusable Water Bottles because it's dead simple and cheap. Nalgenes tend to get brittle in ultra-cold environments, but unlike a metal bottle, you're not liable to get your lips frozen to it. Plus, this bottle is BPA-free.
If you favor hydration bladders instead of water bottles, this is a good one. Before I switched back to bottles, I preferred my Platypus to my CamelBak because it was easier to clean between hikes.
Water filters remove not only viruses and bacteria, but sediment too. Collapsible filter systems like the Sawyer Squeeze are extremely effective, lightweight, and quick. You could use water purification tablets or droplets instead, like Micropur for $16 , but know that they can take up to half an hour to work on most viruses and bacteria, and four hours (!) on Cryptosporidium.
If the water is below 60 degrees Fahrenheit, it takes even longer to work. Better to use a filter.
You're probably not in active danger on a popular, well-traveled beginner trail. But it's still a good idea to pack a few of these items just in case.
Petzl Actik Headlamp Photograph: Petzl Your hike might take longer than you think, or you just might want to start extra early. If you need to get around in the dark, a headlamp that shines at least 300 lumens will keep you on the path and leave your hands free. Get one that accepts AAA batteries so you can bring spares on long trips.
Always let a reliable friend or family member back home know your plans before you head out. Cairn is a novel smartphone app that reports your location in real time to an authorized “safety circle” of people you select to follow your progress. Cairn uses crowdsourced information to tell you where you can expect to find cell coverage on trails, and it'll alert your safety circle if you're overdue to return.
A mirror, which you aim at overhead aircraft to draw their attention, and an Acme Tornado Whistle for $7 can signal for help if you need rescue.
If you aren't bringing a tent, bring an emergency bivvy. It weighs less than 4 ounces and will keep you dry and warm (ish) if you spend an unplanned night outdoors.
Save your knees on downhill hikes and gain stability on sketchy trails with a pair of trekking poles. These have strong adjustment levers that never come loose or slip, no matter how hard you lean on them.
Rubber tip covers for $10 keep them from scraping up trails, and snow baskets for $11 prevent them from punching through snow.
Prepackaged first aid kits are heavy, expensive, and usually incomplete.
Pack your own in a little bag. Add some Band-Aid Hydro Seal for $6.
They're the most amazing blister bandages I've ever used. And pick up a Tick Key for $10 or a Coghlans Tick Remover for $6 to get those pesky bugs off your skin. Peruse our Home Emergency Kit Gear guide for other ideas.
Trip preparation begins long before you pull your pack out of your closet and begin cramming it full of stuff. You can't learn everything before you actually take your first outdoor trip, but you can set yourself up for success by learning a few key skills so that when you do run into a problem, you'll know just how to handle it.
The Backpacker's Field Manual Photograph: Amazon Outdoor manuals can be fun and useful for preparation, and a source of helpful tips. Rick Curtis' The Backpacker's Field Manual is the best comprehensive guidebook on hiking I've read. You can also practice reading topographic maps with your compass if you pick up Wilderness Navigation ($15) by Bob and Mike Burns.
Satellite messengers can be useful, but they're expensive, and you might not have to use them that often. You probably have a great hiking companion already in your pocket. Alltrails is my favorite free trip planner and trail discovery tool, but we have more in our Best Hiking Apps guide.
Even if you download Alltrails (and you should), it's a good idea to download a second navigation app. Often, one will have details for a specific trail but not the other. While Alltrails is geared more toward pre-trip planning (although it's still great for on-trail navigation), Gaia GPS gives you a variety of up-to-date topographic maps that you can download for offline use. Before your trip, download maps on both apps to lessen your chances of losing your way once you're out on the trail.
If you're alone in the woods, it's helpful to know what to do in emergency situations. A first aid course focused on outdoor situations is a good place to start. If you want more comprehensive (and expensive) training, the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) has an excellent Wilderness First Responder course.
Heading into the wild can be a bit intimidating at first. Some folks find comfort in having a navigational aid strapped to their wrists. Others simply want to track their hikes to analyze their fitness goals. Check out our guides to the Best Fitness Trackers and Best Smartwatches for more of our favorite picks.
Fitbit Charge 5 Photograph: Fitbit We call the Charge 5 ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) the best all-around fitness tracker for its relatively low price and bevy of biometric sensors. There's a smart alarm that determines the best point during your sleep cycle to set an alarm for, ECGs for monitoring your heart rate, sleep analysis tools that measure your blood oxygen levels at night, and more. You do have to pay $10 per month, or $80 per year, for a Fitbit Premium subscription to get the most from the Charge 5, though.
The 7S Sapphire Solar ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) impressed us with its quick and accurate GPS connection that worked even under surprisingly thick tree cover. Preset outdoor activities—from gravel biking to swimming to running to bouldering—track biometric data so you can analyze your runs and routes later on. The built-in altimeter, barometer, and compass round out the reasons we call this admittedly pricey unit the top outdoor watch in our Best Fitness Trackers guide.
This affordable watch is mentioned in both our Best Fitness Tracker guide and our Best Smartwatches guide. Sync it to Garmin's Connect app, and you can track and analyze heart rate, blood oxygen, respiration, and sleep data. There's no onboard GPS, since its focus is on tracking health data, but the battery lasts an impressive three to five days.
There are always a few odds and ends that make your trips a little more enjoyable, whether by taking pressure off your battered knees or keeping your phone juiced up so you have plenty of evidence when your friends back home say, “Pics or it didn't happen.” Anker PowerCore Portable Charger Photograph: Amazon I always bring a small battery bank to keep my phone topped up. There are no power outlets in the wilderness (I've checked). Check out our Best Portable Chargers guide for more recommendations.
Some people like to bring camp chairs on their hikes, but I never want to carry anything that heavy and bulky. I'd rather stuff a hammock in my pack. The Eno impressed me with its build quality, especially for such a low price. It comes with the straps needed to string it up between trees and, for once, some decent instructions for folks unaccustomed to hanging a hammock. There's a two-person DoubleNest for $75 that holds a combined 400 pounds, if you'd like to bunk down with somebody in the breeze.
Suunto makes my favorite compasses. The park ranger's office will usually have topographic trail maps if you stop off before the trailhead, but America's parks are more popular and crowded than ever.
Buy some ahead of time if you can, so you're not without a map if the ranger's office runs out.
I'll let you in on a little secret. The expensive detergents marketed for your precious hiking clothes are no better than a typical liquid laundry detergent. I've been using Tide to wash most of my gear for years, and it's still as good as new. The exception is goose down clothing and sleeping bags. I use this down-specific detergent to keep from weighing down the loft and reducing their overall loft. And remember to only wash your puffy clothes and sleeping bags in top-loading washing machines. Front-loaders will shred them to pieces. Speaking from experience here … Photograph: REI The ground can suck a lot of warmth from your body. Even if it seems warm outside, a lengthy break seated on the bare earth can leave you chilled. If you're hiking when it's cold out, or if the nights are chilly (it takes a while for the ground to heat up during the day), bring along an insulated foam pad to sit on during breaks. Your rear end will thank you for it.
We're all familiar with DEET insect repellent. Chances are your folks sprayed you with it liberally as a kid to keep all the ticks and skeeters away from you. But although effective, DEET has a nasty tendency to melt synthetic tech fabrics, the kind outdoors gear is often made of. I switched over to using this Picaridin years ago. It works nearly as well, and it doesn't harm my expensive gear.
Permethrin is a kill-on-contact insecticide. It doesn't repel insects, it just kills them when they trespass. Spray some on your shoes and pant cuffs if you're heading into tick-infested areas. Ticks like to crawl up the leg and latch onto warmer areas, such as the groin. This spray keeps them from getting that far. Three notes of warning. First, permethrin is highly toxic to cats and birds, so if you have either pet, avoid the stuff. Two, don't spray it directly on your skin. It's not a substitute for DEET or Picaridin. And three, use it smartly. Don't spray it on tree straps for a hammock, for example. That causes unnecessary insect casualties, and you're in their home, so be nice.
You need to protect your face when you're outside. The problem is that most regular sunscreens clog up your pores and make you break out. I've been using this Sun Bum lotion for all my outdoor pursuits for years without complaint. Whether I'm chugging through the Chihuahuan Desert or climbing peaks at 10,000 feet, it has kept my face from roasting and breaking out for the past five years. For the rest of the body's exposed skin, I prefer Banana Boat Sport Ultra SPF 30 Spray Sunscreen for $9.
The spray is quicker to apply and less messy, and it works just as well as the more expensive options from Sun Bum.
Don't forget about your lips. It's all too common for folks to slather on the sunscreen and insect repellent but forget about their lips, which can burn, dry out, and crack. I tried a few brands of high-SPF lip balm, including Sun Bum's offerings, but didn't like how thick and pasty they felt. Carmex is the most comfort and—this is a subjective feeling—most moisturized-feeling among those I've tried. Even in full sun at high altitudes, the 15 SPF Carmex worked well enough to prevent chapping and burning.
I've tried pretty much all the hiking specialty snacks out there and don't really recommend any of them. Options like the GU Stroopwaffel and the Sweetwood Fatty Meat Stick are very expensive and usually too packed with sugar or salt to be healthy. And—this is a judgment call—most of them taste pretty rank. I recommend packing your own snacks at home. Include lots of salty ones, since that helps your body retain water and ward off dehydration. If you want something more environmentally friendly than Zip-Locs, check out Bee's Wrap ($18).
Bring a typical trash bag from home to pack out your trash.
Photograph: Amazon If you're like me and have to have your coffee every morning, Alpinestart's brew isn't half bad. And you won't have to carry around damp coffee grounds in your trash bag from making pour-over or French press coffee. Even I, a coffee snob, look forward to a cup on mornings when I like to perch myself on a rock and take in the sunrise. This package will make eight cups of medium-roast coffee.
Many people love listening to tunes out on the trails, but please keep it in your ears and don't disturb the great outdoors for those who want to enjoy the quiet. The Pixel Buds A-Series ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ) were named the best overall in our guide to the Best Wirefree Earbuds for their IPX4 water resistance, easy pairing with Android devices, and Google Assistant integration.
Picture this: You're outdoors on the trail, nature calls, and there's no bathroom in sight. At that point, you'll be glad you packed a cheap trowel to dig a cathole for solid waste. This one weighs only 3.1 ounces and can be kept in an exterior pocket of your pack.
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Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Writer and Reviewer Topics Shopping gear backpack outdoors buying guides Matt Jancer Scott Gilbertson Matt Jancer Scott Gilbertson Scott Gilbertson Martin Cizmar Jaina Grey Simon Hill WIRED COUPONS TurboTax Service Code TurboTax coupon: Up to an extra $15 off all tax services h&r block coupon H&R Block tax software: Save 20% - no coupon needed Instacart promo code Instacart promo code: $25 Off your 1st order + free delivery Doordash Promo Code 50% Off DoorDash Promo Code + Free Delivery Finish Line Coupon Take $10 off Your Order - Finish Line Coupon Code Groupon Promo Code Groupon promo code: Extra 30% off any amount Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Garmin Edge 840 Solar Review: A Data-Rich Bike Computer | WIRED"
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"Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Stephanie Pearson Gear Review: Garmin Edge 840 Solar Facebook X Email Save Story Photograph: Garmin Facebook X Email Save Story $549.97 at Amazon $550 at REI $550 at Garmin If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 8/10 Open rating explainer On a recent bike-packing trip in southern Utah with my partner, Brian, and another couple, I found myself bemused by the guys’ attachment to their GPS cycling computers.
At the end of each day, they pored over stats as if they had just competed in a stage of the Tour de France. I had a cycling computer too, and would admittedly have been lost without its wayfinding wizardry. But I still find myself in an internal debate over whether all the data they spit out diminishes the joy of just riding my bike.
I obviously haven’t resolved that question, since I jumped at my editor’s offer to test the new Garmin Edge 840 Solar.
It’s almost exactly like the Edge 1040 Solar that debuted last year, but it's about half the size, which means it also has half the gigabytes—32—of internal memory and a little less than half the solar-charging power. The more petite 840 Solar, however, is still a highly competent device. The Power Glass solar charging lens extends battery life up to 32 hours (with Battery Saver mode off) and up to 60 hours (with Battery Saver mode on). It has multiband GNSS that makes the wayfinding even more accurate. And it offers a handful of new features like ClimbPro, which profiles the gradient of every climb on every route you ride that’s longer than 500 meters and steeper than a 3 percent grade—no preloaded course required.
Photograph: Garmin The 840 Solar also offers a handful of new training features that, when used in conjunction with a power meter and heart-rate monitor, is like having a coach on your handlebars. For existing Garmin users, these are even more powerful because they can tap into your existing training data stored in the Garmin Connect app (which is required to operate the device).
Say you have an upcoming race. The Targeted Adaptive Coaching feature allows you to download the date and other details of the event into Garmin Connect, and the computer will spit out customized suggested workouts and training prompts that you can adapt to your current training load and recovery. It even counts down to race day, giving you the weather report in Kansas or California or wherever the race may be. The more historical data you’ve previously downloaded, the more accurate the workouts will be.
Other features include Real-Time Stamina, which gauges your output then spits out the remaining time and mileage left before you bonk, allowing you to manage your ambition more realistically. Cycling Ability matches your strengths as a cyclist with the demands of the course you’re riding so that you can maximize the day’s effort.
Photograph: Garmin Garmin Edge 840 Solar Rating: 8/10 $549.97 at Amazon $550 at REI $550 at Garmin If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Since the 1040 debuted last year, Garmin has updated several wayfinding features in the Edge 840 Solar to make them more specific to cycling. Its maps are now ride-type specific, highlighting popular roads and trails and searchable cycling-specific points of interest like bike shops. Also, say you want to purposely veer off course to explore a beach or an espresso shop. You can now pause your course route so that the diversion isn’t calculated into the official route. When you’re ready to jump back on course, the device will steer you back to where you can reengage. Another key feature that Garmin keeps refining is Incident Detection, which automatically sends a message with your location to your emergency contacts after the Edge’s sensors detect that you’ve had a crash.
As for how to access these shiny new features, Garmin added a lot of buttons to the Edge 840 Solar. It has seven in total–that’s four more than the longtime Garmin standard of three. It looks intimidating until you realize you now have the advantage of navigating via touchscreen controls in nice weather or using the buttons when you’re riding in rain or while wearing thick gloves, which is a nice addition, especially for cyclists who often ride in the cold.
Photograph: Garmin What you see on the screen was updated last year on the 1040 when Garmin revamped its user interface to make navigating the device faster and more intuitive. Its homepage can be customized to include shortcuts to a long list of features like Training, Navigation, History, Notifications, Weather, Sunset, Fitness Age, and Recovery Time. Or it can include just one of those. Scroll down to access a category, press on it, and a whole universe of data is at your fingertips. Sunrise/Sunset, for example, offers the time of sunrise and sunset for the next two weeks, which is helpful if you live in a climate where daylight hours vary greatly as seasons change. Training opens to all the aforementioned new training features. Some of the tools, like Fitness Age, require preloading your VO 2 max, resting heart rate, and body fat percentage in the Garmin Connect app on your phone.
Garmin Edge 840 Solar Rating: 8/10 $549.97 at Amazon $550 at REI $550 at Garmin If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Photograph: Garmin So how does this all translate while on a ride? As Garmin is quick to point out, to optimize the solar charging, the device needs to be mounted flat on your handlebars to catch maximal sun rays, not tilted at an angle. April clouds that lasted for weeks in northern Minnesota did not bode well for solar testing. On more than one midday, two-hour lunch ride, I had no noticeable power gain, because it takes the device about 1.5 hours to gain a measurable 1 percent in sunny conditions. That level of gain translates to 21 additional minutes of ride time in demanding use or 42 minutes in Battery Saver mode. On the one full-sun day I had time for a three-hour ride, I did get a nice 40-plus-minute bump in battery life. So, the system works nicely when the sun’s out, but don’t toss out the charging cord—especially if you live in a place that's frequently cloudy.
For data geeks or athletes in serious training mode, ClimbPro is a handy tool. Climbing profiles, pages that show real-time data such as gradient while you're climbing the hill, aren’t unique to Garmin—Hammerhead pioneered it in its Karoo 2 cycling computer a few years ago. I am not a data geek or an athlete in serious training mode, but I do like Garmin’s color-coding that allows you to easily see the climb’s varying gradient. Plus I get a shot of dopamine when I hear the party bells that chime when I’ve crested a climb. But I also like leaving a little bit of the day’s adventure (and struggle) to the imagination, especially when the climb is a never-ending grind. The beauty, however, is that Garmin gives you the option to toggle off ClimbPro, so I can use it when I want or ignore it.
In fact, that sums up the beauty of the Edge 840 Solar. It offers everything you need in one impressively compact device, whether training for a 350-mile ultra-race, bike-packing off the grid for five days, or just trying to maintain a base fitness level as you navigate the complexities of life. And if the data gets too overwhelming, you can customize it to display only what you need and nothing more.
Garmin Edge 840 Solar Rating: 8/10 $549.97 at Amazon $550 at REI $550 at Garmin If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED $549.97 at Amazon $550 at REI $550 at Garmin Topics bikes Bicycles review Shopping Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"I Didn’t Want to Love Zooming on My Facebook Portal—but I Do | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/story/rave-zoom-on-facebook-portal"
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"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Adrienne So Gear I Didn’t Want to Love Zooming on My Facebook Portal—but I Do Photograph: Facebook Save this story Save Save this story Save With all the issues facing us today—a global pandemic, election interference, climate change—don’t we all have better things to do than fuss over how we look during conference calls? And yet, despite being nowhere near death (I think), it takes a remarkable amount of effort to make me look alive and healthy for a 30-minute e-face to e-face meeting.
There are so many things to figure out. Is the lighting right? Is the camera positioned properly? Can they hear me OK? Your computer is a machine with vast capabilities, but it probably doesn’t have the best camera, speaker, or microphone. For months now, we’ve all been staring at each other in our makeshift spare bedrooms or closets or garages, filming our own separate versions of The Blair Witch Project.
Even the most tech-savvy of my colleagues loom like giant, hairy shadows in our Zooms.
There’s now a booming industry of gadgets for turning a computer into a home video studio: webcams, laptop stands, speakers, lights. But I have a solution that will be cheaper, easier, and probably work better: Just Zoom on a Facebook Portal.
I was deeply conflicted when I wrote my review of the Portal last year, given Facebook’s long history of queasy-making decisions.
I couldn’t in good conscience express unqualified support of a company that has done pretty much everything it can to make its users deeply distrustful, not when I myself use Facebook only very circumspectly.
However, it turns out that I will happily throw all my principles out the window if Facebook will alleviate the torture of long-distance grandparent hell. The Portal is still the only device that will keep my 3- and 5-year-old on a video call with their relatives for longer than five seconds. My parents call once a week and use the Portal's built-in Story Time feature, reading Todd Parr's The Underwear Book to my kids as augmented-reality underpants appear on my mom's head on the screen. Watching this all happen makes me feel … happy, sad, and weirdly triumphant? It's a feeling unique to 2020 parenthood that describes the sensation of having salvaged the smallest speck of joy out of the wreck of this year.
About a month ago, Facebook announced the Portal was going to start offering support for videoconferencing services —mainly Zoom, but also WebEx, BlueJeans, and GoToMeeting. Initially, I didn’t really want to repurpose the Sticky Kid Story Time Thing for work. But then I had a day of three consecutive hours’ worth of meetings and thought, well, the Portal couldn’t make this any worse.
I have the 10-inch Portal (there’s also a mini, large, and TV version). It’s about the size of a digital picture frame and nestles naturally on the left side of my laptop on its stand. It took forever (OK, half an hour) to update the software, find the Zoom app, and log in before my meeting. It’s also a minor pain point to manually tap in the meeting code on the Portal's touchscreen; if I was on my computer, I could simply click a link. But now, I am a convert.
My coworkers noticed the change immediately. The Portal's standout feature is its ability to recognize humans in the shot and move the camera around to keep faces clearly visible. On the other end of the line, the effect is eye-catching. It’s hard to not notice your one coworker in a corner of the gallery view, chugging coffee, knees tucked up in the kitchen chair as the camera slowly pans and zooms to keep her perfectly in frame while everyone else’s head and shoulders remain totally still.
Is this why videoconferencing is so tiring? Unless you’re an Instagram influencer, you’re probably not accustomed to looking at yourself constantly, or having to stay put in the same position for hours at a time. Until I didn’t have to do it anymore, I didn’t realize how hard it is to keep yourself properly lit and positioned in the frame. It’s exhausting.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft But a Portal can keep a 5-year-old framed and audible while she's running around the living room, showing grandparents her Lego sets and jumping on the couch. Compared to that, making you, a mostly stationary adult human, look good is a piece of cake. The Portal team says it worked with award-winning filmmakers to optimize the auto-pan and zoom features of the device, and it shows.
Talking or attending meetings just feels so much more natural when I don’t have to worry about my lighting, being at the correct angle, or even maintaining eye contact. I can do something as ordinary as sit comfortably in my chair, knowing that the Portal will find the correct framing for me.
And let’s talk about sound: No more headphones. No more adjusting the volume on your computer’s irritating, tinny speaker system, or plugging in your enormous Yeti microphone. The Portal has a big, round, hand-sized speaker on the back that sounds great , and a four-microphone array that will pick you up even if you’ve turned your head away to chug your 47th coffee.
When the Portal first came out two years ago , the idea of a device dedicated solely to video calling was a little suspect. Our desks are already littered with camera-fied phones, tablets and computers. Do you really need a specific device just to call people? A device that has to be plugged in? I don’t think any of us could have anticipated that many, if not all, of our social interactions would soon take place online. Months deep into the Covid-19 pandemic , owning a dedicated videophone makes as much sense as owning a dedicated refrigerator or a dedicated stove. Single-use devices make a lot of sense if they’re good at what they do, and if you use them a lot.
I also used to think the Portal was expensive. But now there’s a Portal Mini for $149, and tell me: How much have you spent, or are considering spending, on laptop stands, ring lights, mics, noise-canceling headphones, or other gadgets to make videoconferencing work better—and that probably won’t work as well as a Portal, anyway? Just now, I participated in a videoconference where someone said I looked like a well-lit Laura Linney narrating a documentary, and not like a troll crouching at a desk in my dim garage while my children eat lunch in our open-plan house (another pandemic mistake, but that’s for another time). Who can put a price on that? Just make sure you wipe the fingerprints off before the important company-wide all-hands.
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"iMac Review (27-Inch, 2020): A Powerful and Reliable Mac | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/review/apple-imac-27-inch-2020"
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"Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Julian Chokkattu Gear Review: Apple iMac (27-Inch, 2020) Facebook X Email Save Story Photograph: Apple Facebook X Email Save Story $1,799 at Apple (Best Options) $1,799 at B&H $1,799 $1,749 at Adorama $1,799 $1,749 at Amazon (8 GB RAM Only) If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 8/10 Open rating explainer The first and last time I used an iMac was back in 2013, in the dingy office building that housed my college newspaper. Being an all-in-one computer, it didn't take up much space—crucial, since the room was often packed like a can of sardines with student journalists. Its simplicity was striking compared to the bulky, budget Windows PC I built for my dorm room. It was adept at handling Adobe InDesign (which we used to lay out the news pages) and the dozens of Chrome tabs and Word docs I had open at any given moment. All this while looking more stylish than any other piece of tech in the room.
The new iMac looks and feels no different. Literally. I've been using the new 27-inch model in the tiny bedroom of my New York apartment for almost a month, and unboxing it brought a wave of memories of the many hours I spent in that old newsroom. It looks the same, and is still just as elegant.
If you were hoping for a modern iPad Pro–like makeover, you'll need to wait a little longer. And if you were hoping for Apple's own silicon powering the iMac, that might take some time too. However, if you need a desktop that won't take up much space, and has enough power to run almost all the tasks you throw at it, this 2020 iMac won't disappoint.
Photograph: Apple It's easy to like the iMac. The (recyclable) aluminum chassis is sleek and the swooping stand is graceful. Put it next to a Microsoft Surface Studio 2 or this Dell Inspiron and it won't look quite as modern—the thick frame and portly bezels (edges around the screen) don't help—but this is still an attractive machine.
Apple's bigger mistake is not improving the stand. You still cannot adjust the $1,799 iMac's height, only tilt the screen up and down. I used my tester unit on a standing desk so I was able to get around the limitation.
The screen can't swivel side-to-side either, which makes it difficult to reach the ports on the back, especially if you have the iMac against a wall. There are a few ports, too! Compared to what you get on a MacBook Pro , the iMac feels like a Swiss Army Knife. You get a headphone jack, Ethernet jack (upgradeable to 10-gigabit), SD card slot, four USB-A ports, and two Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports. I'd have liked an HDMI and two more USB-C ports at the least (see: the cheaper Mac Mini ), but this is still a solid and versatile selection.
Apple hasn't changed the 27-inch display panel itself—you still get a 5K resolution (5,120 x 2,880 pixels), which is incredibly sharp, and the colors look wonderfully accurate. I prefer editing photos in Adobe Lightroom on this over the monitor I use with my personal PC. Movies like Project Power also look dazzling on the iMac.
Oddly, Apple still bundles in its awful Magic Mouse 2, which isn't ergonomic and is impossible to use while charging. (Pro tip: Pay the extra $50 for the Magic Trackpad 2.
It's well worth it.) The Magic Keyboard is also included, but it's nothing special.
You'll use that keyboard to type out your passwords every time you log into the iMac. You heard that right. The $700 iPhone 11 and $800 iPad Pro can magically unlock the screen by glancing at your face with their respective selfie cameras, but that's too much for this expensive all-in-one. It's not just about logging into the Mac—you can't use any biometric authentication to quickly access Apple's iCloud Keychain to log into all your favorite websites and apps, either. It's a frustrating omission.
Apple iMac (27-Inch, 2020) Rating: 8/10 $1,799 at Apple (Best Options) $1,799 at B&H $1,799 $1,749 at Adorama $1,799 $1,749 at Amazon (8 GB RAM Only) If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Apple's answer? Use an Apple Watch to log in. You can use that $200 to $400 iPhone accessory if you have it.
There are some changes to the hardware. First, the iMac comes with Apple's T2 security chip, which does a lot more than encrypt your data.
The image signal processor (ISP) in the T2 improves the picture quality of the built-in webcam. The camera itself can now shoot at 1080p (up from 720p) so you get a crisper picture. But the ISP can recognize your face to expose it better during video calls, and adjusts colors and lighting to deal with high-contrast scenes (like if you're sitting in front of a window). It's easily better than most webcams integrated into all-in-ones or laptops, though a privacy shutter for when you're not using it would have been helpful. Luckily, they're cheap to buy.
The T2 chip also improves the speakers a bit even though the hardware hasn't changed. They get really loud and sound pretty good, although the low bass performance disappoints; it's not punchy and feels very flat.
Apple did swap out the old microphones for the same ones you'll find in the 16-inch MacBook Pro—that's a good thing. These mics do an excellent job of cutting ambient sounds out, and they've been incredibly helpful when I've joined my colleagues on the Gadget Lab podcast. My voice comes through very clear. You can listen for yourself if you want to hear what the mics sound like.
The biggest improvement is one that you'll have to pay extra for: nano-texture glass. It covers the display and is the same as what's on Apple's Mac Pro Display XDR.
It's much better than a matte finish because it doesn't distort the screen's colors yet effectively eliminates all glare. I used the iMac right next to a window, and the sunlight that trickled in never distracted from my viewing experience. It's a pricey $500 upgrade, but if you know your iMac will sit near a window, snag it. Your eyes will thank you.
The screen now supports True Tone as well. Like it does on the iPhone, this shifts the screen's colors to match the ambient light around you. I've never noticed a huge difference with it on or off, but it might help your eyes adjust to the screen easier.
Apple sent me the top-of-the-line iMac with a Core i9, the most powerful graphics card (the AMD Radeon 5700XT), and nano-texture glass, which costs a bank-draining $4,500. It's overkill for most people.
There are four main configurations you can get with the iMac. You should be fine with the base 10th-gen Intel Core i5 processor, but if you do 4K video editing or other CPU-intensive tasks, go for the Core i7 or Core i9 model. What's more important is to upgrade the amount of RAM. The base 8-gigabytes is too little for such an expensive machine—16 GB is the way to go, or 32 GB if you're snagging the higher-tier versions.
Apple iMac (27-Inch, 2020) Rating: 8/10 $1,799 at Apple (Best Options) $1,799 at B&H $1,799 $1,749 at Adorama $1,799 $1,749 at Amazon (8 GB RAM Only) If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Apple's biggest improvement in performance is its pivot to solid state drive (SSD) storage. The Fusion Drives are gone in favor of the faster read and write speeds that come with SSDs, which are also more energy-efficient and reliable because they have no moving parts. You'll see super-fast load times booting up your Mac and launching apps—load screens in video games are also quicker. The base model offers 256-gigabytes, but if you need more you have to go for the middle or top-tier CPU options. You can go all the way up to 8 terabytes, which is more space than I would know what to do with.
This machine handled 4K video rendering and photo editing tasks with ease. Macs aren't known for their gaming prowess, but I was able to play titles like Mad Max and Tomb Raider at a smooth 60 frames per second at max graphical settings. I just had to drop the screen resolution to 2,560 x 1,440 or lower. I mostly wish the gaming library on Macs was stronger—I own a large library of games on Steam for my Windows PC, but the number of titles I can play on the Mac (without using Boot Camp) is pitiful.
Earlier this summer, Apple announced it will move to ARM-based processors, just like the ones inside the iPhone and iPad. This is a tectonic shift for the Mac. Apple software will theoretically have a kind of synergy across all Apple devices like we've never seen before.
Your iPhone apps will easily work on a Mac, and Apple will be able to do a lot more with its own specially crafted chips, improving energy efficiency, reducing heat, and sprucing up onboard artificial intelligence. The first ARM-based Mac will come later this year , and the entire lineup's transition is expected to take two years (expect a few more Intel-powered Macs during that time, too). Most likely, we won't see the true benefits of the transition to ARM for nearly half a decade.
It could be a bumpy road. Developers will need to ensure their apps will work as well on ARM as they do on Intel's processors—not every app you own will transition quickly or smoothly. There's also a question of just how powerful these machines will be compared to their Intel counterparts, specifically in the higher end. Thankfully, Apple says it will be supporting and releasing MacOS updates on Intel-based Macs "for years to come." The ARM transition is happening soon, but the lasting impacts might not be immediate. We believe this 27-inch iMac is a safe bet, and by the time you'll want to upgrade it, the ARM-based iMac lineup might look a whole lot rosier.
Apple iMac (27-Inch, 2020) Rating: 8/10 $1,799 at Apple (Best Options) $1,799 at B&H $1,799 $1,749 at Adorama $1,799 $1,749 at Amazon (8 GB RAM Only) If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED $1,799 at Apple (Best Options) $1,799 at B&H $1,799 $1,749 at Adorama $1,799 $1,749 at Amazon (8 GB RAM Only) Reviews Editor X Topics Shopping apple macos Hardware Computers review Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
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"Wyze Video Doorbell Pro Review: Cheap Smarts | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/review/wyze-video-doorbell-pro"
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"Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Simon Hill Gear Review: Wyze Video Doorbell Pro Facebook X Email Save Story Photograph: Wyze Facebook X Email Save Story $94 at Wyze If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 7/10 Open rating explainer The Wyze Video Doorbell Pro isn’t the best doorbell you can buy. The camera doesn’t offer the greatest picture; the tinny sound is below par; and with a chunky plastic design, it certainly is not the best-looking device. Why are we here then, you may ask? Because you can snag this doorbell for less than $100, and it nails everything you need a video doorbell to do.
If you are not intent on saving money, there is no good reason to consider this doorbell. Check out our Best Video Doorbell Cameras guide and pick something better. That said, there is a lot on offer here for the money. It comes with a chime, offers multiple installation options, provides an expansive view of your porch, and supports two-way audio. It also boasts smart detection alerts with a Cam Plus subscription , which is an essential extra at $2/month or $15/year.
Photograph: Wyze While the curved black and white plastic design resembles a chunky candybar and won't win any beauty contests, it’s not offensive. I have tested uglier doorbells (Swann and Ezviz, I’m looking at you). Like several things about the Video Doorbell Pro, Wyze has done just enough.
Installation is easy. You can screw in the doorbell mount or use adhesive (handy for renters), and you can angle it if necessary. You can also wire this doorbell into the mains or use the internal battery, so Wyze has covered all the bases. The plug-in chime in the box can't trigger your regular chime, but it does act as a Wi-Fi extender. That's handy for folks who don’t have their router near the front door.
Wyze via Simon Hill Arguably the most crucial element of a video doorbell is its picture. At 1440p, it is sharp enough to pick up details and to recognize familiar faces. The WDR (wide dynamic range) handles mixed lighting quite well, though strong sunlight can lead some areas to appear blown out.
Wyze Video Doorbell Pro Rating: 7/10 $94 at Wyze If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED The square 150-degree view is enough to cover most of my porch. There is a blind spot directly below the doorbell, but the Eufy Video Doorbell Dual ( 7/10, WIRED Recommends ) is the only alternative I’ve tested that doesn’t have the same problem. Unfortunately, that expansive view comes at the cost of a pronounced fish-eye effect that almost makes you feel like you’re looking through a peephole. I like that I can zoom in, but there is pixelation, even at the highest video quality.
The audio is good enough to get an idea of what is going on, and you can have a two-way conversation, albeit with some lag. But it does sound tinny, and any distant noises sound distorted. I like the quick responses—you can tap to tell visitors you’ll be there shortly or tell a courier to leave a package, but it would be nice to have the option to record custom responses in your own voice.
Wyze via Simon Hill Testing a variety of scenarios, I have been impressed with the accuracy and responsiveness of the Wyze Video Doorbell Pro. It never missed a visitor, the chime triggered immediately on button presses, and alerts came through to my phone relatively swiftly. There was some delay when I was away from home and some occasional lag, but Wi-Fi or data signal strength is a factor wherever you are.
Loading the live view takes between three and five seconds. I like the clear timeline underneath that shows events as blocks. Video is stored in the cloud, and playback is quick, provided you have a decent connection. You can set sensitivity and create a detection zone to reduce false positives.
With a Cam Plus subscription, you get smart detection and can choose when notifications should trigger. The smart detection AI can accurately determine whether a person, pet, vehicle, package, or some combination is at your door, and video events sport the relevant icons. There is support for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa too. I found the doorbell feed relatively quick to load on a Nest Hub (it compared favorably with the Eufy).
You get one month of Cam Plus free with the doorbell. Without it, there is a 5-minute cooldown between recordings and a 12-second limit on videos. You get free cloud storage, but there is no local storage option. It also enables smart detection and the option to filter alerts. If you don't have a subscription, any motion will trigger alerts. Without the subscription, the limits on the camera would be a deal breaker for me. Thankfully, it only costs $2 per month, or $15 ($1.25/month) if you pay for a year up front.
Another question with the Wyze Video Doorbell Pro is the battery life. Wyze says up to six months, but my testing suggests more like six weeks. My porch is quite busy, and I have set it to the highest quality with no cooldown and up to 30 seconds for recordings, so your mileage may vary. You also have to remove the doorbell to charge it. Wired doorbells generally have better performance, so it's much better to wire it in if you can.
My final concern is Wyze's lax attitude toward security and software updates. For three years, the company did not fix a major bug that may have let attackers remotely access videos and other images stored on device memory cards. It would have required a local network breach, which is unlikely (here’s the Wyze response ), but still. Privacy-conscious folks may also balk at the cloud-only video storage, although Wyze has stated that it won’t share footage without a warrant or court order.
Then there’s the fact that Wyze discontinued support for the first version of the Wyze Cam shy of its fifth birthday, giving customers scant notice. Sadly, none of this is especially unusual for the industry, and Wyze has beefed up its security team since, but it may still give you pause.
Ultimately, the Wyze brand is all about value. At $94 plus shipping, the Video Doorbell Pro delivers on that front with an impressive range of features and solid performance. It easily surpasses the other budget video doorbells I have tested, so for folks on a strict budget, I don’t see a better option right now.
Wyze Video Doorbell Pro Rating: 7/10 $94 at Wyze If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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"Sorry, Nerds: Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Adam Rogers Science Sorry, Nerds: Terraforming Might Not Work on Mars NASA/JPL/University of Arizona Save this story Save Save this story Save Listen, I get it. You want to go to Mars. I want to go to Mars. (Sort of.) And the plan—it’s good. A rocket with people. A base on the moon. Then more rockets and more people. Start making fuel on the surface, maybe depot it along the way. An outpost becomes a base becomes a domed city. And then: terraforming.
Bring dead Mars back to life, build it a new atmosphere with whatever’s left in its soil—frozen carbon dioxide, most likely—to up the air pressure, rely on greenhouse warming (you know, like climate change?) to make the place warm enough so frozen water, locked away underground, melts and comes roaring back. Oceans! Air! Maybe breathable, but at least enough so you don’t have to walk around in a spacesuit.
Boom (where the value of “boom” = 10,000 years, plus or minus). Up the gravity well we go, and we can get moving on the Earther-Martian Colony Revolution all the hard sci-fi keeps promising.
It ain’t crazypants. The astronomer Carl Sagan, an upright symbol of scientific rectitude, pitched “planetary engineering” in 1971, melting water vapor from Mars’ polar ice to create “much more clement conditions.” Twenty years later, the astrobiologist Christopher McKay rounded the idea out , suggesting that terraforming of Mars was possible as long as the planet still had enough carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen squirreled away to volatilize and pump into the atmosphere.
But a couple of scientists who study Mars are trying to burst that hermetically-sealed, oxygen-recirculating, radiation-shielded bubble. If a new analysis is correct, conditions on Mars make it impossible for existing technology to turn it into a garden of Earth-like delights.
“We were able to put together for the first time a reasonably clean inventory of the CO 2 on Mars,” says Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado and co-author, with Northern Arizona University's Christopher Edwards, of the new paper. “The bulk has been lost to space, a small amount to polar ice and shallow carbon-bearing minerals, and an unknown amount to deep carbonates.” Even adding in bits of CO 2 stuck onto rocks—“adsorbed” onto their surfaces—and a little more locked into water-molecule cages called clathrates doesn’t help. “Even if you put it all back into the atmosphere, it doesn’t add up to enough to warm the planet,” Jakosky says.
Atmospheric pressure on the surface of Earth is about 1 bar; you need about that much CO 2 on Mars to bring the surface temperature up to freezing; even just 250 millibars would change the climate there significantly. And some time in the past, Mars had that and more—geology and surface morphology strongly hint at the existence of liquid water on the planet’s surface in its distant past, which means it had to be warm enough and pressurized enough to retain that liquid water. If the planet had CO 2 in the same proportions of Earth and Venus, Jakosky says, you’d expect the equivalent of 20 bars of the stuff somewhere—mineralized as carbonate, frozen in polar ice, something. “For the past 40 years, the mantra of Mars science has been looking for carbonate deposits that had to exist, because the CO 2 had to have gone somewhere,” he says. “Down into the crust, it would be accessible, perhaps. If it went up to the top and got lost out of the atmosphere, it’s gone.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg New radar data has yielded new numbers for CO 2 near the polar caps. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has collected numbers for carbonate distribution. And the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) probe, in orbit since 2014, has been quantifying the gas lost to space. (Jakosky is the principal investigator for that mission.) And the results are ugly, if you’re a would-be terraformer.
Polar caps give you about 15 mbar. Strip-mining the carbonates give you less than 15 mbar; maybe up to 150 mbar if you really squeeze. Adsorbed gas in the regolith? Just 40 mbar even if you process all the dirt on Mars to a depth of 100 meters. “It would be almost impossible to get up above 40 or 50 millibars, and that’s not enough pressure, and not enough of an effect on temperature,” Jakosky says. “You could probably push it up by a factor of two or three, but even that doesn’t get you anywhere near the amount required to produce significant warming.” Sigh.
Or … well, maybe he’s wrong. Terraforming pioneer Christopher McKay still has hope. “The key question for terraforming is the amount of CO 2 , N 2 , and H 2 O on Mars. Unfortunately there is nothing new here to resolve this question,” McKay emails. Jakosky’s Maven results only show some of Mars’ ex-carbon dioxide leaving, not all of it. So maybe it’s still there, McKay says. “We are still highly uncertain as to the amount of CO 2 below the surface. We don’t have good data and we need to drill deeply to get it.” It's true that Mars remains full of surprises—as last week’s announcement of a possible sea of briny liquid water under the pole shows. So these newly crunched numbers don’t dampen the spirits of the real Mars jockeys. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars , says Jakosky's numbers are “systematically pessimistic.” Zubrin doesn’t need a full bar. Just give him 300 mbar. That’s, like, Mount Everest pressure. “Two hundred millibars means no spacesuits. It means you can create domed enclosures where the pressure on the inside equals the pressure on the outside,” Zubrin says.
Zubrin and McKay also point out that stretching the bounds of the hypothesis just a little paints a much rosier picture for the red planet. Artificial greenhouse gases—maybe chlorofluorocarbons made from the abundant chlorine in the Martian regolith, or something even more exotic and faster-working, a “ super greenhouse gas ,” could get the job done. If anyone knew how to make them. And release them. And make sure they didn’t destroy what little ozone is there, so that ultraviolet radiation doesn’t join the the killer cosmic radiation bombarding the magnetosphere-less Mars.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg (Related: If you believe it’s possible to terraform Mars, you also must believe in human-caused climate change, because it’s the same process. Even if it’s impossible to terraform Mars, it’s clearly possible to areoform the mid-latitudes of Earth. Because people are doing it.) (Doubly related: Water on Mars makes it slightly more likely that something is alive there already. “Terraforming” a world with indigenous life is the difference between the Genesis effect and the Genesis torpedo. That’s an ethical conversation that’ll have to happen along with the scientific and policy ones.) Which raises a triply related question: Why? “We’re getting away from the science here, but I would question the rationale for terraforming to begin with,” Jakosky says. “Having a back-up planet in case we screw this one up, or it gets screwed up from external drivers, I think is a poor argument. It’s a lot easier to keep this one pleasant and with a clement climate than it is to change the Mars environment.” Explore? Sure. Permanent scientific base? Absolutely. But cities? Oceans? Canals? Take a deep breath—because as far as anyone knows, you literally cannot do that anywhere else in the universe.
Inside the 23-dimensional world of your car’s paint job Crispr and the mutant future of food The 10 most difficult-to-defend online fandoms Behind this Xbox controller's new accessible box design After its epic breach, a look at Equifax's security overhaul Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss our latest and greatest stories Senior Correspondent X Topics Mars space carbon dioxide Matt Simon Ramin Skibba Matt Simon Amit Katwala Grace Browne Ramin Skibba Jim Robbins Matt Simon Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Lina Khan’s Plan to Liberate US Workers | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Steven Levy Business Lina Khan’s Plan to Liberate US Workers Photograph: Tom Williams/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Well before she became chair of the Federal Trade Commission , Lina Khan had her eye on the practice of employers banning workers from job-hopping to a competitor. She is no fan of noncompete clauses. Those restrictions are commonly forced on employees, sometimes without informing them. By preventing workers from taking on new, presumably higher-paid jobs, they can depress wages and opportunities for advancement. And though conservatives might believe that the FTC should keep its nose out of stuff that doesn’t involve antitrust or consumer harm, one speaker in a 2020 FTC workshop about the issue noted that the very name of the problem seemed to call for action from the agency charged with ending practices that stifle competition: Noncompetes.
So it was not exactly a shock last week when Khan announced a proposed rule that would ban employers from issuing noncompete restrictions. It was the kind of presumptuous move that people expect from Khan, who came to the post as an unabashed skeptic of the bromides of big business. Still, it’s breathtaking how many US workers would be liberated by this rule. “One in five,” she says in a Zoom call we had this week. “And that’s a conservative estimate.” She’s even got an estimate of how much those clauses cost workers: $300 billion every year.
Right before announcing the Non-Compete Clause Rule , Khan’s FTC set the plate by revealing settlements with three companies that egregiously abused the practice. One involved Michigan-based Prudential Security , which forced its low-wage security guards to sign contracts agreeing not to work in the field within 100 miles of the job site for two years—or face a $100,000 penalty. In the text of the proposal for the new rule, she notes some other examples, including one restricting workers at a sandwich shop from “selling submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita and or wrapped or rolled sandwiches within three miles of any of the chain’s more than 2,000 locations.” (Who knew that Jimmy John’s had so many stores?) Those cherry-picked cases make noncompete clauses seem supervillain-ish.
Wages aside, Khan emphasizes that noncompete clauses impose a deeper harm on the economy by discouraging innovation. “Scholars have found that one thing that really promotes innovation is the easy flow of information and knowledge,” she says. “When you lock in workers, most innovation is totally blocked.” While she admits such effects are hard to measure, she says that those scholars have documented a number of “natural experiments” that prove the point.
The most canonical natural experiment of all is the contrast between the fates of Boston’s Route 128 corridor and the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. In the 1960s, those tech regions were closely competitive. But California has a law that forbids noncompete clauses.
Some attribute at least part of Silicon Valley’s success to the freedom tech workers have to move to competing firms unencumbered, or to become founders without a year or two in the noncompete penalty box. Meanwhile, the locked-in geeks on Route 128 grew whiskers—or migrated west—while their employers at DEC tried to figure out what that PC thing was all about.
Conservatives despise Khan’s proposed rule.
The Wall Street Journal opinion page calls it “an air kiss to Big Labor.
” The lone Republican FTC commissioner, Christine S. Wilson, strongly opposes the rule, in part because, well, we’ve had noncompete clauses since forever, and anyway, who does the FTC think it is? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “I am dubious that three unelected technocrats have somehow hit on the right way to think about noncompetes and that all the preceding legal minds to examine this issue have gotten it wrong,” she writes, as an unelected technocrat herself. The US Chamber of Commerce calls the proposed change an “ unlawful action ” and claims that getting rid of noncompetes will depress innovation. Why would a company bother to invest in innovation, or even to train workers in specialized skills, if those ingrates could walk that knowledge out the door? Khan drily notes that companies in California, despite the state’s ban on noncompetes, have managed to innovate pretty well. You know … Apple, Disney, Google, the guy who invented the AeroPress.
And she’s got a message for those firms which will now face the scary prospect of losing those clauses if the FTC rule becomes official. “At the end of the day, companies have to invest in workers if they want to be successful,” she says. “You retain talent by actually competing, offering them better wages, better benefits, better training and investment opportunities. That’s how you keep retention high rather than locking workers in place.” As for the fear of workers swiping intellectual property, Khan says her rule won’t affect trade-secrets litigation, though she doesn’t want trade-secrets restrictions interpreted so broadly that they become a shadow form of noncompete.
While the non-noncompete rule is only in the proposal stage, Khan thinks that her agency has made a pretty good case. “I mean, it's a 218-page rule!” she says. “Almost a half of that is reviewing very, very carefully the empirical studies.” But she also encourages everyone with an opinion or relevant evidence to chime in during the 60-day comment period ending March 10 and says the agency will look at everything with an open mind. But with a 3–1 majority of Democrat commissioners, it’s fair to predict that the agency will get its rule in some form or other.
I ask Khan whether she views the rule as a natural experiment of her own, testing to see how much the FTC can get away with before the Supreme Court raps her knuckles. Last June, the court ruled that the EPA overstepped its bounds in regulating carbon emissions. Concurring with the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch promoted a doctrine that agencies can’t make sweeping new regulations unless Congress explicitly approves them.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Khan answers by citing Congress’ original intent for the FTC to ensure competition. “It’s an authority that, especially in recent decades, hasn’t been used as much, and I think that’s a travesty,” she says. “We as enforcers have an obligation to enforce the laws that Congress charged us with. I think we have pretty clear authority, pretty clear precedent. If we get legal challenges, we’ll be prepared to fully defend ourselves.” Khan’s case against noncompete clauses is strong. But five and potentially six of the current Supreme Court justices aren’t accustomed to bestowing air kisses on labor, big or small. Instead, they seem to take pleasure in directing sputum toward the faces of workers who assert their rights —or regulators who want to extend those rights. If they strike down Khan’s rule, she’ll have as little power to restore it as those Prudential security guards who were trapped in their miserable jobs by noncompete clauses.
In November 1998, I wrote about the rise of Silicon Valley wannabes in a Newsweek cover story titled “The Hot New Tech Cities.” As far as I can recall, noncompete clauses didn’t factor into my thinking.
How do you go about building a tech city? It’s not easy. “Silicon Valley is a set of networks and social relationships—simply plopping down a science park isn’t going to work,” says AnnaLee Saxenian, a University of California, Berkeley, associate professor in city and regional planning. The main technique of aspirants is to reverse engineer Silicon Valley … Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Whether they come from existing companies, a university or, in the case of Tel Aviv, the Army’s Central Unit for Data Processing, smart new hires are like oxygen to high-tech firms. Only places with a rich talent pool can claim to be a tech city. Case in point: after years of bragging about how even a remote location like the so-called Silicon Prairie in North Sioux City, SD, could incubate a world-class computer manufacturer, Gateway threw up its hands and relocated its administrative headquarters to San Diego. “We simply exhausted the Sioux City workforce,” explains vice president John Heubusch. On the other hand, once talent reaches critical mass, young fortune seekers flock there, secure in the knowledge that they can choose from a range of existing companies and hot startups.
Lessa writes, “All hail the oral exam!” and then ruminates about the long arc of civilization from the oral tradition to the written word and now digital communication generated by AI. “How do we frame all this?” she asks.
Thanks for the question, Lessa. Keeping to my New Year’s resolution, I won’t use your question as a prompt for a ChatGPT answer. I do feel that AI-generated content is a huge deal. But I also think we need to get a grip, particularly regarding the fear that large language models are going to enable an epidemic of cheating by people who outsource graded work to these robots.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Yes, some instructors may wind up orally quizzing students to make sure they have a grasp of material. I think that’s a great idea regardless of the chatbot issues. One-on-one tests may be more time-consuming, but the real-time interplay between teacher and student might be an educational revelation in itself. So I second your hailing of that development.
Still, I refuse to be alarmed that students might use LLMs to cheat on their work. Of course when it comes to earning credentials for jobs that affect safety—doctors, architects, plumbers, and such—we may well have to proctor exams to make sure that unqualified fakers don’t build our bridges or perform root canals. High school and college essays are another matter. The point isn’t to win a grade but to train students to think logically, express themselves clearly, and make a linguistic connection with a reader. Students pay astronomical tuition fees to learn subject matter from professors. You’d have to be a real idiot to miss out on learning those valuable skills by handing in the results of a prompt given to ChatGPT. Who’s cheating who? You can submit questions to [email protected].
Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
The 6-year-old kid who shot his teacher.
I can’t even.
The results are in from CES , from Afeela (Sony’s new car) to the $100 hearing aid.
To the dismay of scientists, the latest version of Covid has a “scarient” name : the Kraken.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Iran is using face recognition technology to ID women who eschew hijabs.
Are we finally getting rid of the parking lot ? A world without them would be paradise.
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"A Native Son of Palo Alto Thinks His Hometown Will Kill Us All | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Steven Levy Business A Native Son of Palo Alto Thinks His Hometown Will Kill Us All Photograph: David Madison/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save I meet Malcolm Harris, voice of millennials and anti-capitalist crusader, at a Brooklyn coffee shop, suggested by his publicist for a book-tour interview. He goes for a guava croissant along with his $3.75 drip. He hints this is not an endorsement of a bourgeoisie micro-luxury, but an ironic jab at the media tycoons of Condé Nast who are picking up the tab.
Harris, a spry 34, is generating considerable buzz with his book, Palo Alto.
He knows the town and the tech industry it sits at the heart of well. He grew up there, was schooled there, and even learned journalism at Palo Alto High School under Esther Wojcicki , mother of the (recently retired) YouTube CEO Susan and former mother-in-law of Sergey Brin. His antitrust lawyer father took on Microsoft in a major trademark case in the mid-aughts. But as an author, Harris is less into forging a first draft of history than using research to promote his preexisting point of view. “It’s not a work of journalism,” he says of his book. “It's a Marxist history.” Whatever you call it, Palo Alto is epic—an unrelenting 700-page indictment of capitalism, California, and the town that railroad baron Leland Stanford named in 1876 to honor a tall tree that still stands, and soon after made the home of his new university, which still dominates the region. Some might view Harris’ book as a companion piece to another doorstop-sized chunk of tech rejection, Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
But Harris thinks Zuboff’s book overemphasized the surveillance part and went too easy on the capitalism. “It doesn’t really get to the global political economy,” he says.
Harris’s book gets there, in spades. In his sprawling, colloquial narrative, history isn’t a sloppy progression but a nefarious plot serving capitalism’s theft of people’s labor and dignity. His touchstone is the system by which Leland Stanford bred racehorses, which combined genetics with a novel emphasis on pushing horses to run faster at an earlier age than was the custom. (Kind of like Move Fast and Take Things.) Harris applies this “Palo Alto System” as a metaphor throughout, branding everything from venture capital to Tiger Woods’ training methods as inhumane descendents of Stanford’s original sin. Of course, one might argue that, having been nurtured in the town’s famed school system and its tech community, Harris—a deft wordsmith and an effective marketer—is himself a product of the Palo Alto System.
Harris has no problems digging up more villains than a thousand Marvel-verses. There’s Stanford, of course, and the first president of the university he founded, David Starr Jordan, who allegedly murdered Stanford’s widow. (At least that’s what Harris thinks.) The university’s early psychology pioneer Lewis Terman not only promoted eugenics-based IQ tests, we learn, but also slept with his students. Harris even attacks well-meaning leftists like congressman/activist Allard Lowenstein for working too deeply inside the system. (Harris heaps scorn on the Grateful Dead wing of the protest movement; he’s the guy at the SDS meeting who screams at the stoners in the back of the room.) More recent scoundrels include Silicon Valley’s vaunted founders. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are smelly “jerks,” he says, but “more meaningful as personifications of impersonal social forces.” Harris has a genuine supervillain, though, in William Shockley, the Nobel-winning physicist. Shockley, father of the transistor, Stanford professor, and founder of a Silicon Valley semiconductor company, was a racist bully who fully deserves Harris’ one-word summation: asshole.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Hold on, I say to Harris, wasn’t Shockley such an outlier that his nastiness led eight of his brilliant engineers to abandon him and start their own company, Fairchild, and from there populate the Valley with other upstarts like Intel? Wouldn’t that mean that the modern system of VCs funding startups—and ultimately, companies like Apple and Google— was based on a counterreaction to the white-supremecist ethos that Harris finds tucked away in every corner of his hometown? Harris pushes back on that theory. “They made chips for bombs!” he says of the “traitorous eight.” But for all his verbiage, Harris falls short when it comes to proposing remedies for the wage exploitation, racism, ecological carnage, and suicides he sees rippling outward from Palo Alto. He doesn’t provide a prescription for ending capitalism, short of waiting for its horrors to reach a point when ragtag survivors will finally pull the plug on it. He does have an idea how to fix Palo Alto, though.
Brightening as he speaks of the concept, he wants Stanford to return its 8,000-acre campus to the 614 people recognized as remaining members of the Ohlone, which once indigenously prowled that very turf. It’s a tall order, he admits. But giving back the campus, all of it—the football stadium, the Hoover Tower, the palm trees, the hospital, the Memorial Church, the classrooms, the buildings named after Gates and other capitalists who donated some of their ill-gotten gains to the university—is “low hanging fruit,” he tells me. I opined that this was fruit even higher than the tallest branch of the Palo Alto tree. Even Harris admits that the university is unlikely to embrace his idea.
I’m actually in agreement with a lot of Harris’ critiques of systems that reward harmful market power (and of course I am with him in condemning shameful behavior toward people who are from indigenous communities, Black, or Asian). While proponents of the status quo claim that Silicon Valley is the engine of wealth creation, income inequality is worse than ever, with the Bay Area a case in point.
But my preferred solution is to constrain capitalism rather than employ Karl Marx’s playbook. I realize that significant change is difficult when the most destructive forces have the money and power to thwart reform.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But while we struggle to improve conditions for those not lucky enough to afford Palo Alto’s Craftsman homes, can’t we at least acknowledge that some of the technological benefits that have sprung from the system, tainted as it is by over-rewarded founders and exploited workers, have made our lives easier and richer? Even the scary technology of the moment, generative AI, has potential to perform amazing services for all walks of life.
Harris will have none of this. In a typical passage in Palo Alto he writes, “There’s no emerging artificial superintelligence that will automatically arbitrate the thoughts and claims of people. There is just capitalism, an impersonal system that acts through people toward the increasing accumulation of capital, the amassing of exploiting value.” Iconic words from the guy whose previous book was called Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit.
Before we break, I ask Harris if he has a favorite gadget or service. Is there something that has emerged from the evil Palo Alto System that has brought him joy? He sheepishly pulls out his Android phone and shows me Recorder , a Google app for capturing and transcribing conversations in real time. He shows me how it captures a dialog and even identifies different speakers.
My first impulse is to agree that this is an unalloyed marvel. But then I recall a Google gambit of some years ago. In 2007, the company released a service whereby dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 from a cell phone or even a landline would connect you to free voice-based directory assistance that helped you find local businesses. While this ad-free service seemed like a miraculous freebie, it was actually a way for Google to capture millions of human voice interactions to train its algorithms. Users weren’t getting something from Google—they were giving something to Google. Once the company had what it needed, it discontinued the service.
I imagine that the Recorder transcription app might be doing the same kind of thing for Google right now—exploiting our labors in the guise of helping us out. Still, despite its agenda, the service seems damn useful. So much so that it’s impressed even the most unforgiving of anti-capitalists. As does the guava croissant. “Pretty good!” says the Marxist.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Harris rejects the popular narrative that the hippies started a computer revolution. But as he knows from reading my book Hackers (which he generously cites in Palo Alto ), some pioneers of the personal computer had their roots firmly embedded in the anti-war movement. I wrote extensively about one of them, Homebrew Computer Club moderator Lee Felsenstein, who also designed the famous Osborne computer , the first portable.
Lee dropped out of Berkeley in 1967, and began alternating between electronics jobs and work in the movement. In 1968, he joined the underground Berkeley Barb as the newspaper’s “military editor.” Joining the company of such other writers as Sergeant Pepper and Jefferson Fuck Poland, Lee wrote a series of articles evaluating demonstrations—not on the basis of issues, but on organization, structure, confirmation to an elegant system … He insisted that demonstrations should be executed as cleanly as logic circuits defined by the precise schematics he still revered. He praised demonstrators when they smashed “the right windows” (banks, not small businesses). He advocated attack only to draw the enemy out. He called the bombing of a draft board “refreshing.” His column called “Military Editor’s Household Hints” advised: “Remember to turn your stored dynamite every two weeks in hot weather. This will prevent the nitroglycerin from sticking …” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Felsenstein had his effect. During the trial of the Oakland Seven, defense attorney Malcolm Burnstein said, “We shouldn’t have these defendants here … it should have been Lee Felsenstein.” Simon asks, “Which of the FAANG companies do you think is most at risk of being caught on the back foot by new and emerging tech?” Great question, Simon. A lot has been made of Google being jarred by Microsoft’s quick embrace of OpenAI’s technology. (And by the way, the FAANG acronym needs an M in there— Microsoft’s market cap trails only Apple’s among tech firms.) But Google has been working on these and other exotic technologies for years. Speaking of Apple, one may question why its Siri assistant can’t converse as eloquently as those new chatbots from OpenAI and others. But I don’t think that will affect the company’s business much. The long-term threat to Apple is that augmented reality devices will replace the need for screens, like the ones in iPhones and Macs—and that’s exactly why Tim Cook and company are exploring AR glasses.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Meta, though it does have a considerable investment in AI, has a unique problem among the tech elite: No matter how good generative AI is, the company’s core mission is to connect people , not to connect people to well-versed robots. So that’s a problem.
But since you use the “N” in your grouping, let me throw out this curveball. Maybe the entire entertainment industry will be disrupted when AI makes it possible for anyone to generate things like fantastic movie-length videos from prompts or an engine that translates words to visual scenes. Google already has an experiment along these lines. In the long term, one might even imagine that you could cast these productions with representations of living human actors (assuming they will license their images). This might be bad news for Netflix, unless the company gets ahead of that curve.
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Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
Hollywood is no stranger to snow jobs but hasn’t much known snow— until now.
Paging Malcom Harris! Capitalism is now diving to the bottom of the sea to exploit the earth.
A “surprising” study tells us to forget what’s in foods and just avoid the processed ones. Gee, I thought those tater tots were healthy.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Maybe the biggest lie of all is that lie detectors can work.
WIRED asked ChatGPT to write our policy about how we will use generative AI tools. Sorry, that was a lie that got past the detector! Actually, our editor in chief has laid out our thoughtful policy , which does not include outsourcing original content to robots.
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"'Midjourney Magazine' Is Here—and It’s Soulless | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Chris Stokel-Walker Culture Midjourney Magazine Is Here—and It’s Soulless Photograph: Sashkinw/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Midjourney Magazine has landed. The publication, a collection of thousands of AI-generated images as well as "interviews with Midjourney community members," dropped its second issue this past week.
It's a $4, 114-page coffee-table-style periodical filled with luscious, outlandish images and little else. There’s an eight-page interview, conducted by a human, with Bob Bonniol, a creative designer who has taken to using Midjourney to help iterate ideas. The Q&A aside, the title has very few of its own ideas at all.
Stage Left Will Bedingfield WIRED Podcasts Michael Calore and Lauren Goode Passive Voice Kate Knibbs The rest is just pages upon pages of large images of varying quality in varying genres, which are roughly grouped together based on theme and captioned with the prompt used to generate them, the human who gave that prompt, and the date they queried Midjourney, the generative AI platform from which its content is taken. (Midjourney is also the name of the company behind the tool, and the publisher of Midjourney.
) A profile photograph of a pensive female cyborg, all glossy, reflective metal skin, looking demurely down out of frame, sits on the same spread as what can only be described as a rejected character design for a Warhammer 40,000 figurine. The thing that seems to unite them in theme is “not human” and “a little disconcerting.” Sometimes the themes slip. While the spread on pages 78 and 79 hangs together well, with an image of a woman in a yellow hat titled “in the style of fan ho, andy Goldsworthy, alex prager, anna atkins, franco fontana, Rosalyn drelxer ::1 umbrellas ::-0.02 styled by alan lee ::-0.48” sitting alongside “don’t look at the eloquent red circle, surreal, glistening highlights –ar2:3 –s 33” (which features a woman looking at a blood-red moon), others don’t do so well. Three cats wearing bathrobes doing tai chi in a bonsai-filled courtyard sit on the page opposite an image of a man walking on the Big Apple’s sidewalk that wouldn’t look out of place on Humans of New York.
It is enormously impressive to flick through. But when you start to look for more it falls flat. “It looks like a standard glossy magazine, with nice pictures and a simple layout,” says Michelle Pegg, cofounder of Curate Creative, a UK-based creative agency, “but as a magazine is a vehicle for stories and expression, and connecting with the reader, I feel it goes no further than the set of glossy pics.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg And I agree. In part this could be sour grapes: I work in an industry that has historically relied on being able to sell magazines as a luxury product, one carefully curated for you. They’re so expensive because, as advertising revenues that subsidized many titles have disappeared, publishers have been loath to scrimp on standards. Photo editors cost money. Designers, too. Journalists and editors and fact-checkers don’t come cheap.
But AI does—at least it does when its huge computing costs are subsidized by venture capital or the beneficence of Big Tech firms, as has happened so far with the rise of generative AI.
Yet the things that cost money are the things that give magazines their quality. The ability to see something you hadn’t expected is what separates printed products from the internet. It’s why those who love magazines do so fiercely. And it’s why I’m conflicted by Midjourney Magazine.
I want to like it. But it’s soulless.
Pegg explains the problem well, comparing it to the “alt text on a website image.” Her main problem with the magazine echoes the fear many have with AI writ large. “The big thing missing in the magazine is the human connection,” she says. “No stories, no obvious reason behind the images that I want to know more about, no reason for that style.” She says that the magazine has “no depth, just pretty enough pictures.” And she has qualms—as many do with AI-generated images—about the extent to which the work skirts on the right side of copyright laws.
One photo, on page 11, shows the results of a prompt asking for a 1940s-style photograph of a woman looking like Judy Garland, which almost exactly matches her facial features, suggesting the underlying model has been trained on images of the Hollywood icon.
“How will we know if what’s produced isn’t plagiarizing an artist’s work as it draws from what’s already out there?” Pegg asks. It’s an issue that Midjourney is reckoning with right now—it’s currently facing a class-action lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement. Midjourney claims in its defense that none of the plaintiffs in the case can point to their art being used as training data.
The magazine’s tagline ends with the claim it is “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.” That’s something Pegg doesn’t necessarily dispute—some people will feel that way, she’s sure—but she does admit it doesn’t feel that way for her. “My first question on anything is always, why? What’s behind this? What’s the story?” That’s not a question AI feels well equipped to answer—at least not yet.
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Is that bad? 🌞 See if you take a shine to our picks for the best sunglasses and sun protection Topics artificial intelligence Magazines Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"How to Spot AI-Generated Art, According to Artists | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Reece Rogers Culture How to Spot AI-Generated Art, According to Artists Photograph: MirageC/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save How long will the naked eye be able to spot the difference between images made by generative artificial intelligence and art created by humans? Ari Melenciano , an artist who works at Google's Creative Lab, squints at her computer screen during our Zoom chat and scans artwork created with generative AI. “I mean, I can barely tell the difference now,” she says.
The public release of AI art tools, like Midjourney and DALL-E 2, has ignited contentious debates among artists, designers, and art fans alike. Many are critical of the fact that the technology’s rapid progress was fueled by scraping the internet for publicly posted art and imagery, without credit or compensation to the artists who had their work stolen. “I think the current model of AI art generators is unethical, because of how they collected their data—against the knowledge of, basically, everybody involved,” says Jared Krichevsky , a concept artist who designed the memeable AI-bot for the M3GAN movie.
Several artists continue to express anger about their original craftsmanship powering AI generators without informed consent. “Their works are being inputted into a machine against their will,” says Krichevsky. “This machine is specifically designed to replace us.” Companies behind AI generators will soon be in court to defend against claims of copyright infringement.
Despite the legal challenges, widespread use of AI art tools continues to cause confusion. When one digital artist recently posted their work on Reddit, they were accused by an r/Art moderator of posting an image generated with AI assistance. Is it still possible to tell, either way, at just a glance? “For the average person, I feel there isn't that much time left before they won't be able to tell the difference,” says Ellie Pritts , an artist who embraces multiple forms of generative AI in their artwork.
People often joke online that you can’t look too closely at the hands in AI art, or you’ll discover bizarre finger configurations. “The eyes can be a little bit funky as well,” says Logan Preshaw , a concept artist who denounces the use of current AI tools. He says, “Maybe they're just kind of dead and staring out into nowhere, or they have strange structures.” Logan doesn’t expect the small cues an average viewer can use for AI art identification to stick around very long either. Multiple artists we interviewed agreed that such telltale signs will become less evident as the technology progresses, and the developers behind those tools adjust them to address common complaints like dead eyes and too many fingers.
Dan Eder , a 3D character artist, thinks viewers should consider the overall design of a piece when trying to spot an AI image. “Let’s say it was a ‘fantasy warrior armor’ type of situation. At a glance, the artwork looks beautiful and highly detailed, but a lot of the time there’s no logic behind it,” he says. “When a concept artist creates armor for a character, there are things you have to take into account: functionality, limb placement, how much is that going to stretch.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg More people may need to rely on these compositional clues when attempting to identify AI art.
John Ramsey , an artist who creates cute animal illustrations, points out the lack of intentionality in AI images. “AI doesn't have any experiential basis to understand what people are, what trees are, or what hands are,” he says. “All that stuff is just being thrown in, because it was able to associate the words of your prompt with data points within the latent space that corresponds to them. This was the closest stuff that it could bring. It doesn't know why.” Savvy viewers might be able to spot the difference by identifying a clear, visual narrative.
However, what does it even mean to “spot the difference” when an artist leans into the weirdness of AI? Pritts describes their work, which was exhibited in San Francisco , as “AI collaborative art.” Pritts accompanies AI-generated visuals with AI-generated audio, morphing old clips from when they were physically able to play the cello. “As the technology expands, I am always looking for new ways to incorporate it into my practice,” Pritts says.
In the near future, Melenciano believes, most viewers will not be able to identify AI art consistently without computer assistance. “As this progressively goes out into the world, I think the most important thing is being able to detect what's real and what's not,” she says. “Not so much by the human eye, but by services.” Synthetic media detection is likely to be a hot topic of discussion as AI generators continue to proliferate.
Although most of the attention now is on rapid developments in image and text generators, tools producing AI audio and AI video are not far behind. Creative people who work in any medium will soon be forced to reckon with what exactly separates the artist from the machine. Krichevsky says, “It’s an existential crisis, for people who are prone to existential crises anyways.” You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Service Writer X Topics artificial intelligence art artists perception ethics Jason Parham Alex Winter Amit Katwala Kate Knibbs Tammy Rabideau Angela Watercutter Angela Watercutter Jennifer M. Wood Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"How AI May Be Used to Create Custom Disinformation Ahead of 2024 | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-custom-disinformation"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Thor Benson Security This Disinformation Is Just for You Photograph: Robert Brook/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save It’s now well understood that generative AI will increase the spread of disinformation on the internet. From deepfakes to fake news articles to bots, AI will generate not only more disinformation, but more convincing disinformation. But what people are only starting to understand is how disinformation will become more targeted and better able to engage with people and sway their opinions.
When Russia tried to influence the 2016 US presidential election via the now disbanded Internet Research Agency , the operation was run by humans who often had little cultural fluency or even fluency in the English language and so were not always able to relate to the groups they were targeting. With generative AI tools, those waging disinformation campaigns will be able to finely tune their approach by profiling individuals and groups. These operatives can produce content that seems legitimate and relatable to the people on the other end and even target individuals with personalized disinformation based on data they’ve collected. Generative AI will also make it much easier to produce disinformation and will thus increase the amount of disinformation that’s freely flowing on the internet, experts say.
“Generative AI lowers the financial barrier for creating content that’s tailored to certain audiences,” says Kate Starbird, an associate professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. “You can tailor it to audiences and make sure the narrative hits on the values and beliefs of those audiences, as well as the strategic part of the narrative.” Rather than producing just a handful of articles a day, Starbird adds, “You can actually write one article and tailor it to 12 different audiences. It takes five minutes for each one of them.” Considering how much content people post to social media and other platforms, it’s very easy to collect data to build a disinformation campaign. Once operatives are able to profile different groups of people throughout a country, they can teach the generative AI system they’re using to create content that manipulates those targets in highly sophisticated ways.
“You’re going to see that capacity to fine-tune. You’re going to see that precision increase. You’re going to see the relevancy increase,” says Renee Diresta, the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, says this kind of customized disinformation is going to be “everywhere.” Though bad actors will probably target people by groups when waging a large-scale disinformation campaign, they could also use generative AI to target individuals.
“You could say something like, ‘Here’s a bunch of tweets from this user. Please write me something that will be engaging to them.’ That’ll get automated. I think that’s probably coming,” Farid says.
Purveyors of disinformation will try all sorts of tactics until they find what works best, Farid says, and much of what’s happening with these disinformation campaigns likely won’t be fully understood until after they’ve been in operation for some time. Plus, they only need to be somewhat effective to achieve their aims.
“If I want to launch a disinformation campaign, I can fail 99 percent of the time. You fail all the time, but it doesn’t matter,” Farid says. “Every once in a while, the QAnon gets through. Most of your campaigns can fail, but the ones that don’t can wreak havoc.” Farid says we saw during the 2016 election cycle how the recommendation algorithms on platforms like Facebook radicalized people and helped spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. In the lead-up to the 2024 US election, Facebook’s algorithm—itself a form of AI—will likely be recommending some AI-generated posts instead of only pushing content created entirely by human actors. We’ve reached the point where AI will be used to create disinformation that another AI then recommends to you.
“We’ve been pretty well tricked by very low-quality content. We are entering a period where we’re going to get higher-quality disinformation and propaganda,” Starbird says. “It’s going to be much easier to produce content that’s tailored for specific audiences than it ever was before. I think we’re just going to have to be aware that that’s here now.” What can be done about this problem? Unfortunately, only so much. Diresta says people need to be made aware of these potential threats and be more careful about what content they engage with. She says you’ll want to check whether your source is a website or social media profile that was created very recently, for example. Farid says AI companies also need to be pressured to implement safeguards so there’s less disinformation being created overall.
The Biden administration recently struck a deal with some of the largest AI companies—ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta—that encourages them to create specific guardrails for their AI tools, including external testing of AI tools and watermarking of content created by AI. These AI companies have also created a group focused on developing safety standards for AI tools, and Congress is debating how to regulate AI.
Despite such efforts, AI is accelerating faster than it’s being reined in, and Silicon Valley often fails to keep promises to only release safe, tested products. And even if some companies behave responsibly, that doesn’t mean all of the players in this space will act accordingly.
“This is the classic story of the last 20 years: Unleash technology, invade everybody’s privacy, wreak havoc, become trillion-dollar-valuation companies, and then say, ‘Well, yeah, some bad stuff happened,’” Farid says. “We’re sort of repeating the same mistakes, but now it’s supercharged because we’re releasing this stuff on the back of mobile devices, social media, and a mess that already exists.” You Might Also Like … 📩 Get the long view on tech with Steven Levy's Plaintext newsletter Watch this guy work, and you’ll finally understand the TikTok era How Telegram became a terrifying weapon in the Israel-Hamas War Inside Elon Musk’s first election crisis —a day after he “freed” the bird The ultra-efficient farm of the future is in the sky The best pickleball paddles for beginners and pros 🌲 Our Gear team has branched out with a new guide to the best sleeping pads and fresh picks for the best coolers and binoculars Topics disinformation artificial intelligence fake news content moderation algorithms elections Social Media Andrew Couts Andy Greenberg David Gilbert Lily Hay Newman Darren Loucaides David Gilbert Lily Hay Newman Matt Burgess Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Apple’s Making Its Own GPU to Control Its Own Destiny | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/2017/04/apples-making-gpu-control-destiny"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Brian Barrett Gear Apple’s Making Its Own GPU to Control Its Own Destiny JOSH EDELSON/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save For years, a company called Imagination Technologies gave Apple the tech behind your iPhone’s Retina-ready graphics and eye-popping image processing. That relationship ended today. From here on out, according to an Imagination Technologies release, Apple will design its own underlying technology for GPUs. The reason is simple: It's officially too important to entrust to someone else.
Losing such a major customer has cratered Imagination Technologies stock; about half the company's annual revenue came from Apple. But that doesn’t mean Apple’s sudden yen for graphics independence should come as a surprise. In fact, it was inevitable.
Graphics are the future. Not only that, but they’re increasingly important in the present: Graphics processors underpin virtually all of the features and experiences that today’s tech companies scramble to lead in.
Machine learning ? GPUs. Augmented and virtual reality? Likewise. And while it often gets lost in the conversation around glitzier use cases, good old-fashioned, high-resolution gaming horsepower leans heavily on GPUs too.
The Silicon Shift That’s Transforming How Tech Giants Make Phones How AI Is Shaking Up the Chip Market Apple TV’s Plan to Succeed Where Other Tiny Consoles Didn’t That’s partly because of how graphics processors work. While traditional CPUs process things sequentially, a GPU can crunch a huge number of calculations in parallel. They’re the multitaskers of the silicon world, adept at the kind of mega-scale data churn that CPUs can only dream of.
“The GPU is being leaned on more heavily than it ever has before,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy. “With the right algorithm, you can get 10 times the performance per watt [a key measure of computational efficiency] with a GPU on machine learning than you can with a CPU.” You just can’t overstate the importance of that sort of machine learning, in which Apple has been a quiet but important player. As Backchannel reported last year, it’s what gives Siri its smarts and predicts what app you might need at any given moment. It provides the connective tissue that helps your iPhone anticipate your every need.
Despite recent inroads, that’s an area in which Apple still lags well behind Google. Apple has even ceded important digital assistant ground to Amazon, whose Alexa currently converses on dozens of devices--- including the iPhone.
Apple similarly finds itself underdeveloped in augmented and virtual reality, fields that haven’t yet gone fully mainstream but are by now at least mainstream-adjacent. It’s clearly an area of intense focus; Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told The Independent that he sees AR as “a big ideal like the smartphone,” with potentially iPhone-like impact.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft As for high-resolution, stutter-free graphics, well, those still matter, especially when your years-long quest to conquer the living room coalesces in the Apple TV , a tiny black box that strives to keep up with full-fledged consoles.
So yes, graphics are a big deal for every tech giant—and especially for Apple, which appears to have some catching up to do. They matter so much, in fact, that Apple didn’t have any other choice.
Apple has, of course, been making its own processors for years. Its Ax series SoC garners the most attention, since it’s the brain behind the iPhone. In recent years, though, Apple branched out: The Sx series supports the Apple Watch. The W1 enables the Bluetooth magic that keeps Air Pods connected. And the T1 popped up in last year’s MacBook Pro, providing an extra security layer for the Touch Bar and its fingerprint-reading Touch ID feature.
“In general, Apple likes to own as much of the underlying technology for its products as possible, and it already has a deep investment in chips,” says Jan Dawson, founder of Jackdaw Research.
If anything, look at Apple’s move into graphics as a continuation of a trend it helped start. Rather than rely on outside partners for critical components, an increasing number of large-scale tech companies have invested in rolling their own silicon.
The advantages are manifold; you can design them to work specifically with your own devices, find novel ways to differentiate, and avoid getting dragged down if something goes wrong on someone else’s watch.
Not only that, but Apple’s also good at this. Moorhead notes that the Ax series performance improves around 25 percent every year, a pace that the veteran analyst “never seen before.” That’s not to say that Cupertino will automatically replicate its mobile CPU success in the graphics realm. “I liken GPUs to black magic,” says Moorhead. “It’s really, really hard to get right. And there are fewer people who know how to do it.” In fact, that confluence of factors---difficulty of execution and scarcity of talent---signals what seems to be the biggest potential roadblock to Apple’s new core competence: whether it can design an effective graphics processor without getting sued. A lot.
That already seems to be on Imagination Technology’s mind. “Apple has not presented any evidence to substantiate its assertion that it will no longer require Imagination’s technology, without violating Imagination’s patents, intellectual property, and confidential information,” the company said in a statement Monday. And it won’t be the only rival keeping close eyes on what Apple comes up with.
“There is a big question about where Apple will get the patent licenses and so on that it needs,” says Dawson. But both he and Moorhead also suggest that it’s a highly solvable problem. Companies like ARM willingly license out technology, which could provide some legal coverage. Or Apple could apportion out some of its nearly $250 billion cash hoard to snap up a patent-loaded chipmaker. Building up IP quickly takes two things Apple happens to stockpile: ingenuity and money.
Besides, even if there is some risk, it’s worth every bit of it for Apple to control its own graphics destiny. It’s going to dig into GPUs as though its life depended on it---because increasingly, it does.
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"Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2022: New MacBooks, iOS, and More | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Boone Ashworth Gear Everything Apple Announced at WWDC 2022: New MacBooks, iOS 16, and More Photograph: Apple Save this story Save Save this story Save Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference kicked off on Monday with a keynote address, and the company used the stage to announce a bunch of new software updates and the stray hunks of hardware. Rather than sticking with the totally virtual event format Apple has been running during the pandemic, this WWDC was a strange hybrid of prerecorded video played before a live audience at the company’s California headquarters.
As expected , Apple went big on the software updates. But there’s also a new MacBook Air and a new M2 processor.
Read on for all the news Apple announced today, and check out the rest of WIRED’s WWDC 2022 coverage.
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Photograph: Apple Hey, look, there’s a new MacBook Air! Normally it would be surprising to see a laptop launched at a software event, but the long-awaited portable was expected by pundits. The 2022 MacBook Air has a new case design that’s 20 percent thinner than the previous model, and it features slimmer bezels around the screen and a smaller notch for the webcam at the top of the display. Also, big news: It has MagSafe. The magnetic charging attachment appears on the new MacBook Air in place of the Thunderbolt charging that Apple has been moving toward lately. The MagSafe addition also frees up the two Thunderbolt-USB 4 ports. Inside, there’s a new M2 chip (more on that below) that improves performance and battery life. Apple says the new Air gets 18 hours on a charge, even while playing videos the whole time. The new laptop weighs just 2.7 pounds, comes in four different colors, and starts at $1,199.
There’s also a new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M2 chip inside. Apple says it gets up to 20 hours of battery life and can be upgraded with 24 GB of memory and a 2-TB SSD. The Pro starts at $1,299. You can read more about the two new laptops here.
Photograph: Apple Apple’s new chip is built on the same proprietary hardware that the company’s been packing into most of its new machines. This second-generation chip has an 8-core CPU, which Apple says is 18 percent faster than the CPU on the M1. The GPU has up to 10 cores, and Apple claims it provides 25 percent higher performance than its predecessor. It’s going to be available in the new MacBook Air and a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Photograph: Apple The next version of the iPhone’s operating system will arrive this fall , and it’s coming with a bunch of quality-of-life updates. The lock screen is getting more customizable. Now, you can make a variety of visual changes without having to unlock the screen. Just press and hold to change colors and typefaces, or activate widgets that let you access things like your calendar, workout apps, and photos. Apple is also tying its Focus app to the lock screen. Set a lock screen for each of your Focus modes, and your notifications and apps will be filtered to show just what’s relevant to your current mode, helping you avoid those constant texts and distractions.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Apple also added some updates to Messages. Maybe most noteworthy is the ability to edit and even delete texts after they’ve been sent. The voice-to-text dictation feature is getting some enhancements too, like the ability to flow between voice and finger input, something that’s enabled by the keyboard staying on-screen while you dictate. Apple’s Live text feature has been updated to let you copy text right from videos, photos, and the translation app. In Apple Maps, a Multistop planning feature lets you plot out up to 15 different stops along your journey.
Apple has added updates to its Home app intended to make it play nice with all your devices in your smart home. Apple’s working with the upcoming smart home standard Matter , which is meant to ensure that devices from different brands communicate smoothly in your home.
There are also updates to Apple News, which gets sports scores; Apple Wallet, which has a new “buy now, pay later” option for large purchases; and Apple’s CarPlay, which will allow for custom dashboard displays on new vehicles that support them. We've rounded up all the details about iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 here.
Photograph: Apple Workout tracking got beefed up in watchOS 9. A new workout view shows a bunch more data on screen, even alerting you if your heart rate goes below your desired threshold. The Apple Watch will also be able to better measure arm and leg movements during runs to deliver more accurate stride data. Other health options are on the way too. A new feature called Sleep Stages tracks the quality of your slumber as you go through light, deep, and REM sleep. You can also use the watch to track and remind you to take medications, and you can enter meds into your profile by simply taking a photo of the label.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft There are also some aesthetic tweaks to the Apple Watch, like new faces that show off lunar calendars or real-time astrological alignments.
Photograph: Apple Apple’s new desktop operating system is called Ventura. The new features shown off at WWDC concentrate heavily on productivity. A new feature called Stage Manager keeps all your stray apps and tabs off to the side in an easily viewable sidebar and allows for quick switching between groups.
Mail and Safari are getting some efficiency upgrades too. Have too many browser tabs open? Good news, now you can share those Safari tab groups with other people and let them add in their own. There are some privacy boosts, like an on-device security feature called Passkey that lets you sign into websites and apps without using passwords.
A new version of Apple’s Metal gaming rendering engine aims to smooth out frame rates and allow more demanding, more realistic gameplay on Macs.
Apple’s goal of creating a smooth, all-encompassing ecosystem of products rolls on with its new Continuity features. Now, Macs and iPads can detect that you’re on a FaceTime call on your iPhone and offer to switch the call to one of the larger devices. And—something that will surely fit right into our Zoom-Meet-Teams present—you'll gain the ability to use your iPhone as a wireless webcam for video calls. Attaching a plastic accessory to the back of your iPhone lets you rest it on top of the screen with the lens pointing at you; MacOS automatically recognizes the phone and switches the camera function to use the handset's camera instead of the computer's webcam. Read about all the new software features in MacOS Ventura here.
Photograph: Apple The inexorable fusion of the iPad and MacBook continues, as Apple announced a bunch of features that make its capable tablet feel a little more laptop-y.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft A new screen scaling feature lets iPad users adjust the pixel density of windows in split-screen mode, squeezing more information onto the sliver of the screen that each app occupies. Most significantly, Apple is putting Stage Manager on the iPad. Just like in MacOS Ventura, iPad users will be able to organize and group windows together for better workflows. You know, just like on a computer.
New collaboration features on iPadOS 16 let multiple users work together live to talk in video chats while they edit documents. Freeform, a collaborative whiteboard app, will be available across iPad, Mac, and iPhone. There are also new collaborative gaming features as well, such as a SharePlay option that lets people play games together while sharing video. There are features aimed at artists like Reference Mode, a color-grading mode that aims to produce more accurate color representation on the screen.
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Photo: Alex WashburnWired Save this story Save Save this story Save New chips should excite you. Instead, the news reports you read whenever some new microprocessor is released are the dullest things in the world. They are obtuse and inscrutable, a mish-mash of numbers and acronyms for technologies you can't really wrap your head around.
But people do sit up and pay attention when something like the new MacBook Air is announced. Everyone gets very excited, citing Apple's claims of new capabilities, better performance specs, and longer battery life. It turns out that new Air has one of Intel's brand new Haswell chips inside, and that this new low-power processor is responsible for many of the MacBook Air's performance gains. If it takes the introduction of a high-profile Apple product to make microchips sexy, so be it.
Intel's U-series "Haswell" line of low-power, dual-core CPUs are destined for ultrabooks -- hence the "U". In fact, these chips are expressly designed to squeeze more computing cycles out of the ever-shrinking batteries inside our ever-thinning mobile computers. While the MacBook Air is already known to have better-than-average battery life (especially for a compact ultra-portable laptop), Apple says the new Haswell chips can keep the machines alive even longer. The company claims the new Haswell-powered Airs can achieve up to 12 hours of battery life on the 13-inch model, and up to nine hours on the 11-inch model. When you're working on any laptop, the battery status indicator is always a source of frustration and anxiety, so these improvements are a very big deal for Apple's svelte notebooks.
There's more to the Haswell upgrade than just power savings -- Apple also claims a modest performance boost to overall CPU speed, as well as a 40 percent speed boost to graphics processing.
But battery life is the biggie. Intel has said that the new chips will increase battery life by 50 percent during active loads when compared to Ivy Bridge chips, and that in standby mode, battery life should improve by up three times over Ivy Bridge chips. The MacBook Air comes very close to hitting those numbers, according to Apple, though specifics haven't yet been determined. Apple says that during active loads, the 13-inch MacBook Air gets a 42 percent boost to battery life, while the 11-inch MacBook Air gets a 45 percent bump. Much of this battery magic was achieved by cramming a voltage regulator onto the chip. Intel calls its voltage-regulator-on-the-chip design a FIVR ("fully integrated voltage regulator").
Another power-saving feature comes from Intel combining the chipset and CPU onto a single package. In previous generation chips, the CPU and chipset had different power requirements. If the U-series Sandy Bridge CPU was pulling 17 watts, and the chipset was pulling an additional 3 watts, the whole system was pulling 20 watts. By combining the CPU and chipset, Intel has been able to better control power usage: the entire Haswell U-series CPU and chipset pull only 15 watts.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft On the graphics end, Intel's Iris Graphics technology is supposed to offer twice the 3D performance for the U-series ultrabook chips and mid-level H-series chips. Just like the bump to battery life, the Air's graphics boost falls just shy of Intel's performance claims: around 40 percent. So while it's not the biggest boost we'll see on Haswell computers, it's still a nice boost to the Air's graphics capabilities.
One thing many Apple fans were hoping to see announced at WWDC is MacBook Air with a Retina display. But, Apple doesn't seem ready to throw its high-density display onto the Macbook Air line. Those superfine screens suck power at much higher rates, and it's doubtful that the efficiency gains from Haswell were dramatic enough to offset the battery hit a Retina display would cause were Apple to drop one into the Air line.
So while chip technology is some pretty deep math, the real-world performance boosts we'll see on the MacBook Air -- and other Haswell ultrabooks to follow -- are something everyone can understand and appreciate.
One other note about how these improvements are rolled out. Haswell is the latest "tock" chip in Intel's "Tick Tock" roadmap, the company's two-step iteration cycle. Intel begins a new cycle by releasing a smaller version of the previous chip architecture where it shrinks the CPU's design (a "tick"), then releases a different, newly engineered chip architecture (a "tock"). In this current "Tick Tock" cycle, the "tick" moved the Sandy Bridge CPU architecture to a smaller die size of 22nm, while the "tock" marked the introduction of the new Haswell microarchitecture. The next "tick," due next year, will shrink the Haswell architecture from a 22nm die to a 14nm die.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 8/10 Open rating explainer I don't know just who Apple's newest laptop is for. Rich people who fly coach? People with one laptop who want a second, gold one? Maybe. But I do know two things about the new MacBook: This is what the future of laptops looks like, and I want one very badly.
In almost every way, it's the opposite of the first laptop I ever loved, a Dell Inspiron E1505. I bought it in 2006, and it had everything: a Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigs of RAM, four USB ports, a dual-layer DVD burner. Of course, it also weighed seven pounds, and its battery had just enough juice for me to unplug it, sprint across the library, and plug it in again.
Strictly speaking, that Dell was more useful than Apple's new MacBook , which I've spent two weeks testing. I could connect a hard drive, a thumb drive, my camera, and an external mouse. I could play games, and I could even (sort of) run Photoshop. It was the hub of my digital life.
The MacBook doesn't do any of that. But then, it doesn't have to. In almost every case, the Internet has replaced our computers as the center of our digital experience; our laptops are just terminals of access, particularly suited to a certain set of tasks. More than any laptop I've ever used, the MacBook embraces that: It does a few things as well as it can, and leaves the rest to the Internet. It's running out a little bit ahead of consumers, but it's blazing the right path.
1 / 8 The MacBook has a great screen, a full-size keyboard, and a big trackpad. It doesn't have much to speak of beyond that. It's thin and beautiful, but not terribly powerful. And it hasn't got life-changing battery life. It has a new type of connector (a USB-C port), so you can't hook up any of your peripherals without tracking down an adaptor. At $1,299 (for a 1.1GHz processor, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage) or $1,599 (1.2GHz, 8GB, and 512GB) it's crazy expensive.
The future of laptops looks a lot like the MacBook, and I want one very badly.
I've been carrying it to and from work, and it's an absolutely perfect travel computer. At just a hair over two pounds and less than a half-inch thick at its fattest point, it feels more like an iPad in my bag than a laptop. It's still quite sturdy, too, this aluminum slab of a machine. I catch myself carrying it in weird ways since it's so light. But even when it's open, dangling at my side, my thumb and index finger on the palm rest, it never creaks or flexes.
It's easily the best-looking laptop I've used, but not because it's a big step forward in notebook design. It's still a wedge-shaped clamshell, available in silver, gold, and "space gray," with clean lines and rounded corners. It's the laptop, virtually perfected.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Josh Valcarcel/WIRED The standard reaction from onlookers is, "Ohmygod it's so small." I suspect it could be even smaller if Apple didn't feel the need to include a full-size keyboard. Of course it's got a 12-inch, 2304 x 1440 Retina display that is crisp, detailed and everything you've ever wanted a laptop screen to be. But I bet those bezels could have been even smaller. The keyboard runs literally edge-to-edge on the MacBook's palm rest.
About that keyboard. It is the oddest thing about the new MacBook. It largely looks like other Apple keyboards, with square black keys and white letters, but it feels completely different. Apple had to redesign the key-press apparatus to fit within the whisper-thin chassis, and came up with a slick new mechanism it calls the "butterfly" spring. It's a cross between a mechanical keyboard and tapping on glass. There's very little clack as you type, and only the slightest travel. Suddenly I understand what typewriter aficionados are always droning on about: There's something wonderful about hitting a key and having something happen. That feeling gets lost here. Yet after a day of adjusting to the new keyboard, I do type as quickly and accurately on the MacBook as on any other laptop (and far better than on a tablet).
The terrific trackpad has seen fewer changes. You might not notice the difference unless you find yourself leaning just a little too hard on its glassy surface. Then a Wikipedia page might pop up, or you might be looking at all your open Safari windows. That's Force Touch, Apple's newest input method. Use it in iMovie and it'll let you fast-forward through films with a specific gesture. Open a drawing app, and you'll notice the thickness of your lines change as the trackpad registers the amount of pressure you're applying. Something even more clever about the design: the trackpad doesn't actually click. It vibrates, in a way that tricks your brain into thinking it's clicking.
It's some crazy mental gymnastics when you think about it too much, but it really makes no difference. It isn't clicking, but it works like it's clicking.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Many of these changes were borne of necessity. Apple started with this tiny frame and soon discovered there was no room for a super-clicky keyboard or a trackpad that physically moves up and down. So the company innovated around those things.
Josh Valcarcel/WIRED But then there are places where Apple is making careful, bold proclamations about the future of the PC. The most notable example is the fact the MacBook has but one, single, solitary, lonely USB-C port on its left side. (There's a headphone jack on the right side, and that's it.) You must use that port for charging, connecting a hard drive, running a second monitor—everything.
Right now, that kind of sucks.
There are precious few USB-C devices available. And also, call me crazy, but I like to charge my computer and plug in a second monitor at the same time. I can buy Apple's $80 adapter and use my existing USB devices, but carrying a bunch of adapters sucks almost as much.
Apple's real bet is that you won't need that port for much of anything.
This is familiar move for Apple. As its computers have grown sleeker, they've grown simpler, shunning floppy disks, CDs and DVDs, FireWire, the 30-pin dock connector, and a variety of power connectors. It's always the same routine: it sucks for a while because your accessories don't work anymore, but then everyone catches up. And with USB-C, which virtually the entire consumer tech industry is committed to supporting, that will happen quickly. I'd much rather see the MacBook ship with two USB-C ports like the new Chromebook Pixel , but soon enough, even the one port won't be such a problem.
Apple's real bet is that you won't need that port for much of anything. Ditch your external hard drive, the USB-C port begs, and use Dropbox instead. (Well, it would probably recommend iCloud, but don't use iCloud.) Forget about your second monitor, because look at this screen! Oh, and that thing you do where you plug in your laptop every single damn time you sit down? Stop doing that. This'll last you all day.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED That last claim is so close to being true, too. I can work a full day at the office on the MacBook with no problems. Granted, this consists largely of using Office and a web browser, neither of which are terribly taxing. Those simple tasks are also exactly what the MacBook's Intel Core M processor is designed for. But as soon as I open Photoshop, fire up Steam, or even crank up the brightness to watch The Tudors (great show), the laptop slows and the battery drains quickly.
That's the part I can't quite wrap my head around. If the new MacBook lasted a day and a half, I'd happily forgive the muscular deficiencies. If it were more powerful, nine or ten hours of battery would be a killer number. But when the MacBook is more expensive and less powerful than the Air, and even doesn't last as long, what's it for? The answer to that question hasn't changed since we first saw the MacBook Air slide out of a manila envelope five years ago. That computer was pricey, spartan, and underpowered, and didn't make a lot of sense. Now it's the benchmark.
Much like that first Air, the new MacBook is for the future. It's a vision of our next computer, the one we'll buy when our Airs or ThinkPads can't keep up anymore. The MacBook is a work in progress: The processor and the battery will improve, and the price will drop. It won't take long. The future's getting here faster than you think.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED $1,299 at Apple Senior Staff Writer Facebook X Tumblr Instagram Topics apple laptops Mac notebooks Reviews Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"New Apple MacBook Air (2018): Price, Specs, Release Date | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Lauren Goode Gear Apple's New MacBook Air Is Thinner, Lighter, and Has a Retina Display Apple Save this story Save Save this story Save It's the MacBook update everyone has been waiting for, and it's coming more than a decade after the laptop was first introduced.
Apple today announced a new MacBook Air , one with a Retina display, slimmer bezels, and an even thinner and more lightweight body than the first MacBook Air, which had set new industry standards when it was first released. Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed the new laptop at a media event today in Brooklyn, New York, to cheers and a sea of smartphone users trying to capture the moment on their cameras.
The New MacBook Air has same overall design, but now includes a 13.3-inch Retina display.
But Apple's MacBook Air update is long overdue, and as sleek as the new MacBook appears to be, it's now entering a crowded market of slim, powerful laptops and convertible machines that attempt to bridge the laptop and tablet experience.
Apple The new MacBook Air has same overall design, but now includes a 13.3-inch Retina display, with four times the resolution as the display on the previous MacBook Air. Its bezels are significantly smaller, and somehow, the computer is thinner. Overall, it's 17 percent smaller than the last MacBook Air, and weighs just 2.75 pounds. Apple made point to say that this new machine is being made with 100 percent recycled aluminum.
It also ships with TouchID, so users can authenticate with their fingerprints. This can be used both for Apple apps, like Apple Pay, and third-party apps, like 1Password. The fingerprint sensor is built right into a key on the keyboard, and the laptop now has Apple's T2 security chip, which debuted last year. This ensures a secure boot and encrypted storage. While TouchID is new to the MacBook Air, this is not new to the broader market: Premium Windows laptops have had fingerprint sensors for years now.
The "Force Touch" trackpad on the MacBook Air is also larger, though it has the same butterfly-switch keyboard as the MacBook Pro, despite that design causing some issues for MacBook Pro users.
The new MacBook Air has upgraded speakers, and a new three-microphone array allows you to shout at Siri—and not have to shout during group video chats.
Apple The MacBook Air was first introduced in 2008, when then-CEO Steve Jobs pulled it out of a manila interoffice envelope and wowed people with its slim, chiseled design. Since then it has received a couple of updates, but its design (including its low-res display) has remained entirely the same. Apple last "updated" the MacBook Air in 2017, although it was less of a major update and more of a chipset refresh.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Meanwhile, Apple has continued to update its MacBook Pro line of laptops, aimed at professionals, as the name suggests. It also introduced a 12-inch laptop, simply called "MacBook," into the lineup in recent years. But despite the 12-inch MacBook's convenient size—it's easy to mistake for a large iPad when it's closed—it's somewhat underpowered. The new MacBook Air has an an Intel i5 8th generation (Coffee Lake) processor. This should be more powerful than the Intel Core M3 in the 12-inch MacBook, though it's not the latest and greatest Intel processor. The new MacBook Air also starts at 16GB of RAM, double the amount in its predecessor, and ships with up to a 1.5 terabyte solid state drive.
Its pricing isn't as friendly as the original MacBook Air, however. That once started at $999; this new laptop starts at $1,199. And that's for a paltry 128GB of storage. So Apple has finally delivered on an update to the MacBook Air that includes a high-resolution display, a super-thin body, and the continued promise of all-day battery life—but it's going to cost you more than you would have paid before.
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"Everything Samsung Announced at Galaxy Unpacked (July 2023): Galaxy Z Flip5, Fold5, Watch6, Tab S9 Series | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Julian Chokkattu Gear Everything Samsung Announced at Summer Galaxy Unpacked 2023 Photograph: Samsung Save this story Save Save this story Save It seems like it was just yesterday when Samsung announced its first-ever folding smartphone , and here we are at its fifth generation.
At its biannual Galaxy Unpacked event—taking place for the first time in Samsung's home city of Seoul, South Korea—the company took the wraps off of several new products. The new Galaxy Z Flip5 and Z Fold5 are its latest folding smartphones , the Galaxy Watch6 and Watch6 Classic smartwatches succeed last year's Watch5 series , and as usual, there are three new flagship tablets in the Galaxy Tab S9 series.
The hardware hasn't been dramatically updated. Many of the upgrades this year (like most years of late) are iterative. Here's everything you need to know.
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Photograph: Julian Chokkattu The fifth-generation Galaxy Z Flip5 is arguably the one device that has seen the biggest change over last year's Galaxy Z Flip4.
This is Samsung's clamshell-style flip phone—when folded, it's about the size of a compact mirror; open it up and it resembles a normal, rectangular smartphone. New here is the upgraded 3.4-inch front screen, which is significantly bigger than ever and more closely resembles what you'll find on the new Razr+ flip phone from Motorola.
Samsung calls this exterior screen the Flex Window. You can scroll through various widgets—Calendar, SmartThings home control, the weather—to take advantage of the larger display, potentially reducing the need to open up the phone as much. You can use the smaller screen to reply to messages via Quick Reply, where a full-size keyboard appears within the notification. The exterior screen can also serve as a preview, so your photo subject can see how they look as you tap the shutter to take their picture.
Photograph: Samsung Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Just as notable is the new Flex Hinge, which is present on the Galaxy Z Fold5 as well. This new hinge design allows both of Samsung's folding phones to close completely without leaving an awkward gap between the screens, just like the hinge on the Google Pixel Fold.
Samsung says the hinge has fewer moving parts than the old design, making it less prone to mechanical issues over time. Speaking of, all the glass on the phones is Corning's Gorilla Glass Victus 2 , and the phones retain their IPX8 water-resistance rating.
There's still no official rating for dust resistance, but Samsung says the hardware has “proven to be quite durable.” The company also claims it has doubled the amount of recycled materials used in the phones' construction since last year.
The Galaxy Z Fold5, the folding phone that opens like a book, has more modest changes. It still features a narrow screen on the exterior, something I now don't like as much as the wider aspect ratio on the Pixel Fold.
Samsung's skinnier screen just makes apps look a bit squished. Samsung says the Fold5 is thinner than the previous model, and the inner screen can now get up to 30 percent brighter than its predecessor for better visibility in sunny conditions. The S Pen Fold Edition stylus—the digital pen for sketching and taking notes on the screen, still a separate purchase—is now slimmer and purportedly more comfortable to use.
The software updates are notable too. Samsung says it has improved the task bar to show more recent apps, and drag-and-drop should now work with multiple fingers: Press a photo in Samsung's Gallery with one finger and use another finger to open Samsung's notes app, then drag the image into it. These software tweaks will presumably make their way to some older Galaxy Fold models, though Samsung did not confirm this.
Photograph: Samsung Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Everything else is the standard-fare upgrades on these phones. The Flip5 now comes with 256 GB of internal storage instead of 128. Both phones are powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset like the one in the Galaxy S23 series.
As for the cameras, there are minor changes to the hardware, but Samsung says the phones' image-processing engine now reduces noise, offers more accurate skin tones, and performs better overall in low light.
The Galaxy Z Flip5 is $1,000 and the Galaxy Z Fold5 costs $1,800 , and both can be preordered now. They'll officially go on sale August 11. If you preorder, you can get a free storage upgrade. For example, if you choose the 256-GB Flip5, you'll be upgraded to the 512-GB model.
Photograph: Samsung Samsung's Galaxy Tab S9 series consists of three tablets: the Galaxy Tab S9, Tab S9+, and Tab S9 Ultra. The S9 is the smallest with an 11-inch screen, the Tab S9+ follows with a 12.4-inch display, and the Ultra remains a behemoth with its 14.5-inch screen.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft The biggest change is that they all have the same Dynamic AMOLED 2X display panel, which delivers inkier blacks and better contrast. (Last year's Tab S8 was the only one of the lot that stuck to an LCD panel.) Samsung says it has also ported its Vision Booster technology from its phones—it detects ambient lighting conditions and optimizes the screen to best suit the environment you're in, much like Apple's True Tone.
The speakers are now 20 percent larger, there's IP68 water and dust resistance, and, like the new folding phones, they're powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy chipset. Samsung still includes the S Pen stylus with every slate, and now you can magnetically stick the stylus in any direction on the back of the tablet for storage and wireless charging. Previously, you had to place the pen with the tip facing a specific direction. The stylus is also rated IP68 so you don't have to fret if you drop it in the toilet bowl. (OK, fret a little; that's disgusting.) DeX mode has gotten a few improvements, including an interactive task bar. This is the mode that simulates a desktop-like interface on the tablet when you connect a keyboard. Too bad a Samsung keyboard case remains an additional purchase that balloons the cost of these already spendy tablets even further.
Seriously, they're all expensive. The Galaxy Tab S9 is $800, the Tab S9+ is $1,000, and the Tab S9 Ultra is $1,200.
Only the Tab S9+ gives you the option to add LTE connectivity. (This model costs $1,150.) Like the folding phones, these slates are up for preorder and go on sale on August 11. If you preorder, you can take advantage of the same free storage upgrade Samsung is offering on the phones. Samsung's keyboard covers for the tablets are also discounted during the preorder period.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu That leaves us with the watches. There are technically two models: the Galaxy Watch6 and the Galaxy Watch6 Classic. Each of these comes in two different sizes. You can choose the Watch6 in 44- or 40-mm case sizes; the Watch6 Classic comes in 43- or 47-mm sizes. Unlike last year, there's no Watch6 Pro model.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Longtime Galaxy Watch fans will be happy to see Samsung has brought back the mechanical rotating bezel. This spinning ring around the case of the Watch6 Classic allows you to cycle through elements of the interface without having to swipe the screen with your grubby fingers. It's just as satisfying as before, almost like spinning a combination lock to get into your high school locker.
Samsung says the screens on these smartwatches are the largest ever on a Galaxy Watch by 20 percent, with improved brightness for better visibility as well. These are also the first watches to run Google's Wear OS 4, which will make its way to more devices by the end of the year. The user experience is smoother, too, now that it's powered by a new Exynos W930 chipset.
Watch6 Classic Photograph: Samsung Samsung highlighted improvements to sleep tracking, which now offers an in-depth analysis of your sleep score to better help you understand exactly what the data is telling you. It has also partnered with the National Sleep Foundation to send out more “individualized Sleep Messages” that give you more feedback every morning, and a new Sleep Consistency tool shows you how consistent your sleep and wake times are, along with a Sleep Animal Symbol to represent your sleep type, something Google and Fitbit introduced on the Pixel Watch.
This is all paired with an enhanced Sleep Coaching system, which gives you more actions to take to get better rest.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft As for fitness, there are new personalized heart rate zones you can utilize for your workouts, a Custom Workout tool to track your own routine, and now irregular heart rhythm notifications. The Watch6 series can also track skin temperature (ahem, like the Apple Watch Series 8 ), and Samsung claims this can provide useful insights for anyone tracking their period.
Both watches are available for preorder now and go on sale on August 11. The Watch6 starts at $300 for the 40-mm model and $330 for the 44-mm version. The Watch6 Classic is $400 for the 43-mm model and $430 for the larger 47-mm size.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu These are all, from my limited time handling the hardware, fine upgrades over their predecessors. There's not much to get excited about, save for the larger screen on the Flip5, which makes it genuinely more usable in its folded state. However, I'd have liked to see Samsung make headway in bringing the cost down for its folding phones so they’re more accessible in their fifth generation. They're still too expensive for most people.
The tablets are also expensive, especially since you have to shell out for a separate keyboard cover. Unlike Apple and its iPad Air or base iPad, Samsung doesn't have any fanfare for its budget slates (they exist); I'd have liked to see the company tote out a sub-$500 tablet here and get people excited about it. Maybe another time.
For the watches, I'm mostly looking at battery life. The combination of Wear OS 4 and more efficient chipset should mean a longer-lasting battery, but Samsung's claim of up to 40 hours of operation (with the always-on display mode turned off), is lower than what it claimed with last year's Watch5 series. None of these new watches have anything close to the beefy battery that was in the Watch5 Pro, so I'm expecting to be disappointed. We'll be gearing up to test all the new hardware over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
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"Who Would Have Thought an iPad Cursor Could Be So Much Fun? | WIRED"
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"Open Navigation Menu To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Craig Mod Trends Who Would Have Thought an iPad Cursor Could Be So Much Fun? Photograph: Apple Save this story Save Save this story Save I gasped when I first saw the iPad's new cursor—a little circle, a shape-shifting blob. Because for decades, cursors have been as cursors are. The prototype to the computer mouse as we know it today was first invented by Doug Engelbart in 1964, and with it the cursor by necessity. You can see it at work in the 1968 Mother of All Demos , given in San Francisco by Engelbart himself at the Association for Computing Machinery. The cursor in the demo looks not unlike the cursor on macOS today—thin and pointy.
This desktop cursor is largely static. Its form is contingent only on context—the type of thing below it. The size and shape of the thing over which it hovers is irrelevant. If an object is text, the cursor changes to an I beam, always the same size, always the same look.
Defaults matter, and this default, set some 60 years ago, has been hard to break. That is, until this new iPadOS update.
What if you were able to invent the cursor today? Start over? A rare opportunity in the world of computers, but the iPad and its operating system have had the strangest of trajectories.
In 2010 the iPad began life designed around a nub, the tip of a finger. Imprecise and fat and stubby. The iPad’s OS was built with large tap targets, in contrast to the relatively tiny buttons and icons of a mouse-based desktop OS.
Video: Apple Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs is infamously quoted from the iPhone product launch : "If you see a stylus, they blew it.” I reference this not to chide, but to illuminate how strong a design philosophy you must have to make something new. Even in 2010, the anti-stylus ethos still made absolute sense for a new platform. The goal: Make the best possible interface for navigating with a potato. The result: a kind of clumsy—but direct tactility that required no special tools or instructions, and was easy for everyone to use.
Years later, of course, Apple would go on to make a stylus called Pencil because the company could do it well.
The $99 Pencil is a hyper-precise pointer, specialized, superb for artistic tasks. Sure, Apple made it with the world’s most awkward charging port , but then it refined the mechanism entirely in 2018 to a pitch-perfect magnetic click, a seamless wireless charge, a best-of-class stylus that’s always right where you need it—snapped to the top of your screen—with plenty of battery life.
The Pencil-as-refined-stylus delights. It's so well weighted, sits gladly in the hand, has little lag, and picks up on the slightest changes in pressure. But it works best in illustration software or photo editing. It feels ever so out of place in the general OS itself, an OS designed around potatoes—like using a laser to cut butter when all you need is a dull knife.
This is where the iPad’s support for the trackpad comes in—a middle ground between laser and potato, and a reinvention of Engelbart's pointiness. Apple has taken the desktop cursor’s familiar thin arrow and replaced it with a translucent circle. This circle has the ability to change form not only with context but with the “physicality” of the object beneath it.
Move the pointer above a button and the circle morphs into the button itself, "snapping" into it, enveloping it like an amoeba, causing it to glow in a pleasing way. What this means is that the usual precision of a trackpad isn’t required to get exact hits on navigational elements. If you own an Apple TV, you’re already familiar with this vibe—it’s how the cursor on the TV “jumps” from icon to icon with a kind of sticky momentum. Similarly, on the iPad home screen, you can “lazily” slam the cursor around and have it lock onto applications with an eerie telepathy not experienced on a desktop OS.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft The cursor itself, too, has momentum. It continues to glide on the screen for just a few short milliseconds after you stop moving your finger on the trackpad. This sounds more annoying than it is in practice. (And you can modify almost all these behaviors to your liking in Settings > General > Trackpad, and Settings > Accessibility > Pointer.) What I’ve found is that this momentum creates a subtle design cohesion between scrolling and scroll bounce, selecting applications, locking onto buttons, and just generally moving things around the screen.
The iPad is gesture-dependent for multitasking and switching between applications. But those multifingered swipes have always seemed giant and ungainly, simian, and a bit hokey at best when you have to lift an arm up to the screen. Done on a trackpad, they’re suddenly efficient and nearly instantaneous. These gestures now feel, I suppose you could say, closer.
The trackpad is always closer at hand than the screen; it sits on the same plane as the keyboard, further enhancing that sense of connection or perception between the OS and the user.
Which is odd considering how much a trackpad abstracts. A trackpad or mouse moves a disembodied thing on a remote surface. It's unintuitive. In the ‘90s, while in high school, I taught a class with a friend called Internet 101. And we quickly realized the first thing we had to teach the students (often decades older than us) was how to use a mouse. Watching them struggle was a revelation.
And yet somehow, the overall effect of using a trackpad with an iPad is more convincing than direct manipulation, less exhausting, and simply more fun.
This is in part because the cursor lives in the same virtual space as the interface in a way our finger never can. It's a native part of the system. The cursor telegraphs what's to come—what may or may not happen if you tap. It highlights what is or isn't tappable, even. An old cursor became the same I beam over any size text. The new cursor becomes an I beam the size of the text field itself, so even if the field is empty, you sort of "know" what will happen and can begin to feel the underlying logic of the interface before you dive in.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft The fun comes from the speed at which the OS responds to your gestures, the smoothness with which you can flip or riffle between entire applications. This is because of the 120-hertz screen refresh rate on all iPad Pros, which makes animation and scrolling feel more fluid. But it’s also a testament to the engineers and designers at Apple who have worked to minimize “edges” in the OS. You are never “scolded” by hitting a dead end—you reach a soft bounce at worst, and so, for me at least, exploration is encouraged. Everything feels like an object to be picked up, examined, and playfully thrown about.
I've been using the trackpad with my 2018 11-inch iPad Pro for the last four days, and I can't stop smiling. It's a boneheaded response, I know—to be delighted by something that feels so obvious and, many would say, regressive. But paths matter. And what's so strange about all of this is the multiple layers of redundancy you find on an iPad. You don't need the keyboard to type, you can type on the screen. You don't need the trackpad to navigate, you can pick up the Pencil and do the same. And if you lose that Pencil, who cares? The OS was designed potato-first, and so your dirty digits will work just fine. A bare iPad is like Monty Python's Black Knight; no arms, no legs, but the brain still works.
Thankfully, it's easy to snap all these pieces back on. And I'm glad the trackpad, along with its beautiful, playful new cursor, is now part of the package.
How UFO sightings became an American obsession A critical internet safeguard is running out of time Covid-19 is bad for the auto industry— and even worse for EVs Going the distance (and beyond) to catch marathon cheaters Uncanny portraits of perfectly symmetrical pets 👁 If AI's so smart, why can't it grasp cause and effect ? Plus, get the latest artificial intelligence news ✨ Optimize your home life with our Gear team’s best picks, from robot vacuums to affordable mattresses to smart speakers Topics ipads apple mice software Julian Chokkattu Brenda Stolyar Brenda Stolyar Adrienne So Simon Hill Simon Hill Julian Chokkattu Reece Rogers WIRED COUPONS TurboTax Service Code TurboTax coupon: Up to an extra $15 off all tax services h&r block coupon H&R Block tax software: Save 20% - no coupon needed Instacart promo code Instacart promo code: $25 Off your 1st order + free delivery Doordash Promo Code 50% Off DoorDash Promo Code + Free Delivery Finish Line Coupon Take $10 off Your Order - Finish Line Coupon Code Groupon Promo Code Groupon promo code: Extra 30% off any amount Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"How Heat Waves Are Messing Up Your Sleep | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Sabrina Weiss Science How Heat Waves Are Messing Up Your Sleep Photograph: Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save The downside of hot summer days are hot summer nights. When the temperature doesn’t drop below 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) at night—as is currently the case in many parts of Europe and North America—we become restless. We toss and turn in bed for hours, find it difficult to fall asleep, and feel groggy the next day. Sound familiar? This has mainly to do with how closely sleep and the body’s temperature regulation are linked. Our internal temperature, which is normally around 37 degrees Celsius, naturally drops a little at night to make us fall asleep. About 1 degree of heat is redistributed from the core of the body to the hands and feet, which have large surface areas and specialized blood vessels to allow this heat to dissipate. The hormone melatonin plays an important role in this: When it’s dark, melatonin is secreted from the pineal gland in the brain and serves as a timer for our internal clock. It widens the blood vessels in the hands and feet to allow the body to rid itself of heat faster and help us nod off.
That is, if the ambient temperature doesn’t mess things up. The ideal bedroom temperature for adults is somewhere between 15 and 19 degrees Celsius (59 and 66 degrees Fahrenheit), depending on the person, and the body has to work harder to regulate its own temperature when this isn’t achieved. And if the room temperature doesn’t fall sufficiently after a hot day, then our ability to regulate our body temperature is impaired. Not only do we then have trouble falling asleep, but the hot air can interrupt our sleep stages too.
Our brain cycles through four stages of sleep—awake, light, deep, and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep—for an average of 90 minutes, repeating the cycle four to six times each night.
Deep sleep is particularly important. During this stage, breathing and brain activity slow down, with the brain using this time to form and consolidate memories.
It’s also this sleep stage that leaves us feeling refreshed. Unfortunately, it is particularly sensitive to temperature.
“We know that cooler temperatures support deep sleep,” says Christine Blume, a sleep scientist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. So when our ability to regulate body temperature is impaired because it is too warm, this leads to us not getting into the deep-sleep phase, she explains. “And if deep sleep is missing, then we simply lack rest,” she says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Sleep in a hot room and the fourth stage of sleep might be disrupted too. A 2020 study found that higher bedroom temperature is also associated with a shorter duration of REM sleep. When REM sleep is interrupted, the sleep cycle has to start over again. The exact role of REM sleep is still under debate, but it’s been hypothesized to play a role in memory formation, learning new motor skills, and regulating emotions.
Being sleep-deprived over the course of several days can affect your mental state and cause you to be irritable and angry, says Michelle Miller, an associate professor of biochemical medicine at the University of Warwick. “In a heat wave, I would be more concerned about short-term effects, such as cognitive function, impaired performance and judgment, and mood changes,” she says. People who plan to drive or who work in high-pressure occupations where cognitive function is important—such as police or health services, finance, or professions that involve operating machinery—should be especially aware of these effects, she adds.
Getting less than seven hours of sleep a night regularly, the minimum benchmark for adults, has also been associated with heart problems , obesity, and type 2 diabetes , among other conditions. “People try to do short sleeps during the week and then catch up on the weekend, but you never fully catch up on the health and cognitive benefits of sleeping properly throughout the week,” says Miller.
Hot, sleepless nights also aren’t a particularly new problem. A recently published study estimates that in 2010, each person across the globe was already losing on average 44 hours of sleep per year because of hot nighttime temperatures. As a result of these lost hours, on average adults were experiencing 11 additional nights each year when they got less than seven hours of sleep.
As air temperatures continue to rise, people could be missing out on even more. The same study—which linked the sleep-tracking wristbands of more than 47,000 people in 68 countries to local meteorological data—predicted that people could be losing 50 hours of sleep per year by the end of the century. Six additional lost hours spread over the year may not seem like much, but this would result in around 13 additional short nights of sleep, which is hardly welcome.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The study’s researchers also looked at whose sleep was disrupted the most. “We hypothesized and expected that people who were already living in warm climates would be better adapted to nighttime temperature increases,” says Kelton Minor, a PhD candidate at the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Social Data Science and the lead author of the study. “What we found was the exact opposite.” A 1-degree rise at night appears to affect residents of the world’s warmest climates more than twice as much as residents of the coldest regions, according to the analysis, which was based on data from 2015 to 2017.
They also found that sleep loss per degree of warming appeared to be greater among women, the elderly, and people in low-income countries. Although the study design didn’t allow for causal inferences as to why this is so, some conjecture can be made based on existing research: Women’s bodies usually cool down earlier in the evening to prepare for sleep than men’s, so women will face hotter, more disruptive temperatures when their sleep wave kicks in. Women also have higher levels of subcutaneous fat, which may slow the cooling process at night, making controlling body temperature in heat waves harder. And as we age, the body secretes less melatonin, which may explain why older people have even more difficulty regulating their body temperature when it’s too hot.
Fans and air conditioners can help to remove heat from the body or cool a bedroom, but in lower-income countries most people do not have access to such devices. Apart from that, sleep researcher Blume has no single recipe for getting enough sleep on hot nights. “Anything that helps lower the body temperature would make sense from a sleep physiology perspective,” she says. Even something as simple as sleeping with a thin cover or without one at all, or taking a cooling hand and foot bath before bedtime, is useful—as long as the water is not too cold, because otherwise the body starts to compensate and produce heat, she says.
Removing electronic devices (which emit heat) from your room, keeping curtains, blinds, and windows shut during the day, and staying hydrated can all help too. “You just have to try things out. The main thing is to relax,” says Blume. But as you lie there sweltering, damp with sweat, that’s easier said than done.
Updated 7-16-2022 16:30 pm ET: A previous version of the article incorrectly stated that the study by Minor et al. estimated that people had lost 44 hours of sleep per year since 2010. The study actually found that people were losing that amount of sleep in 2010.
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"Watch Harvard Professor Answers Happiness Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED"
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Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Harvard Professor Answers Happiness Questions From Twitter About Released on 03/14/2023 I'm Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard University and the happiness columnist at The Atlantic.
I'm here today to answer your questions on Twitter.
This is Happiness Support.
[upbeat music] First up, @simpysamantha, who just, Found out that the key to happiness is a good sleep schedule.
Who knew? Well, the secret to happiness is not lots of sleep or even a good sleep schedule.
One of the funny things about diet, nutrition, exercise, sleep, they don't actually bring happiness, but they do lower unhappiness, which can be your problem.
Now it sounds like I'm splitting hairs, right? Most people think that unhappiness is the opposite of happiness.
It's not.
They're actually processed in different hemispheres of the brain.
Happiness on one side, unhappiness on the other.
The right side is negative basic emotions, and the way that we know this is because the left side of the face, which is controlled by the right side of the brain, is more active when we're feeling negative emotions.
So, simpysamantha, my guess is that, you know, you've got some unhappiness in your life, and look, we all do.
Some of us have higher negative feeling levels than others.
If you've got that and you want some relief, that's what's gonna bring it.
So it won't make you happier, it's not the secret of happiness, but it sure is good for having less unhappiness.
Have a good night's sleep.
Queenoffire85, Does anyone ever experience depression or uncertainty after achieving a goal? Oh, yes. Yes, they do.
This is the real riddle of happiness.
This is the satisfaction dilemma in a nutshell.
Yeah, if I get that watch, I'm gonna love it forever.
I get that car, I get that house, I get that relationship, I get that job, that money, that, fill in the blank, it's gonna be so great, and it is for a minute.
Now there's neurophysiology behind this, too.
There's a neuromodulator in the brain called dopamine, and you want it, you work for it, you're gonna get it.
Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, you got it, [grunts].
Oh. Oh, I guess I need to start again.
Here's just a little, tiny way to think about how to solve that problem.
You, I, everybody, Mother Nature teaches us that to get satisfaction and keep it you need to have more.
That's the wrong model.
Your real satisfaction is all the things you have divided by all the things that you want.
Now you can try to increase your satisfaction permanently by having more, or you can work on the denominator of haves divided by wants.
You can work on wanting less.
That turns out to be the right formula.
Shaikitoff, or shaikitoff.
Shaikitoff. I got it! Shaikitoff asks, How do I practice gratitude when all I feel is sadness, frustration, and confusion? Back to your question, how do I feel gratitude? You decide to be grateful is the bottom line.
The brain kind of is in three parts.
It's not exactly this way, but just for reference, there's the ancient part that has all your motor functions and breathing and brain stem and spinal column.
Then you got the middle part, your your limbic system that takes signals from the outside world and takes a kind of machine language and turns it into feelings that happen to you.
And then from there it delivers those signals into the neocortex of the brain, the wrinkly part on the outside of your brain, the most evolved and amazingly human of which is the prefrontal cortex, a bumper of brain tissue right behind your forehead, and it gets these emotions, and you decide what they mean and what you're supposed to do.
Now, a lot of people go through life in just kind of a limbic state being delivered emotions.
And if you're sort of a limbic person feeling like you're managed by these things, kind of hoping for the best, then your limbic system is in charge.
But that's not your only option.
You can be in charge yourself, but what you have to do is to experience your emotions in the prefrontal cortex of your brain.
And it's a very simple process, if you put your mind to it.
It's called metacognition.
Metacognition means being aware of your emotions and your thinking.
This is what humans are uniquely available to do.
My dog, Chucho, he's not metacognitive, he can't be.
He feels it. He does it.
He sees the cookie. He eats the cookie.
But I can actually deliver that information to my prefrontal cortex and make an executive decision about what I'm going to do, not withstanding my feelings.
Here's what I ask my students to do at Harvard.
I ask them to make a gratitude list on Sunday nights.
They make a list of the five things they're most grateful for, then every night during the rest of the week take five minutes and look at your gratitude list.
Sundays, update your list.
In 10 weeks, you're gonna be between 15 and 25% happier because you decided to be grateful.
You managed your emotions so they didn't manage you, and if you do that, it's a game changer.
Being in charge, you're never gonna be the same.
Hase1136, Pretty Rabbit, As I lay here, I wonder what is the true meaning of happiness? Happiness is actually a combination of three identifiable things that we all need and we all want in both balance and abundance.
These are the macronutrients of happiness.
Your Thanksgiving dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Well, your happiness is enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
Enjoyment is not just pleasure, it's pleasure with consciousness.
It's using your prefrontal cortex.
Satisfaction is the joy that you get from a job well done.
It's your reward for striving, for working, for even suffering.
Purpose, what's that? Well, that's really a question of finding coherence in your life, finding goals in your life, finding significance in your life.
If you have those three things, you have happiness.
GeeorgeStyles asks, Is happiness connected to having a purpose? Purpose is literally one of the macronutrients of happiness, but it's a weird one.
It's actually hard to figure out even what it is.
If you're feeling like life doesn't have enough purpose, that life doesn't have enough meaning, answer the following two questions: why am I alive, and for what would I be willing to die? If you don't have an answer to one or both of those questions, you're gonna have an existential crisis.
And you need to go in search with your life of an answer to those two questions.
I'm not gonna tell you what those answers are.
They're different for different people.
So yes, does purpose lead to happiness? Oh, yeah.
How do you find your purpose? Answer those two questions.
Find the answer to those two questions.
That's your assignment.
Syedafati, Can social media cause depression? Yes, so it seems.
Here's the basic bottom line.
Social media is like the junk food of social life.
High calories, low nutrition.
You're starving for this neuropeptide called oxytocin.
It bonds people together.
You get almost none of it when you don't have touch and eye contact, but you crave more and more social contact when you've been on social media for so long, so you binge it.
It's basically like binging french fries and then wondering why you feel crummy and you're gaining weight, but you're not getting your nutrition.
Here's the deal.
If you're gonna use social media, make sure it only ever compliments your in-person relationships and you use it very sparingly.
I'm talking about a total of 30 minutes a day across all platforms and never, ever, ever, ever substituting for an in-person friendship.
If it substitutes for any friendship or goes outside of those bounds, it's gonna lower your happiness.
Poojasgoyal, gotta get the middle initial, I know, How does age affect happiness? And she encloses a graph, and what it does is it looks at different ages the average happiness level in a particular country at a particular time, and it looks the same every place.
What do you think is gonna happen if, let's just say, you're in your late 20s? Are you gonna be happier or unhappier in 10 years? Now most people watching me are optimists.
Most people think they're gonna be happier at 38 than they were at 28, and the reason is because these have these goals and they think that they're gonna meet their goals.
Most people think they're gonna get happier as they get older, and it's gonna reach a max point, and then it's gonna head back down again.
The truth is exactly the opposite.
Most people, on average, they get a slight diminution of their happiness from their early 20s until their late 40s or early 50s, but it's like eight to seven on a 1 to 10 scale.
This is not a huge problem.
Noticeable but not horrible.
Then in your early 50s it turns around and you start back up again, and almost everybody actually gets increasing happiness from their early 50s until about 70, except two groups: people who have unremediated mental illness and people who have untreated substance use disorders.
So if this is you, get treated for anxiety and depression and mood disorders and get treated for addiction.
All right, next question comes from @LaughingAllTheWay, How do we adjust our expectations as we age? That's a good one.
One of the things that actually gets better and better and better as you age is your expectations about the future because you understand how things work.
There's this tyranny that people don't understand until they're usually a little after 50 years old.
They think that if they get that thing that they want, they're gonna get it and they're gonna enjoy it and it's never gonna go away, and then it does.
They also think that if something bad happens to them that they're gonna stay in a bad mood or sad or angry or afraid forever.
Here's what you learn after 50: nothing lasts and it doesn't matter.
There's a thing that all biologists talk about, which is homeostasis, the tendency of every biological process to go back to its equilibrium.
Well, it works emotionally as well.
Your anger, your sadness, your disgust, your fear, your joy, your interest, those things don't last for good and for bad.
Your heart is broken? It won't last.
When you figure that out, this is power, and if you harness that, every year's better than the last.
Or it can be.
Next up, this one's from Father Poster, and I'm just gonna take a wild guess that this is actually not a priest.
How do I transcend from my mortal anguish? Sounds to me like Father Poster is a little afraid of dying, but we're all afraid of our own version of dying.
There's a meditation that the Theravada Buddhists do.
If you go to a monastery, a Buddhist monastery, in the southern tier of Asia, especially East Asia, Thailand or Vietnam or Myanmar, you'll find pictures of corpses in various states of decay and that the monks have to ponder and they have to say, That is me and that is me.
What are they doing? They're doing what's called the maranasati death meditation.
Walk yourself through that. Why? Because you're gonna accustom yourself to that sort of surreal experience of your own death as you see it.
How do I transcend my mortal anguish? By leaning into my mortal anguish.
You beat fear by experiencing the fear and making it ordinary, and it will no longer be a ghost and it will no longer be a problem.
@thYrd_eYe_prYin, I've been working on being present.
To be present means to be here now.
That's the words that Ram Dass used to talk about.
We have a special kind of language that we put on that now, it's called being mindful.
Mindfulness is hard because we're time travelers.
You're thinking about the past.
You're thinking about the future.
The average person, by the way, spends 30 to 50% of their time thinking about the future.
That's unbelievable.
You're not here now.
Think about how much you do that, by the way.
You go on vacation, you're like, Oh, I'm gonna make some memories, so I'm gonna take a picture, picture, picture, picture, picture.
You're thinking about now as if it were the past in the future when you're looking back on the present.
That's unbelievable time travel.
We do it all the time.
Here's the problem.
You missed your life. You missed it.
You know, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, y'all have to read The Miracle of Mindfulness 'cause it starts off with him describing what it's like to wash the dishes.
I'm washing the dishes, and I'm conscious of washing the dishes because if I don't think about washing the dishes I will not be present in the act of washing the dishes.
That means working on being a mindful person.
Maybe it's with meditation, maybe it's with prayer, maybe it's with therapy, and sitting with your hands folded on your lap looking out the window of the train saying, I am sitting on the train right now because I don't wanna miss my life.
Finally, Shammeri_AAA wants to know the definition of wisdom.
Psychometricians, those who study different forms of intelligence, find that we have a thing called fluid intelligence early on.
In our 20s and 30s, the ability to focus, to innovate, to solve problems, to think quickly.
People tend to peak in knowledge professions, at their ability to solve problems, to innovate, to focus, working memory in their late 30s.
But there's another curve behind it called crystallized intelligence, which increases through your 40s and 50s and 60s and stays high in your 70s and 80s.
It's the wisdom curve.
The essence of wisdom is teaching, is mentoring.
It's leading teams. It's recognizing patterns.
It's understanding what things really mean and using that information in service of other people.
And it gets better, and if you choose to cultivate it, it can make your life as happy as it could possibly be as you get older.
That's not only the consolation of age, that's the promise of wisdom.
Well, it looks like that's all we've got for today.
Those are your questions.
I hope you've learned a lot from this time.
I hope you've enjoyed it.
I hope you're a little bit happier.
But here's the key thing, if you really wanna lock it in, here's the secret.
You gotta think about it and you gotta adopt new habits in your life, and most of all, here's the most important part, you gotta share it.
Go share it, then you'll never lose it.
Thanks for taking some time with me today.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Andy Greenberg Security It Takes Just $1,000 to Track Someone's Location With Mobile Ads Getty Images/WIRED Save this story Save Save this story Save When you consider the nagging privacy risks of online advertising, you may find comfort in the thought of a vast, abstract company like Pepsi or Nike viewing you as just one data point among millions. What, after all, do you have to hide from Pepsi? And why should that corporate megalith care about your secrets out of countless potential Pepsi drinkers? But an upcoming study has dissipated that delusion. It shows that ad-targeting can not only track you at the personal, individual level but also that it doesn't take a corporation's resources to seize upon that surveillance tool—just time, determination, and about a thousand dollars.
A team of security-focused researchers from the University of Washington has demonstrated just how deeply even someone with modest resources can exploit mobile advertising networks. An advertising-savvy spy, they've shown, can spend just a grand to track a target's location with disturbing precision, learn details about them like their demographics and what apps they have installed on their phone, or correlate that information to make even more sensitive discoveries—say, that a certain twentysomething man has a gay dating app installed on his phone and lives at a certain address, that someone sitting next to the spy at a Starbucks took a certain route after leaving the coffee shop, or that a spy's spouse has visited a particular friend's home or business.
" Regular people , not just impersonal, commercially motivated merchants or advertising networks, can exploit the online advertising ecosystem to extract private information about other people , such as people that they know or that live nearby," reads the study, titled "Using Ad Targeting for Surveillance on a Budget," which will be presented at the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society in Dallas later this month.
The University of Washington researchers didn't exploit a bug or loophole in mobile advertising networks so much as reimagine the motivation and resources of an ad buyer to show how those networks' intentional tracking features allow relatively cheap, highly targeted spying.
One test subject's commute across Seattle that the researchers tracked with ads in the app Talkatone. The dotted lines show the subject's real path, while the red dots show where the ads were delivered to the subject's phone to reveal his or her workplace, bus stop, home and local coffee shop. (The subject's actual home location has been somewhat obscured for privacy.) University of Washington Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "If you want to make the point that advertising networks should be more concerned with privacy, the bogeyman you usually pull out is that big corporations know so much about you. But people don't really care about that," says University of Washington researcher Paul Vines. "But the potential person using this information isn't some large corporation motivated by profits and constrained by potential lawsuits. It can be a person with relatively small amounts of money and very different motives." The research team used 10 Moto G Android phones for testing, a mobile banner ad they created, and a website that served as the landing page if someone clicked on the ad. Then they spent the minimum $1,000 deposit to place orders with a so-called demand-side platform—think Facebook, Google AdWords, MediaMath, Centro, Simpli.fi, and others—that allows ad buyers to specify criteria like where their ad appears, for which unique phone identifiers, and in which apps. (They declined to reveal which specific DSP they tested, arguing that nothing about that platform was more intrusive than many others in the industry.) They then used that DSP to place a geographic grid of location-targeted ad buys around a 3-mile-square section of Seattle, which for their tests they set to appear on the popular ad-supported calling and texting app Talkatone.
Every time a target phone had Talkatone open near one of the coordinates the researchers had set on their grid of ad buys, the ad would appear on it, the researchers would be charged 2 cents, and they'd receive confirmation from the DSP of approximately where, when, and on which phone the ad had been shown. With that method, they they were able to follow their test phones' locations within a range of about 25 feet any time the phone user left an app open in one location for about 4 minutes or opened it twice in the same location during that time span. They registered just a 6-minute delay in the ad network's real-time reporting of the phone's location. Following a human test subject carrying each test phone over seven days, they were able to easily identify the person's home and work address, based on where their target stopped. (See the map above.) "You’re using whether or not your ad gets served as an oracle to tell you whether or not an event happened: that this particular device was at this location," Vines says. They note that the DSP they used never flagged their behavior as unusual or cut off their account for attempting targeted surveillance.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That tracking method has a couple of serious limitations. The target would have to have a certain app open on their phone at the time they're being tracked, so that the ad can appear. And to track a specific phone, any ad-buying spy would have to know a unique identifier of the target phone, known as a mobile advertising ID, or MAID.
But to get around the first of those limitations, a spy could buy ads against a range of popular apps in the hope that one of them would show the ad. And for the second, the researchers suggest a variety of ways to obtain that MAID, including placing an "active-content" ad that uses javascript to pull the MAID from a phone at a certain location, then use that identifier to continue to track the phone with normal ads. Perhaps more simply, they point out, MAIDs can also be intercepted by someone on the same Wi-Fi network as the target phone.
"It’s not a particularly high bar to entry for a very, very highly targeted attack," says Adam Lee, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who reviewed the University of Washington study.
'It’s not a particularly high bar to entry for a very, very highly targeted attack.' Adam Lee, University of Pittsburgh A domestic abuser could, for instance, obtain a spouse's MAID from their home network, and then use it to closely track him or her by placing ads in apps he or she uses frequently. A person on a laptop at a nearby table at Starbucks could steal your MAID when you connect your phone to Wi-Fi, or a coworker could do the same in the office, and then either could receive periodic pings of your location whenever you see an ad they've placed. Or an ad buyer could use active-content ads to gather the MAIDs of the people at a specific location, like a protest, or users of a potentially sensitive app like gay-dating apps or religious apps—plus other demographics provided by ad networks—and then track those targets' movements. (The researchers found that their DSP did in fact allow them to place location-based ads on the most popular gay-hookup app, Grindr, though they didn't test whether it implemented other protections to prevent continuous location tracking of users. Grindr didn't immediately respond to WIRED's request for comment on the researchers' work.) Even without obtaining a MAID, some broader spying remains possible. The researchers say they were able to count the number of people with the Grindr app or the Muslim-focused app Quran Reciter installed at a target location without knowing any unique identifiers.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg There's no simple fix for the targeted surveillance that mobile ad networks enable, the Washington researchers say, without reducing ad networks' fine-grained tracking ability in general. But they hope that their findings will at least draw attention to the surveillance capabilities of ad networks, beyond the amorphous notion of companies gathering data about users en masse.
"This is so easy and it's industrywide," says Tadayoshi Kohno, a computer science professor at the University of Washington who worked on the study. "We want to enable a broader conversation about the risks of online advertising when anyone can become the adversary." DSPs could, perhaps, attempt to detect and block advertising that's targeted at the individual level or that seems designed specifically to track a particular user. More ad networks need to collect MAIDs over encrypted connections, protecting them from interception, they say. And more experimental tools like differential privacy could make it possible to collect data from large groups of users while masking the sensitive details of any one person.
And in the meantime, for users who'd rather not become a target of that individualized ad-spying? Perhaps consider which ad-supported apps you use, when you use them, and what they reveal about you. It may be worthwhile to pay for the premium version of that gay-hookup app rather than allow it to be populated with ads that can potentially track your sexual orientation and location. Every ad that you see on your smartphone, after all, can in some sense see you too—and so can the unknown entity that paid for it.
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"The Social Network Doling Out Millions in Ephemeral Money | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Andrew McMillen Backchannel The Social Network Doling Out Millions in Ephemeral Money Illustration by Lauren Cierzan Save this story Save Save this story Save Every time you log onto Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to share a photo or post an article, you give up a piece of yourself in exchange for entertainment. This is the way of the modern world: Smart companies build apps and websites that keep our eyeballs engaged, and we reward them with our data and attention, which benefit their bottom line.
Andrew McMillen is a freelance writer and the author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations About Drugs.
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Steemit , a nascent social media platform, is trying to change all that by rewarding its users with cold, hard cash in the form of a cryptocurrency. Everything that you do on Steemit—every post, every comment, and every like—translates to a fraction of a digital currency called Steem. Over time, as Steem accumulates, it can be cashed out for normal currency. (Or held, if you think Steem is headed for a bright future.) The idea for Steemit began with a white paper, which quietly spread among a small community of techies when it was released in March 2016. The exhaustive 44-page overview wasn’t intended for a general audience, but the document contained a powerful message. User-generated content, the authors argued, had created billions of dollars of value for the shareholders of social media companies. Yet while moguls like Mark Zuckerberg got rich, the content creators who fueled networks like Facebook got nothing. Steemit’s creators outlined their intention to challenge that power imbalance by putting a value on contributions: “Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward…[the] individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.” A minuscule but dedicated audience rallied around Steemit, posting stories and experimenting with the form to discover what posts attracted the most votes and comments. When Steemit released its first payouts that July, three months after launch, things got serious.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are only worth whatever value people ascribe to them, so there was no guarantee that the tokens dropping into Steemit accounts would ever be worth anything. Yet the Steem that rolled out to users translated to more than $1.2 million in American dollars. Overnight, the little-known currency spiked to a $350 million market capitalization—momentarily rocketing it into the rare company of Bitcoin and Ethereum, the world’s highest-valued cryptocurrencies.
Today, Steem’s market capitalization has settled in the vicinity of $294 million. One Steem is worth slightly more than one United States Dollar, and the currency remains a regular presence at the edge of the top 20 most traded digital currencies.
It’s a precipitous rise for a company that just 18 months ago existed only as an idea in the minds of its founders. More than $30 million worth of Steem has been distributed to over 50,000 users since its launch, according to company reports. It’s too early to know whether Steemit can hold onto its users’ interest and its market value. But its goal—upending a model built by social media giants over decades of use in favor of a more populist system—is significant in itself. By removing the middlemen and allowing users to profit directly from the networks they participate in, Steemit could provide a roadmap to a more equitable social network.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Or users could get bored or distracted by something newer and shinier and abandon it. The possibility of a popped bubble looms over every cryptocurrency, and the bubbles are filled with both attention and speculative investment. Steemit’s value is based on money that its founders have virtually willed into existence. Fortunes could vanish at any moment, but someone stands to get rich in the process.
The creators of Steemit didn’t set out to build a social network. When Ned Scott and Dan Larimer first spoke on the phone in mid-2015, having previously chatted online, they began dreaming up new applications for blockchains—the distributed, verified databases that back today’s wave of digital currencies. Scott, a former financial analyst, was fascinated by the economics that drive cryptocurrencies. Larimer, a computer scientist, already had cryptocurrency bona fides, having developed an ambitious exchange called BitShares.
At first, they were intrigued by the idea of using the hivemind trust of blockchain to create an insurance network. They wondered if they could incentivize a group of people to pool money, which could then be drawn upon by an individual in the event of an accident or emergency—a kind of libertarian backup plan.
More From This Edition Hugh Howey Steven Levy Susan Crawford Scott Rosenberg But in order to make it work, they needed a way to hold people accountable. Their plan hinged on building a robust communications forum. By linking people’s accounts to their discussions, each individual’s claims and communications would be both able to be audited and unable to be censored. The community would have to evaluate each claim, voting the best posts towards the top. That’s when the wider scope of their project took shape. “We realized that this is going to look a lot like Reddit,” says Scott, “but people are going to get paid for participating.” Today, Scott supports the software development of the platform and currency from the company headquarters in Austin, Texas, alongside a distributed team of 30 staff worldwide. Larimer resigned from his role as chief technology officer in March, but continues to post on Steemit; the pair published a joint statement announcing the separation, emphasizing that they “parted on amicable terms without dispute.” At its core, Steemit looks a lot like any other social network. The most popular tags include things like photography, life, travel, art, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Steemit itself. Scott’s favorite success stories involve people who use the site to both document and fund their explorations—like a travel blogger and photographer (username: @heiditravels ; 5,904 followers) who has funded her trips around the world with Steem, and a young man in West Africa ( @infovore ; 3,479 followers) who started a popular “Steem magazine” about the currency and its pop-up community. @infovore’s regular posts earned him a global audience, as well as the equivalent of $41,000 in virtual currency during his first few months on the site.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg According to Scott, Steemit boasts an “incredibly small” number of trolls, which he argues is because of the cash incentive. (It could also be due to the relatively small community, which includes around 350,000 registered accounts as of September.) “For the first time, there’s an opportunity cost to trolling,” says the cofounder. “Every second that someone spends trolling, they’re potentially damaging their reputation and preventing themselves from earning any Steem.” New users are also encouraged to introduce themselves to the community, and take a photo of their smiling face in order to verify their account, which may be a contributing factor: So far, it seems that anonymity is less prized on Steemit than on Reddit, where “throwaway” accounts are commonplace.
You might have heard of Bitcoin mining operations where racks of powerful PC processors are dedicated to solving complex mathematical problems. Their electricity bills are enormous, but so are the potential rewards for mining Bitcoin, which is likely to become more valuable—and more difficult to mine—as the currency approaches its maximum circulation of 21 million coins. In these more traditional “proof-of-work” blockchains, tokens are distributed to the people whose computers are performing work, known as “miners.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Steem is designed differently. Its tokens are generated at a fixed rate of one block every three seconds, which are then distributed to various parties in the system based on the blockchain’s rules. These parties are incentivized to compete in ways that add value to the network: 75 percent of new tokens are distributed to the “rewards pool” for content creators and curators, while smaller fractions are awarded to vested token holders.
Steemit’s function is rooted in transparency. Every action a user makes on the site is logged on the blockchain—meaning every vote, currency transfer, and even the amount of Steem sitting in someone’s digital wallet, is public and viewable.
There are two ways of earning Steem. The first is the “rewards pool” of digital tokens, which incentivize content creation and curation—in other words, quality posts that are upvoted by other users. The second is a voting system which assigns a value to each post and comment on the platform, and then distributes Steem tokens to the creators based on the wisdom of the crowd. The more users that upvote your posts on Steemit, the more Steem you’ll earn, which can then be cashed out of your wallet using an online currency exchange.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Much like Reddit, Steemit is an experiment in group psychology, where the human hivemind (as tallied by individual votes) determines the most popular—and lucrative—content. In contrast, invisible but immensely powerful algorithms control what each Facebook and Instagram user sees in their feeds. “On Reddit, there are people who put up links and posts, and are then accused of ‘karma whoring’—or basically, selling out to get these worthless internet points,” says Scott. “On Steemit, people show up to earn Steem. They’re posting and linking stuff, and they’re earning something that’s worth real money.” A weighted voting system places greater value on votes placed by the older accounts of early Steemit adopters, who appear to be in it for the long haul. While a vote from a brand-new user may be worth a fraction of a cent, a vote from someone who has gained a reputation for posting quality content each day might be worth several dollars. In turn, the valuable votes of these “power users” attract votes from a crowd of less powerful users seeking to cash in on the action, like ants jostling for crumbs.
Under this weighted model, individuals who have contributed the most to the platform have greater influence over how other contributions are scored—which creates a snowballing effect. Some have argued that this system unfairly benefits the founders and those in their network who were attracted early to Steemit. Case in point: My own year-old Steemit account ( @andrewmcmillen ) is worth approximately USD $1,300. As of early October Ned Scott’s account, @ned , has an estimated account value of USD $5.08 million.
Cryptocurrency has been all but impenetrable for the average person, who might struggle to recall a handful of computer passwords, let alone safely store the proverbial keys to a virtual bank account. It exists as an esoteric part of modern life. Only the most motivated users have educated themselves about how to trade real dollars for currency, and then use said currency to their advantage. The rise of Bitcoin, for instance, is linked to black markets; once someone figured out it could facilitate the distribution of drugs through sites on the dark web, like Silk Road, the currency’s value took off. Today, Bitcoin accounts for a little less than half of the entire cryptocurrency trading market; its nearest competitor is Ethereum, which occupies about 20 percent.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But the most innovative aspect of Steem is its lack of friction: New users can join Steemit and begin earning tiny fractions of the currency immediately, without even understanding how it works. It is designed as cryptocurrency for the masses, as the barriers to entry are almost nonexistent. Unlike Bitcoin, there’s no messing around with coin traders or triple-checking long, fiddly strings of letters and numbers to make sure you’re not accidentally sending your money to a Nigerian prince.
On Steemit, you simply create an account, start browsing the site, upvote posts you like, and search for the gaps you might fill by posting something of your own. If you’re not creative, no problem: You can curate by spotting high-quality posts soon after they’re published and voting for them as a kind of early investor, before the rest of the crowd arrives.
Related Stories Uncategorized morgenpeck Scott Rosenberg Gabriel Nicholas The gamification is by design. “It’s as though all the users are playing a social media game, and they’re earning points based on how well they participate,” says Scott. Years ago, he loved playing the action role-playing computer game Diablo II. “All of the characters in the game had the ability to cast spells, and they had ‘mana’ they could use,” he says. “As they cast spells, the mana was used up; over time, it regenerated, so they could cast more spells later. Voting power here works similarly: Users come back every day to try and vote better, and level up.” With about 40 votes per day at their disposal, regular Steemit users are playing a lottery, where the outcome is turning internet points into real-world dollars. It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme; it requires significant time investment before you start to see more than a few cents per day.
As with any other cryptocurrency, the virtual bubble that surrounds this idea could pop at any moment, and all of that time and effort you’ve invested into earning Steem could be worth nothing—which happens to be precisely the same amount you earn when you post on any other social media website.
Topics Backchannel Blockchain cryptocurrency bitcoin Social Media Andy Greenberg Brandi Collins-Dexter Angela Watercutter Steven Levy Lauren Smiley Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Issie Lapowsky Business The Man Who Saw the Dangers of Cambridge Analytica Years Ago At the University of Cambridge, John Rust warned about the potential danger of Facebook data manipulation years before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke.
Dave Porter/Alamy Save this story Save Save this story Save In December 2014, John Rust wrote to the head of the legal department at the University of Cambridge, where he is a professor, warning them that a storm was brewing.
According to an email reviewed by WIRED, Rust informed the university that one of the school’s psychology professors, Aleksandr Kogan, was using an app he created to collect data on millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. Not only did the app collect data on people who opted into it, it also collected data on those users’ Facebook friends. He wrote that if just 100,000 people opted into the app, and if they had an average of 150 friends each, Kogan would have access to 15 million people’s data, which he could then use for the purposes of political persuasion. Journalists had already begun poking around, and Rust wanted the school to intervene, arguing Kogan’s work put the university at risk of “considerable media attention, almost entirely adverse.” “Their intention is to extend this to the entire US population and use it within an election campaign,” Rust wrote of Kogan and his client, a little-known political consulting firm that went on to be called Cambridge Analytica. He predicted, “I simply can’t see this one going away.” Six months later, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States, and launched a campaign that depended, in part, on Cambridge Analytica's work. His shocking election victory in 2016 thrust the firm into the spotlight, earning the company contracts with major commercial clients around the world. But more than a year after it helped get Trump in the White House, news broke that Cambridge Analytica had hired Kogan to harvest the data of tens of millions of American Facebook users without their consent, stoking international outrage from those who felt their privacy had been violated.
As director of the university’s Psychometrics Centre, which researches and develops psychological tests, Rust knew better than most how Facebook data can be manipulated. It was researchers in his own lab who first discovered that Facebook likes could be used to deduce all sorts of sensitive information about people’s personalities and political persuasions. But he says the goal of that research—and the goal of his 40 years in the field—was to warn the world about what can be done with this data and the dangers of allowing it to be so freely traded.
Years later, Rust takes no joy in being proven right. “We could see even four years ago the potential damage it would do, and there was nothing we seemed to be able to do to stop it,” he says today.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Facebook now acknowledges that Kogan collected the Facebook data of up to 87 million Americans and sold it to Cambridge Analytica. But as CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his team attempt to clean up the mess, Rust is hardly being hailed as some digital Paul Revere. Instead, his entire department and indeed his entire legacy have been swept up with both Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, accused by Zuckerberg himself of committing the very violations that Rust tried to warn against. “Our number one goal is to protect people’s data first and foremost,” says Ime Archibong, Facebook’s director of product partnerships. “We have an opportunity to do better.” Since this spring, when news of the scandal broke, Facebook has cut off several apps used in the Psychometrics Centre's work, and in his testimony before Congress earlier this year, Zuckerberg suggested that “something bad” might be going on within the department that required further investigation from Facebook. In written responses submitted to Congress last week, Facebook mentions the Psychometrics Centre 16 times, always in conjunction with Kogan, who briefly collaborated with the researchers there.
Now Rust and others await the results of Facebook’s investigation, which is itself on hold until UK regulators finish their own probe. And yet the Centre’s reputation already seems inextricably bound to the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Rust fears the condemnations from Facebook have not only tainted the legacy of the department, they’ve brought a key area of research to a halt at a time when Rust insists it’s needed most.
Rust believes the science of psychometrics was born to be abused. At its most basic, it is the science of measuring people’s mental and psychological traits, strengths, and weaknesses. It forms the basis of the SAT and IQ tests, but it’s also been used for all manner of dark and disturbing ends, including eugenics.
“It has a long history of being a science where people say, ‘Gee, that’s amazing. It will change the world.’ And it does, but it doesn’t always change the world in the way people want it,” Rust says. He is sitting near the almost empty row of computers that comprise the tiny Psychometrics Centre. It is modestly demarcated with a slender sign resting on a cabinet and a finger puppet of Sigmund Freud and his couch propped up against it.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Early on in his career studying psychology, Rust saw how IQ tests and other aptitude tests were being used to justify discrimination against people of different races, locking them out of academic and professional opportunities. One of his PhD professors, Hans Eysenck, was a prominent proponent of the theory that people of different races were genetically predisposed to have different IQs.
“There I am stuck in a field, which was shifting increasingly to the right, and I felt there was an obligation to show their approach was wrong,” says Rust, who describes himself as an anarchist in his younger years. “Most people would have just given up the field. I didn’t. We had to address all of these issues.” Rust launched the Psychometrics Centre at the City University of London in 1989, where he initially focused on developing an intelligence test for children. In 2005, he moved the Centre over to the University of Cambridge. But it wasn’t until 2012, and the arrival of an academic named David Stillwell, that the Centre’s work shifted to social media. While most personality tests are administered by schools and businesses that never show participants their results, Stillwell had developed an app that let people take personality tests on their own and get their results. They could also opt to share the results with the researchers.
The app, called myPersonality, also plugged into Facebook and asked participants to opt in a second time if they wanted to share data from their Facebook profiles. It only collected data on the people who opted in, not their friends, and included a disclaimer saying the information could be “stored and used for business purposes, and also disclosed to third parties, for example (but not limited to) research institutions, in an anonymous manner.” MyPersonality went viral, amassing data on 6 million participants between 2007 and 2012, about 30 to 40 percent of whom opted to share their Facebook data with the researchers, as well.
'We could see even four years ago the potential damage it would do, and there was nothing we seemed to be able to do to stop it.' John Rust, Psychometrics Centre director In March of 2013, Stillwell, a PhD student named Michal Kosinski, and a third researcher coauthored a now-famous paper showing that Facebook likes, even for seemingly benign topics like curly fries or thunderstorms, could be used to predict highly sensitive details about people, including their sexual orientation, ethnicity, and religious and political views. At the time, Facebook Page likes were still public, meaning anyone could collect information on everyone who liked a given Page on their own. The paper warned about how these predictions “could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life,” and concluded with a plea for companies like Facebook to give users “transparency and control over their information.” “It was scary. It still is,” Rust says of the revelation. “It showed communicating through cyberspace was completely different than writing a letter or having a telephone conversation. A digital footprint is like your avatar.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg He says he hoped the research would bring about a crucial conversation about what it really means to let algorithms run amok on massive data sets—conversations that were happening largely behind closed doors in Silicon Valley. The paper, and the ones that followed, earned the two researchers, and the Psychometrics Centre, international attention. In 2013, the Centre began licensing the anonymous data set for other academics to use, leading to dozens of additional research papers. Those collaborators had to agree to terms that prohibited sharing the data, de-anonymizing the data, or using it for commercial purposes.
At the time, Facebook’s terms prohibited selling data or transferring it to data brokers. But it did allow app developers to share data for academic research under certain terms. Users needed to consent to their data being shared, for example. The developer also needed to ensure other researchers agreed to the terms before accessing it—you couldn't just put data sets up on a website. Facebook's terms are continually changing, and according to the company, developers are bound by the most current ones. That means the onus is on developers to ensure their apps are aligned with Facebook's terms every time they change.
Rust says the researchers in his department believed they were complying with all of Facebook’s rules, and back then, at least, Facebook seemed to agree. In 2011, the company paid Stillwell’s way to a workshop on using Facebook data for research, and in 2015 a Facebook researcher invited Kosinski to present his findings at a conference in Long Beach, California. If there was anything wrong with the work they were doing, neither Facebook nor the researchers seemed aware of it.
Around 2012, Rust invited Kogan, a new professor working in the university’s psychology department, to meetings at the Psychometrics Centre. Kogan had established the Cambridge Prosociality and Well-Being Lab, which, according to its website , studied “the psychology of human kindness and well-being.” “I thought this was a nice, hospitable thing to do to a new university lecturer,” Rust says of the invitation. He now regrets that decision.
Kogan became intimately familiar with the Psychometrics Centre’s data and its models. He was even an examiner on Kosinski’s dissertation. Then, in 2014, a year after Stillwell and Kosinski’s landmark paper published, Kogan and his partner Joe Chancellor launched a firm called Global Science Research. Its client, SCL Elections, which would later become Cambridge Analytica, wanted Kogan to work with the Psychometrics Centre to amass Facebook data on the American electorate and use it to understand people’s personality types for the purpose of political advertising. But the relationship between Kogan, Stillwell, and Kosinski soon soured over contract negotiations that would have left the Psychometrics Centre with a much smaller cut of the budget than originally discussed. Stillwell and Kosinski ultimately declined to work with Kogan, and afterward, the university made Kogan sign a legal document saying he wouldn’t use any of the university’s resources—including its data—for his business.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “We were just watching in a state of, what’s going to happen next?” Rust says.
What happened next is the stuff of breaking news push alerts. Over the summer of 2014, Kogan and Chancellor recruited people to take personality quizzes through their own app called This Is Your Digital Life, thereby gaining access to their Facebook data, as well as the data on tens of millions of their friends. Over the course of that summer, they amassed 50 million records, 30 million of which they sold to Cambridge Analytica, despite Facebook’s prohibition on selling data. Kogan maintains he didn’t know he was violating Facebook’s policies, which he argues the company rarely enforced anyway.
As Rust heard reports about this work from PhD students working with Kogan, he says he grew increasingly concerned. Meanwhile, a reporter from The Guardian , who went on to break the story about Kogan’s methods in 2015, had begun poking around, asking Kogan, Stillwell, and Kosinski questions. According to emails reviewed by WIRED, the researchers worried their work would be lumped in with Kogan’s. It was in this environment at the end of 2014 that Rust decided to sound the alarm.
Last Thursday, Aleksandr Kogan walked into a Starbucks just south of Central Park, looking almost Zuckerbergian in his light blue t-shirt and jeans. He and his wife have been living in New York since November, a few months before, as he puts it, “one hell of a nuclear bomb” dropped into their lives. In March, The New York Times and The Guardian broke the story that made Kogan front-page news and led to him being banned from Facebook. The company has repeatedly cast Kogan as a singularly bad apple, while the armchair sleuths of the internet have used his Russian heritage and research ties to St. Petersburg University to accuse him of being a Russian spy. Now, as he waits for his contract at Cambridge to run out, he knows his career in academia is over.
“This has not worked out well for me, personally,” Kogan said loudly, unafraid of who might be listening. This is one of many reasons that he’d make a lousy spy, he added with a laugh.
Kogan has already testified in front of the UK Parliament, and on Tuesday, he’ll appear at a Senate hearing, too. When he does, he’ll have a different version of events to share than Rust. For starters, Kogan has claimed repeatedly that Stillwell and Kosinski's methods for predicting people's personalities and other traits weren’t actually all that effective. That argument is hard to square with the fact that Kogan sold these very methods to Cambridge Analytica. And yet, he’s not alone in making this claim. Other academics and political operatives familiar with Cambridge Analytica’s work have accused the company of selling snake oil.
'This has not worked out well for me, personally.' Aleksandr Kogan Kogan also says Rust is writing a revisionist history of events, casting himself as a whistle-blower when, Kogan says, the Psychometrics Centre wanted in on the project up until contract negotiations fell through. “When they couldn’t get back on the project, they were like, ‘This is an ethics violation,’” Kogan says, pointing a finger sarcastically in the air. “Never has greed served someone so well.” He concedes, though, that everyone would have been better off had they heeded Rust's warning back then, and admits that, as he gobbled up this data, he was blind to the risk of public backlash. He’s sorry about the chaos he’s created. “If people are upset, then fuck yeah, we did something wrong,” he says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But he insists he’s not the only one. The core problem, he argues, is not that “something bad” is happening at the Psychometrics Centre but, rather, that Facebook gave user data away to developers with minimal oversight for years. The company celebrated the work of Stillwell and Kosinski. It hired Chancellor, Kogan’s partner, for its research team and gave Kogan specially curated data sets for his own research. Now Facebook insists it was unaware that any of these academics may have been violating its policies.
“We had no understanding of the violations that were potentially happening,” says Facebook’s Archibong. “This is the reason we’re stepping up and investigating now.” The University of Cambridge says it is also conducting its own investigation. “We are undertaking a wide-ranging review of all the available information around this case,” a spokesperson said. “Should anything emerge from this review, or from our request to Facebook, the university will take any action necessary in accordance with our policies and procedures.” But for Kogan, all of this scapegoating of academics is a distraction. If Cambridge Analytica had collected the data itself, instead of buying it from Kogan, no one would have violated Facebook's policies. And yet, tens of millions of people would still have had their data used for political purposes without their knowledge. That's a much deeper problem that Facebook---and regulators---have to grapple with, Kogan says. On this point, at least, he and Rust see eye to eye.
Since this spring, Facebook has suspended just about every app the Centre ever touched. Archibong says the company will reinstate the apps if it finds no evidence of wrongdoing, but that may take a while. Facebook is waiting out an investigation by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office before it proceeds with its own audit. In the meantime, the company won’t comment on what policies the Psychometrics Centre’s apps may have violated, leaving the researchers in limbo.
“It’s just a PR exercise for them to say they’re doing something about it,” says Vesselin Popov, director of business development for the Psychometrics Centre.
In addition to myPersonality, Facebook suspended an app called YouAreWhatYouLike, developed in partnership with a company called CubeYou, which has also been banned from Facebook. (Facebook says CubeYou was suspended because of a "suspected violation independent of its ties to the Psychometrics Centre.") That app showed people their personality predictions from Facebook likes, as well as predictions about their friends. According to CubeYou, the company never sold that data, but did get consent from users to store and share it anonymously, in accordance with Facebook’s terms at the time. Facebook also suspended a tool developed by the Centre called Apply Magic Sauce. It included both a consumer-facing app that let users take personality quizzes, as well as an API, which businesses could use to apply the Centre’s personality-profiling models to their own data sets. The Centre says it never sold that data, either, though it did make money by selling the API to businesses.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Facebook’s decision has radically reduced the Centre’s ability to conduct social media research at a time when, Popov argues, it’s crucial. “One of Facebook’s responses to this is we’ll set up an academic committee that we’ll fund and staff with senior academics we consider worthy,” Popov says. “That, for me, is a total farce. It’s the people causing the problem pretending they’re the ones fixing it.” Of course, Facebook’s leaders might say the same thing about the researchers at the Psychometrics Centre. In May, The New Scientist reported that login credentials to millions of anonymized records collected by Stillwell and Kosinski had been uploaded to Github by an academic at another university.
1 That’s despite the strict terms Stillwell and Kosinski had in place. The data was exposed for four years. Stillwell declined to comment for this story, but in a statement on the app’s website, he wrote, “In nine years of academic collaborations, this is the only such instance where something like this has occurred.” The breach shows there's no guarantee that even well-meaning developers can keep Facebook data secure once it's been shared.
If Rust accepts any blame, it’s that he didn’t foresee earlier that the research his department was conducting into the misuse of Facebook data might, in fact, inspire people to misuse Facebook data. Then again, even if he had, he’s not entirely sure that would have stopped him. “I suppose at Cambridge if you know the research you’re doing is groundbreaking, it can always be used for good or bad,” he says.
Rust says he is cooperating with the Information Commissioner’s Office’s investigation. The Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, wouldn’t comment for this story beyond saying she is “considering the allegations” leveled against the Centre by Facebook. Rust, however, says he’s submitted emails and other documentation to Denham’s office and has tried to impress upon them the urgent need for regulatory oversight in the field of artificial intelligence.
“AI is actually a bit like a psychopath,” he says. It’s adept at manipulating emotions, but underdeveloped morally. “In a way, machines are a bit like that. They’re going through a stage of moral development, and we need to look at how moral development happens in AI.” Of course, when Rust says “we,” he’s not talking about himself. He plans to retire next year, leaving the work of solving this problem to a department he hopes can survive the current turmoil. At age 74, he’s already seven years past retirement age, but still, leaving with things as they are isn’t easy. From behind his horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes look melancholy, and maybe even a little glassy, as he reflects on the legacy he’s leaving behind.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “You come into academia trying to solve the world’s problems and work out how the brain works,” he says, hands clasped over crossed legs. “Ten years into it you say, ‘Well I’ll just get my next grant for my next paper, because I want to be a lecturer or senior lecturer.’ It’s only when you come out the other end that you say, ‘Where’s my life gone?’” He came into this field to start a conversation about why using data to sort and organize people could end up tearing them apart. As frustrating as it’s been to be cast as a villain by some of the most powerful people in the world, he’s thankful this long-awaited discussion around data privacy has finally begun.
“We’re at a point where it could go in so many different directions. It could be a big brother, Brave New World combination where a group of individuals can completely control and predict the behavior of every single individual. Or we have to develop some regulatory system that allows these newly created beings to evolve along with us,” he says. “If anything we’ve done has influenced that, it will have made it worthwhile.” 1 Update: 10:23 AM ET 06/19/2018 This story has been updated to clarify that a subset of Stillwell and Kosinski's data was exposed, not the entire database.
How Facebook groups became a bizarre bazaar for elephant tusks Pulling water out of air? Grab some ions or a weird sponge Larry Page's flying car project suddenly seems rather real Encyclopædia Britannica wants to fix false Google results PHOTO ESSAY: The trailblazing women who fight California's fires Hungry for even more deep-dives on your next favorite topic? Sign up for the Backchannel newsletter Senior Writer X Topics cambridge analytica Facebook privacy Will Knight Kari McMahon David Gilbert Amit Katwala Andy Greenberg David Gilbert Khari Johnson Joel Khalili Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Yes, Big Platforms Could Change Their Business Models | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Zeynep Tufekci Business Yes, Big Platforms Could Change Their Business Models Storytk Save this story Save Save this story Save In 2006, Jeffrey Hammerbacher, then a recent Harvard graduate in math, became an early employee at a budding company founded by another Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg.
After building Facebook’s data team, Hammerbacher left the company in 2008. He later explained his decision to leave, despite the company’s tremendous growth, in what has become one of the most iconic quotes of the second internet boom: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” he told Businessweek.
“That sucks.” Twelve years and hundreds of billions of dollars of market capitalization later, that’s still true, and it still sucks. The few companies that control our digital public sphere—Facebook, Google, and Twitter—are all driven by the same fundamental business model, and it has only grown more pernicious over time. To microtarget individuals with ads, today’s platforms massively surveil their users ; then they use engagement-juicing algorithms to keep people onsite as long as possible. By now it’s clear that this system lends itself to authoritarian, manipulative, and discriminatory uses: hiding job openings from minorities and older people; discouraging certain groups from turning out to vote; and allowing anyone with even a small budget to find audiences that are, say, anti-Semitic. It also creates an environment conducive to viral misinformation and hate speech.
Related Stories Disinfo Wars Zeynep Tufekci Special Issue Zeynep Tufekci Book Excerpt Billy Gallagher Does it really have to be this way? There’s simply no plausible alternative, the platforms say. People will never pay to use platforms, we are told. Plus, dissidents and activists in the developing world rely on these free services to get their word out. How can we abandon them? And anyway, the platforms say, we can’t provide the fundamental features that our users value without all this data collection. It’s simply too late to change.
I say to all this: phooey, phooey, and phooey.
First, people all over the world pay for communication services. We regularly pony up for Netflix, HBO Go, and Amazon Prime on top of sizable monthly payments for cell phone plans. A Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter without a bloated ad infrastructure could likely charge far less than these other services, which after all have to buy or produce their content. Before WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, it charged users $1 per year, and it was growing like a vine.
As for dissidents: Yes, online platforms offer important alternatives to censored mass media across the globe. But authoritarians have figured out how to defang most of these benefits for activists, while adroitly using social media for their own ruthless purposes. Like other politicians and world leaders, Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte has received guidance from Facebook’s staffers on how to get the most out of the platform. He has also made an art of using Facebook to viciously hound and harass his opponents.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It’s true that requiring users to pay even a nominal amount for web services can offer governments a means to track activists. But that’s not an insurmountable problem. In many countries, cell phone minutes are already used as payments that can be transferred between people; a similar system could easily be developed for people who’d rather not pay for Twitter with their credit cards. Other potential solutions could lie in cryptographic payment schemes that offer almost cashlike privacy, along with the ability to audit transactions. But ad revenues keep the platforms too well-fed and happy to pursue much innovation in payment methods.
What about the argument that data collection is what allows platforms to give users more of what they want? Again, try innovating. There have been exciting developments in, for example, encrypted databases—systems that might allow platforms to perform operations on data without ever decrypting it. That way, tech companies could garner aggregate insights without conducting individual surveillance.
Surely researchers would be excited to explore areas like these, given more incentive to do so. But right now these projects remain relatively marginal. Why should the platforms bother when they can siphon up data, throw it against machine learning algorithms, and laugh all the way to the bank? In case I sound like I’m making impossible demands from the sidelines, consider that Apple makes money directly from its users. The company has developed specific ways to lock itself out of user data while making very functional phones, and it has made these privacy protections a selling point. Apple may not be a perfect company, but it shows that other models work.
Sure, raking in all this personal user data is convenient. Lead is also a great ingredient in paint.
Sure, raking in all this personal user data is convenient. Lead is also a great ingredient in paint: It’s anticorrosive, it helps coats dry faster, and it increases moisture resistance. But we outlawed lead in paint anyway, for reasons that now seem chillingly obvious. We can do the same for data surveillance.
Because of course it’s not too late. Seat belts became mandatory in the US in 1968, many decades after cars became an integral part of life. Airbags and emission controls didn’t develop overnight either—or without prodding. Regulation forced the car industry to innovate. It developed safer and cleaner cars, and remained quite profitable.
To force platforms out of their rut, some regulation will be necessary. We should discuss outlawing invasive digital tracking (online or offline), merging data from multiple sources, and maybe even microtargeting based on surveillance.
We could also use some real employee pressure. After a walkout in November, Google and Facebook put an end to forced arbitration for sexual harassment claims. The powerful employees of Silicon Valley could also become advocates for user privacy. They could demand to start using their formidable brainpower for something other than getting people to click on ads. Because it really does suck.
Zeynep Tufekci (@zeynep) is a WIRED contributor and an associate professor at the University of North Carolina.
This article appears in the January issue.
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Everything you need to know about data breaches Tumblr's displaced porn bloggers test their new platforms A SpaceX delivery capsule may be contaminating the ISS How to use Apple Watch's new heart rate features An eye-scanning lie detector is forging a dystopian future 👀 Looking for the latest gadgets? Check out our picks , gift guides , and best deals all year round 📩 Get even more of our inside scoops with our weekly Backchannel newsletter Topics magazine-27.01 data privacy Facebook Google twitter Advertising apple Social Media David Gilbert Amit Katwala Kari McMahon Will Knight Andy Greenberg Andy Greenberg Khari Johnson Joel Khalili Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Amazon’s Alexa Upgrades Give the Voice Assistant New Listening Powers | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Tom Simonite Business Amazon Wants Alexa to Hear Your Whispers and Frustration Amazon Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Human-computer interaction Personal assistant Company Amazon End User Consumer Source Data Speech Technology Natural language processing (Whispers) Amazon Alexa will soon notice if you talk to it sotto voce—and whisper its response back to you.
The new feature, announced by Amazon today alongside new devices including a microwave and a wall clock at an event in Seattle , is one of several upgrades that will expand the virtual assistant’s ability to listen to and understand the world around it. Alexa will able to confer with you in whispers before the end of the year, making Amazon’s voice-operated assistant less awkward to use when someone is, say, sleeping nearby. Amazon will also make its assistant capable of listening for trouble such as breaking glass or a smoke alarm when you’re away from home, a feature called Alexa Guard.
Meanwhile, inside Amazon’s labs, the company is experimenting with giving Alexa a rudimentary form of emotional awareness, enabling it to listen for the sound of frustration in a person’s voice.
“We’re going beyond recognizing words,” says Rohit Prasad, the vice president who heads work on the artificial intelligence inside Alexa’s guts.
Alexa was an oddity when it launched late 2014 inside the cylindrical Echo speaker. It’s now the leader in a rapidly expanding voice assistant market. Amazon is cagey with numbers but says it sold tens of millions of Echos and other Alexa-enabled devices last holiday season, and rivals like Google and Apple have competing smart speakers of their own.
Alexa evolved out of advances in an approach to artificial intelligence called machine learning , which Amazon used to train algorithms to recognize speech from across the room with surprising accuracy. Tech giants have ramped up investment in machine learning research over recent years to create new products, profits, and streams of valuable data. Amazon’s plans for Alexa depend on Prasad’s team figuring out how to apply the fruits of that research to make the assistant smarter.
The new Alexa Guard feature coming later this year is an example of that. To activate it, you’d call out “Alexa, I’m leaving” or a similar phrase to an Echo or other device on your way out the door. If an Echo device in a home hears the sound of breaking glass or a smoke alarm while you’re gone, it will send a notification to your phone with a link to a recording of the sound that triggered the warning.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg To avoid having to create a live audio link between a person’s home back to Amazon’s computer systems, Prasad’s team had to create a new machine learning system that lurks inside an Echo device and constantly listens for alarms or smashing sounds. It was trained in part by using audio samples from public domain video, although Prasad says development also involved some destruction. “We did break a lot of glass in our internal testing,” he says.
Amazon’s audio algorithms are also getting better at tracking subtleties of speech. Prasad’s team trained algorithms to detect the characteristically sibilant sounds of whispered speech to enable the whispering upgrade coming later this year. He says Alexa will also get better at analyzing the prosody of what people say. When combined with better text analysis, that will make tasks such as creating shopping lists easier, because the assistant can understand that “add paper towels, peanut butter, and bananas” to my shopping list refers to three separate items, not just one.
Greg Roberts, a managing director who tracks personal technology at consultants Accenture, says Amazon and its rivals can use AI upgrades to drive increasing usage and adoption of their assistants. When Accenture surveyed users of Echo-like devices late last year, nearly 70 percent already reported using their smartphone less and their voice assistant more. “Similar to what we saw when smartphones first arrived, people move to the interface that’s easier to use,” Roberts says.
There's also evidence that some consumers are wary of advances in the ability of devices like the Echo to listen to them. “Privacy concerns have already been a barrier to adoption,” says Werner Goertz, a research director at analyst Gartner. “The industry’s efforts have not been sufficient to remove this misapprehension.” Goertz spoke to WIRED after disabling the Alexa installed in his hotel room to stop it from hearing its name and butting into the conversation.
The frustration-detection feature Amazon is testing in the lab illustrates the tension between using AI to improve functionality, and privacy. For some consumers, Amazon knowing about their feelings in addition to their purchases and music choices might seem a step too far.
Prasad declines to say when that emotional awareness technology might be deployed but argues it could help Alexa learn from its mistakes and would be used only to improve the assistant. His group is planning to launch a system later this year that does that using other cues, such as when a person interrupts and rephrases their query or command. “We put customer trust first,” Prasad says.
Tech disrupted everything. Who's shaping the future ? Google AI tool IDs a tumor's mutations from an image The diplomatic couriers who deliver America's secret mail This popular Mac app was basically just spyware PHOTO ESSAY: The mission to count New York's whales Get even more of our inside scoops with our weekly Backchannel newsletter Senior Editor X Topics artificial intelligence amazon alexa Amazon Paresh Dave Steven Levy Will Knight Will Knight Will Knight Aarian Marshall David Gilbert Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"How Under Armour Plans to Turn Your Clothes Into Gadgets | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter David Pierce Gear How Under Armour Plans to Turn Your Clothes Into Gadgets 1 / 9 Save this story Save Save this story Save Under Armour was founded on a simple idea: Make athletes better. To do that, it's turning human performance into a big data problem. The company is betting on the notion that the right hardware, the biggest dataset, a lot of machine learning, and powerful motivational tools can make everyone better, faster, and stronger. It's betting that technology doesn't exist solely to make us lazy, to bring everything to our door with the push of a button.
The centerpiece of that bet is a $400 kit, announced today, called Healthbox, that provides a scale, an activity tracker wearable, and a chest strap for measuring your heart rate. The company also is updating Record, its mobile app, making it a 24/7 real-time barometer of your fitness and health. These tools, combined with three apps Under Armour has purchased in recent years, provide the most comprehensive ecosystem of fitness products yet made.
This represents a huge investment for the company, which started 20 years ago in a basement in Washington, DC. The company's spent more than $700 million since 2013 in a bid to correct a fundamental flaw in every activity tracker and app: None of them communicate with each other. Apps don't sync with other apps. Or with most hardware. And switching from one device to another means starting everything anew. There are too many walled gardens, and, worse, most of these apps and gadgets do a lousy job telling you what to do with all this information.
Under Armour is taking a comprehensive approach where everyone else is piecemeal. It worked with HTC on the hardware---a round glass scale, a fitness tracking wristband, and a heart-rate monitor. It also worked with Harmon Kardon on a pair of Bluetooth heart-rate-tracking headphones sold separately for $250. Everything is black and red and kind of aggressive looking in that way Under Armour loves so much. And it all connects effortlessly to the Record app at the touch of a button.
It's all very slick. Very polished. But that's not the point. Someone almost certainly will make hardware that's cooler. Smaller. Whatever. Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank doesn't mind. In fact, he welcomes it. He's committed to supporting anything anyone wants to make for Record.
All he wants is your data.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft That's to be expected. After all, it's all any tech company wants. And make no mistake: Under Armour is a tech company. That's where this entire industry is headed. The days of dongles and wristbands and straps are numbered. It won't be long before our fitness trackers are built into our shoes, our shirts, our headphones. Everything will be a fitness tracker, and every fitness company will be a tech company.
This is the idea that drives Plank. He doesn't care what his designers and engineers and product people will do when Adidas or Nike makes a cool new shoe, or how they'll compete with the next Fitbit. He's thinking bigger than that, and he's prepared to fend off all comers.
All comers. "What are we going to do if--- when ---Apple makes a shoe?" he asks. "We're contemplating right now, 'How do we make it before they do?'" The Under Armour story is a lot like a Tom Hanks movie: An all-American kind of guy walks on to a college football team and becomes beloved captain. He hates how sweaty his workout shirt always is, decides to make something better, and develops it in Grandma's basement. His company grows and grows, eventually signs deals with Steph Curry and Tom Brady, and outfits everyone from the Notre Dame football team to Marvel superheroes. He earns billions making the world a better place where everyone looks cool and every drop of sweat is wicked. Roll credits.
Under Armour is growing like mad, and has been for years, but remains well behind Nike and Adidas. "It's going to take five, 10, 20 years before they're ahead of Nike," says Adam Thorwart, a senior research associate at Strategy Analytics. It's hard to out-swoosh the swoosh, after all. Plank hates being in third. He won't even say Nike's name, referring to the company only as "our competitor." He's got no more love for Adidas, which he once called "our dumbest competitor" on live television.
And so you can imagine that Plank is determined---you might even say obsessed---with shortening that takeover timeline. He knows his best shot at it is to stay ahead of the curve. After all, even though everyone makes a compression shirt these days, Under Armour still dominates the category. "I think first-mover advantage is a very powerful thing," he says. Of course, being the first mover means knowing your next move.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Plank's been planning his next move for quite awhile.
He telegraphed it almost five years ago, when hundreds of college football players descended on Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for the NFL Combine.
Quarterback Cam Newton and wide receiver Julio Jones were two of the hottest players on the field, and everyone was watching them. At some point during the week, they all asked the same question: What is that on their shirts? Newtown and Jones were decked out in skin-tight red tank tops with a yellow ... thing in the middle. It looked like a big round bug with an Under Armour logo.
It was the E39, a workout shirt with a removable biometric sensor measuring just about everything they did on the field. When Jones ran, his shirt tracked his heart rate, acceleration, and power. When Newton jumped, it measured the G-forces and and power in his vertical. Under Armour believed players could use the data to train better, and scouts could use it to make smarter decisions. No one had seen anything like it.
https://youtu.be/fPy_P1gXp4w The idea started with a conversation four or five years earlier, when Plank grabbed a 0039, the compression shirt he'd created in his grandmother's basement, the one that launched the Under Armour empire, and handed it to his head product guy, Kip Fulks. Make it electric, he said, not really knowing what that meant. "I just said, 'Make it electric,'" Plank says. The project didn't pan out. Oh sure, it was cool as hell, and it worked. But it was so complicated and expensive it wasn't the slightest bit feasible.
Yet it changed everything at Under Armour.
Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Plank made his next move in 2013, when Under Armour execs visited MapMyFitness to talk about an acquisition. It was a first for Under Armour, but Plank needed a tech team, fast. MapMyFitness had maybe 20 engineers. A good start. But Plank also needed a leader, which he saw in MapMyFitness CEO Robin Thurston. Plank knew Thurston's crew was up to the task; after all, he used its MapMyRun app every time he ran.
During his presentation, Plank played a 60-second ad called Future Girl.
In it, a pretty young woman wakes up in an austere, colorless apartment and walks to her dresser. She removes an Under Armour garment, one of an identical dozen, each neatly folded. The time, the weather, and the day's schedule instantly appear in a projection before her. She dons the magical glittering fabric, which conforms perfectly to her body. As she does yoga, following prompts projected on her window, her vital signs appear on her sleeve. Later, with two taps, her outfit changes color and transforms from a full-body leotard into a stylish running outfit. It's effortless, automatic, and oh so futuristic. "All you must provide," a voiceover says over soothing beats, "is the will to make it happen." Future Girl is Plank's opus. He's been crafting the concept for a decade. He directed every shot of the video, which took forever because there was no budget for an ad for a product that doesn't exist. "I made this for you," he told Thurston privately. "I need you to come help me build this." Now, almost exactly two years later, Thurston sits in his large office at the company's Connected Fitness headquarters in Austin, Texas. He's decked out in Under Armour, like everyone else. His office, down the hall from the in-office gym, where a dozen staffers forgo their lunch break for a trainer-led boot camp, is full of Under Armour marketing material. A longtime professional cyclist, Under Armour's chief digital officer is still trim and athletic, his age (43) betrayed only by the flecks of gray in his close-cropped hair.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft When he first saw Future Girl , Thurston didn't think much of it, or the idea. He saw an advanced Garmin device. Now he sees something different. "She has a personalized yoga experience that morning," he says, "maybe because her heart rate has too high when she woke up, so she was stressed." Her meal plan is specific to her day, her mood, her context. So is her run. So is her clothing. Her universe is collecting, processing, and collating data constantly, feeding it back to her so she might live a little better each day. This, he says, is the future. "Every piece of clothing you wear is going to be connected, and someone's going to have to decipher that data and give that back in an organized way, for you as an individual, to help you in your life." Josh Valcarcel/WIRED After acquiring MapMyFitness in 2013, then Endomondo and MyFitnessPal last year, Under Armour has some 150 million users, with more than 100,000 more joining every day. All those people have logged more than 1.7 billion workouts in this past year alone. That's a lot of data. Plank's challenge is figuring out what to do with it all. How can he use it to make you a better person. "How does [tracking] translate into me feeling better?" Plank says. "Feeling better about myself, feeling better about how I look, how my jeans button." Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Figuring that out means designing a complete fitness tracking system, one that understands you. It's such a logical idea that Plank still can't believe no one beat him to it.
Plank likes to take credit for coining the term "connected fitness," even if Under Armour was late to the party. The Nike+ platform has been feeding data to runners for nearly a decade; Runkeeper, Strava, and a score of others are trying to be where a generation of data-driven athletes hang out. Fitbit turned wearables into a thriving public company; the President of the United States wears one, for Pete's sake. Even the Apple Watch's primary use is activity tracking. At this point, anyone who really wants a fitness tracker and will use the platforms underpinning them, probably has one.
Under Armour had to offer something more. That's where Record comes in. It's a dashboard for all the data Under Armour can collect about your life, divided into four quadrants: exercise, activity, sleep, and nutrition. Below the numbers is a simple question: on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel? All five parts are important, but it's the connections between them that really matter.
Plank's long-term vision for Record goes something like this: It knows your location, and the day's forecast there. It knows you run best when it's between 60 and 70 degrees, and there's only window in your day when it'll be that temperature. Record will alert you to that, and tell you when it's time to go. It also will know there' a gym around the corner, it's offering a class you love, and will sign you up and check you in with a single swipe or tap. Visit the doctor for your checkup and you'll have all the data needed to take charge of your own health. "It's this concierge where we're doing every single thing for you except the workout,"says Chris Glode, Under Armour's vice president of digital. He smiles and adds, "Which is the hardest part." Josh Valcarcel/WIRED Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Record doesn't do all of this. Everyone at Under Armour knows it. But they're sitting on an unprecedented dataset about people's health and fitness, and the odds are that everyone who buys a fitness-tracking product will download at least one Under Armour app. Now the company must figure out what to do with all that data---and how to use it to sell people more gear. No matter how big the Under Armour app platform gets, it always comes back to the company's mantra, written in big red letters on a whiteboard in Plank's office: Don't forget to sell shirts and shoes.
As our gear becomes more connected, more malleable, more personalized---more like that magical Future Girl fabric square---selling shirts and shoes will become precisely the point. Everyone's going to want to make them, but Under Armour's not worried. It's been making shoes for a while.
If there is, in fact, an iShoe hidden somewhere in Apple's design studio, Under Armour's going to beat it to market. In February, it's launching a version of the Speedform Gemini 2, its most popular running shoe, with a chip in the heel that contains an accelerometer, a Bluetooth antenna, and a battery. When Paul Pugh, Under Armour's VP of connected fitness products, lays the red and gray kicks on the table, the first thing he does is yank off a tag with the shoes' MAC address. "We wanted to see what it means to just manufacture a sensor right into the shoe," he says. They had to re-tool some of their factories---making shoes and making sensors are very different things---and overhaul some of their testing and quality-control processes. But other than the unique coloring, this Gemini looks, feels, and runs just like any other.
If there is, in fact, an iShoe hidden somewhere in Apple's design studio, Under Armour's going to beat it to market.
When you put on the Geminis, they start tracking your steps. Run faster than an 11-minute mile and they collect even more data. Since Under Armour knows your shoe size and height, the shoes can measure your pace and analyze your stride to help you run better. The shoes can track their own wear and tear, and let you know when it's time to replace them. There is a lot more that's possible, but Under Armour's moving slowly. "I think the first phase of the sensors is making it easier to capture data," Pugh says. "Whenever the athlete's moving, there's data being generated, and most of it's being lost." That's the idea behind the shoe, behind the first phase of the whole Healthbox and Record strategy: collect data. More data. Better data. Any data, really. "We don't even really know how to use it yet," Pugh says, "but the goal is ... let's collect the data, let's improve the quality of it." These are all just baby steps. Under Armour is trying to learn how this stuff works, to see what it looks like when a company tries to do the whole thing. Ten years from now, though, Thurston says everyone will call Under Armour a tech company. It'll seem obvious.
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"Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes? | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Davey Alba Business Why on Earth Is IBM Still Making Mainframes? IBM's new z13 mainframe.
Augusto Menezes/Feature Photo Service/IBM Save this story Save Save this story Save IBM quit making PCs in 2005, and it quit making servers last year. But it looks like Big Blue will keep pumping out its mainframes forever.
On Tuesday, IBM launched the z13, which it bills as the first mainframe specifically designed to accommodate the booming mobile app economy. Mainframes---the refrigerator-sized, pre-PC computers beloved of government, corporations, and Tron ---were long synonymous with IBM, which introduced its first mainframe in 1952. The company has long since reinvented itself as a provider of business services rather than hardware. But it turns out the old standby is still around.
The first mainframes were designed to serve Cold War clients like the US Department of Defense. (Its first mainframe, the IBM 701 , was known as the Defense Calculator while under development.) The mainframe of today is designed to serve a very different world---and economy.
This 1954 photo provided by IBM shows a 700-series Electronic Data Processing Machine.
IBM/AP IBM claims the z13 mainframe is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day (or the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day, according to the company). It can encrypt mobile transactions in real-time and provide on-the-fly insights on all transactions that pass through it. This will help companies and governments improve fraud detection, IBM says, and it give them a live view of a client’s purchasing habits so they can push related promotions to consumers right when they’re in-store.
>The first mainframes were designed to serve Cold War clients. The mainframe of today serves a very different world---and economy.
“We’re driving toward a world where more and more people are using mobile devices, or embedded devices, to interact with systems,” John Birtles, director of IBM z Systems, tells WIRED. “We need to make sure that those devices are secure, that the transaction’s secure, and that our clients get the level of analytics that gives them opportunities to improve their businesses.” The concept of a "mobile transaction" is a bit of marketing-speak. Tons of transactions take place via mobile devices, and the mainframe is good at transaction processing. Put them together, and voila: a computer the size of a backyard shed becomes a mobile product.
For IBM, staking out this space makes sense. Though the company has, for the most part, left hardware to move towards higher-margin businesses in the age of cloud computing, investing in this particular machine still makes sense. The company showed its dedication to mobile when it teamed up with Apple back in July to create business apps for iPhones and iPads. Now it's designed a computer to act as a powerful backend engine for apps on those devices.
Across so many industries---retailers, financial institutions, telecommunications services, insurance companies, airlines, and governments, to name just a few---transactions are going increasingly mobile. If you think about how much banking you do on your tablet or phone, or even how you might check in to your next a flight, this growth starts to make sense. And that’s not even counting the myriad payment processing schemes you might have tried, from PayPal to Square to Intuit.
>Investing in industrial-grade hardware still aligns with IBM's focus on serving as an engine for business.
IBM’s z13 mainframe is supposed to help with all of these tasks---along with any other business that gets done on a mobile platform. In order to get the job done, IBM says it has equipped the z13 with a processor that contains 300 percent more memory than found on most servers and 100 percent more bandwidth for speedier mobile transactions. The z13 also does analytics natively, rather than requiring data to be moved off the mainframe to other computing systems.
As developers of new applications come to rely on the ease and power of the cloud, the mainframe remains a powerhouse for tasks computers have performed for decades, such as transactions. IBM has realized it can no longer make money selling traditional hardware, and as of late, the company has been focusing its efforts on software and data analytics, including a recently announced partnership with Twitter.
But investing in industrial-grade hardware still aligns with IBM's focus on serving as an engine for business. Business is more mobile than ever. Yet however lightweight those mobile devices feel in your pocket, they can still make good use of a big, powerful machine chugging away in a back room, not going anywhere.
UPDATE: 20:20 ET 01/15/15: The caption on the second photo was updated to correctly identify the computer.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Topics Enterprise IBM Niamh Rowe Amanda Hoover Samanth Subramanian Steven Levy Will Knight Caitlin Harrington Reece Rogers Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Google Tightens Its Voice Assistant Rules Amid Privacy Backlash | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/story/google-assistant-human-transcription-privacy"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Lily Hay Newman Security Google Tightens Its Voice Assistant Rules Amid Privacy Backlash Photograph: VCG/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Application Human-computer interaction Personal assistant Company Alphabet Google End User Consumer Sector Consumer services Source Data Speech Technology Natural language processing Machine learning After months of revelations that smart speakers get a very human intelligence boost from contractors who transcribe and review customer audio snippets, the mea culpas are flowing in. At the end of August, Apple issued a rare apology about how it had handled human review of audio for Siri.
Amazon has made it easier for users to understand how their data might be used and control whether or not it is eligible for review at all. And now Google is joining the fray with a set of privacy announcements about Google Assistant.
Google paused human audio review worldwide in July after reports that a contractor was leaking audio snippets in Dutch. Early Monday, the company said in a blog post that human review will now resume with increased options for user data control. The company emphasizes that sending audio for review has never been the default mode on its devices. But you'll now be prompted to review your settings choice if your devices are currently opted in to the "Voice & Audio Activity" program that potentially sends your recordings out for vetting.
"We believe you should be able to easily understand how your data is used and why, so you can make choices that are right for you," reads the post, which WIRED reviewed in advance of its publication. "Recently we’ve heard concerns about our process in which language experts can listen to and transcribe audio data from the Google Assistant to help improve speech technology for different languages. It's clear that we fell short of our high standards in making it easy for you to understand how your data is used, and we apologize." In addition to adding more prompts and information about the Voice & Audio Activity settings, Google says that it has taken steps to improve filters meant to catch and immediately delete recordings made in error—those that are created when a smart speaker mistakenly thinks it has detected its so-called wake word. Those errant recordings have the potential to capture even more sensitive audio than those made when a user is intentionally speaking to a smart assistant. Google also says that it will soon launch a feature that lets users choose how sensitive their Google Assistant devices are to "hearing" their wake word. For example, you might set a device to be more sensitive in a room that often has a lot of background noise, and less sensitive in your bedroom. This will ideally help cut down on false positives.
Perhaps most importantly, Google says that by the end of the year it will update the Google Assistant policies to "vastly reduce" the amount of audio data the company stores. For accounts that have opted into Voice & Audio Activity, Google will now delete the "majority" of audio data older than a few months. This means that even if you've chosen to share audio snippets with Google, the company still won't keep them forever.
"One of the principles we strive toward is minimizing the amount of data we store, and we’re applying this to the Google Assistant as well," the Google post reads.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg For those who understand the current status and capabilities of machine learning, "smart" assistants' reliance on human quality checks may not have come as much of a surprise. But for the many people who thought they were just talking to a machine, it was jarring to learn that real people might have listened in, and for how long those recordings and transcripts are stored.
About three weeks after Google paused audio snippet review, Apple did as well on August 2. With the release of iOS 13, the company is resuming the practice, but it is now employing all reviewers directly rather than contracting with third parties. And in the new mobile operating system, Siri's audio recording retention is now off by default. Amazon, which has perhaps received the most scrutiny for both its Alexa audio review process and its snippet retention policies, offers the option for users to opt-out of sharing audio clips for transcription. The company launched a dedicated " Alexa Privacy Hub " in May and added the voice command, "Alexa, delete everything I said today," soon after.
Microsoft said at the end of August that it no longer uses human review for audio snippets from Skype's translate feature or Cortana on Xbox.
Similarly, Facebook said that it would stop human review on audio from Messenger—although it was only revealed to have used human transcription for its Portal hardware last week. All the major smart assistant developers maintain that audio snippets are fully anonymized before they go out to reviewers and most specifically say that less than one percent of total interactions with smart assistants actually get reviewed by a person.
These changes all represent real progress on improving privacy protections within smart assistants. But while more companies have at least acknowledged their mistakes, the improvements have come piecemeal across the industry, creating the potential that some exposures have been overlooked. At least now, consumers are getting more information about what really makes smart assistants so smart—and can use that information to decide how comfortable they really are inviting a sometimes-live mic into their homes.
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"Apple One Could Be a Bundle of Problems | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Steven Levy Business Apple One Could Be a Bundle of Problems The most interesting thing announced by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook at this week's event was not a hardware iteration, but a twist in Apple’s services strategy: an Apple bundle.
Photograph: Apple Save this story Save Save this story Save Finally, blue skies in the Bay Area. Now that’s a real plain view! Too bad the fire season is only getting started.
I don’t know whether it was a Covid innovation or just a lack of big news, but the Apple event this week featured something rarely seen in its celebratory product launches: brevity. The entire event clocked in at just over an hour. The marquee announcements dealt with a new version of the Apple Watch , continuing its course as a fitness tool (after its ill-fated debut as a high-priced bauble for the luxury set), and an upgrade to the low and mid-range iPads.
But the most interesting thing announced by Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was not a hardware iteration, but a twist in Apple’s services strategy: an Apple bundle.
It’s called Apple One , evoking various pop tunes and an alarming reference to the eponymous piece of jewelry in The Lord of the Rings.
The idea seems simple and commonplace: an enticement to subscribe to multiple fee-based Apple services at a price that’s lower than it would cost if you bought all of them individually. The best example of this practice is the cable bundle, which includes zillions of channels, many of which you will never watch.. At least until it’s so bloated and expensive that you cut the cord. One downside of bundles that we’ve seen in the television market is that when operators control the cable and also produce content, they are likely to favor their own channels over those of the competition. That’s why audio streaming competitor Spotify immediately complained about Apple One, which includes Apple Music in every tier of its bundle.
The new bundle gets a head start by including iCloud storage. A dirty secret of Apple devices is that while in theory you don’t need more than the free 5 gigabytes of storage Apple offers, your life is hell if you don’t buy more—pop-ups keep appearing saying that you can’t do this or that without more iCloud storage. So more storage is good to have, especially the 2 terabytes included in the high-end bundle, the $30 tier called Premium. (The lower rungs have less storage and fewer services. Only Premium, for instance, has Apple News.) Until recently, Apple was charging $20 for those two terabytes alone; in June, it cut the price in half.
Digression: To me, Premium is the only rung worth talking about since the others, by dint of including fewer services, aren’t really worthy of the term One. By definition, they are less than One. They are more like 0.4 and 0.6.
End of digression. What really makes this bundle potentially compelling is that Apple services have the ability to deliver what its competitors cannot hope to match: deep integration with iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, as well as Apple’s other services. The best example is Fitness Plus, a new service included in Premium. This product features exclusive recorded fitness classes—just like Peloton !—that people can access through iPads or computers. But the workouts also sync up with Apple Music and Apple Watch, allowing stuff like downloadable playlists and timely access to the biometrics in the Watch. For instance, when an instructor tells you to check your heart rate, that metric will be supersized on the screen. (If the executives of Peloton had their Apple Watches turned on during the event, they probably would have seen their heart rates rise to alarming levels.) Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The integration is in a nascent stage now—one imagines that eventually robot instructors might alter your workout in real time, depending on how close you are to a coronary. Still, it’s a unique feature not available to competitors, and it rolls out at Apple’s massive scale. And don’t forget, it’s also available as part of a bundle full of other stuff, so people might be lured into trying it out if they like the other services in the package. After the event, the Peloton CEO said Apple’s product was “a legitimization of fitness content” which is the kind of bravado one shows when refusing the blindfold before the firing squad takes aim. If Apple introduces its own standing-bike or treadmill—it could happen, Tim Cook is a gym rat !—the one-two punch of hardware and services would probably send Peloton the way of Schwinn.
Right now, Apple One is relatively benign, but it’s easy to imagine how future bundles could link with new products to corner all sorts of markets. Let’s say Apple made … a car. (Yeah, I know, the company’s long-rumored autonomous vehicle project has been put on hold.
But in June Apple bought a self-driving-car startup , albeit one that was on the brink of shutting down.) Think of the services that Apple could bundle with a car. Music, to be sure—when the car picks up speed, it’s time for road tunes! Apple Messenger might merge with the car’s electronics to send alerts when service is required. There might be a supercharged version of Apple Maps. And perhaps integration with the Apple Watch: the car might pull over if biometrics indicated the driver was dozing off. The point is that Apple would have the advantage of that integration—and its competitors might not. If you stream Spotify in your Apple Car, you will not automatically hear “Born to be Wild” when you floor that beast.
Apple One, along with services blended with hardware, is a step toward drawing Apple users deeper into its fold. But the timing might not be ideal. Apple is now under scrutiny for what critics, and some legislators , charge is anti-competitive behavior in cases where its own products compete with third party apps distributed on its platform. For one thing, Apple’s rivals in the App store have to pay Apple thirty percent of their revenues, a burden not imposed on Apple products. Those investigating Apple for antitrust concerns will undoubtedly take a close look at Apple One, too.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg If Apple One is the tipping point for the DOJ to go forward with a suit, this week’s brief event might turn out to be Apple’s bundle of oy! Calling its bundle Apple One reminds me of the U2 song, “One.” Which in turn reminds me of the day in November 2004 when the Irish megaband’s iconic members Bono and the Edge performed at an Apple event that also wasn’t brimming with news. After Jobs introduced me to the musicians, I spoke to them for Newsweek: … The second innovation is the $349 U2 iPod, which is colored the same shade of midnight as Bono's leather jacket (the click wheel is fire-engine red) and festooned with the band members' laser-etched signatures on the back. The real significance [of U2’s performance], though, is the relationship Apple has forged with one of the elite bastions of rock, possibly a harbinger of new business models in the digital age.
For the last few weeks we've all been inundated with Day-Glo iPod commercials featuring U2, which previously had not lent itself to ad campaigns. But as The Edge explains, "It's easy to be in the iTunes ad because iTunes is promoting us." In addition, Apple will be exclusively selling a $149 "digital boxed set" consisting of all of U2's official recordings, plus 25 previously unreleased cuts. This can be purchased with a single mouse click (you might want to buy a case of Guinness to pass the time while the songs download, since Jobs estimated it will take "a few hours" to get the 400 songs)… The bottom line for U2 is that success of the iPod and other initiatives has firmly discredited record executives who prophesized that the digital transformation would doom the music industry. "Don't believe those people," Bono says. "We want to stop running from the future, but walk up to it and give it a great big kiss. Give people what they want when they want it." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Note: This event was years before Apple’s misstep of loading, unrequested, a new U2 album into everyone’s music library, an example of giving people what they didn’t want when they didn’t want it.
Michael asks, “How do you think we can utilize some of the world's best minds that we have in the private technology sector in the US to fix the problems in the governmental health data system as witnessed by the pandemic?” Thanks for asking, Michael, but I’m not sure what you mean by the “problems in the governmental health data system.” If you are talking about Covid statistics, some of the reporting seems to be affected by political considerations. But there have been a number of private initiatives, notably one by the co-founders of Instagram, who after leaving Facebook had the time to create rt.live , a site that tracks how the virus spreads. (I’ll have more on that soon.) As for the larger issue of how great tech minds can help solve problems in the public sector, I have been a big fan of the United States Digital Service , which I first wrote about when it emerged in 2014. This allows people in the tech world to take on temporary assignments working for the federal government—typically six months to a year—to help make government services work better for its citizens. This is the odd Obama initiative that our current president has neglected to squash, perhaps because his son-in-law Jared Kushner appreciated it early. USDS people have been embedded in various agencies for years now, including Health and Human Services, and have made a difference. As you might expect, they’ve been very active in the recent pandemic.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg You can submit questions to [email protected].
Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
Hurricane Sally brings giant alligators, poisonous snakes, and floating fire ants into residential areas.
Our gadget mavens go over the complete list of what Apple announced.
This week marked the start of the annual WIRED25 conference , which is being held virtually over three Wednesdays. Next week (September 23rd) is the second session , where I’ll interview Maria Ressa , the heroic CEO of the Philippine news site Rappler. It’s free, please drop in! Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Here’s the story of the Facebook employee who was embedded in the Trump campaign in 2016. He’s now working to elect Biden.
Take a close look at how democracy is dying in Hong Kong. And then vote in November.
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📩 Want the latest on tech, science, and more? Sign up for our newsletters ! Gravity, gizmos, and a grand theory of interstellar travel How to deal with the anxiety of uncertainty One IT guy’s spreadsheet-fueled race to restore voting rights Is lightning-fast plasma the key to a cleaner car engine ? The flagrant hypocrisy of bungled college reopenings 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops , keyboards , typing alternatives , and noise-canceling headphones Editor at Large X Topics Plaintext apple Apple Watch Antitrust Will Knight Kari McMahon David Gilbert Amit Katwala Joel Khalili Joel Khalili Amit Katwala Andy Greenberg Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Gear Team Gear Everything Google Announced Today: Android, AI, Holograms Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google's parent company Alphabet, speaks from the IO stage at the company's campus in Mountain View, California.
Photograph: Google Save this story Save Save this story Save Tuesday marked the return of Google’s annual developer conference. The 2020 edition of the event was canceled because of the pandemic, but today Google IO returned as a virtual event. The three-day conference began with an opening keynote address, where Google executives and project managers took turns showing off new software features, new AI-powered tools, and a zany prototype video booth made for hyperrealistic teleconferencing.
Here’s everything Google announced.
Photograph: Google Android 12 brings many visual changes that make the next version of the mobile operating system a little more personal and playful. Pick up your phone and the lock screen will light up from the bottom, but tap the power button instead and the pixels will illuminate from the side of the phone. If there are no notifications on the lock screen, the clock will take up more space. Small touches like this even apply to the system’s design—the color tones of widgets and the notification drop-down menu can adjust to match your wallpaper.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Many of these changes fall under a new design language Google calls Material You. It’s coming first to Google hardware and software this fall, and it lets you change the color palette of all your apps, though you’ll be confined to the colors Google has chosen for its “Material palette.” Android’s interface has also been given an overall redesign with new widgets, a fresh look for larger and bolder quick settings tiles, and a simpler settings menu. You’ll find new types of tiles in the quick settings menu too, such as Google Pay and smart-home control options. Thanks to under-the-hood improvements, the OS is smoother and animations are more responsive. Everything about the interface is a little faster and more efficient. The first beta version is available now, and the official release will likely roll out in August or September.
Video: Google Perhaps in response to Apple’s recent announcement that it would disable ad tracking between apps by default, Google has emphasized newfangled privacy features of its own.
You can read a detailed rundown Android’s new privacy features by our own Lily Hay Newman. There’s a new privacy dashboard that allows users to view app permission settings, see which data is being accessed by which apps, and revoke app tracking privileges all from one screen. Also, an indicator will now pop up in the top corner to let you know if an app is using your mic or camera. More nuanced “approximate location” features allow you to give an app a general sense of where you are, rather than being able to pinpoint exactly which bathroom stall you’re in.
Starline's booth. Not authorized by FCC rules. No sales or leases permitted until authorized.
Photograph: Google It’s the Zoom of the future! Kind of. Maybe the Google Meet of the future. While still a prototype, Google’s Project Starline is a virtual meeting booth with holograms. (Don’t miss our exclusive first look at the tech.) Two people sit in their respective booths in different locations, and your chat companion beams right in using tech that makes them look like they’re sitting across the table from you. Thanks to depth sensors, multiple cameras, and spatial audio, Starline makes you feel like you’re really there with the other person, as opposed to staring at yet another talking head on a video screen. It’s currently just a proof of concept, and we might see it in the real world within five years, according to Google.
Google is revamping its smartwatch operating system, with some help from Samsung. You can read our exclusive deep dive on the changes coming to Wear this year, but here are some highlights.
Photograph: Google The next version of Wear OS—for now, just called Wear—will include some features pulled right from Samsung’s current wearable OS, Tizen. (Samsung’s forthcoming wearables will also use the Wear operating system.) Google says this and other optimizations will offer better battery life and up to 30 percent faster performance. Some Google apps will work directly on the Wear platform without requiring a constant phone connection, including turn-by-turn directions on Google Maps and offline music listening on streaming services like YouTube Music and (eventually) Spotify. Google is also putting its acquisition of Fitbit to use, imbuing the tech with standard Fitbit features like health tracking and workout progress.
Google gives all of its users a free place to upload all of their pictures, and that policy affords the company a huge benefit: a massive dataset it can use to hone its computer vision prowess. Today, we saw some enhancements coming to Google Photos that are powered by these machine intelligence experiments. First is a feature that automatically collects photos into albums using visual patterns in the images to identify photos that probably belong together. The AI engine looks at all your photos to find similar shapes and colors, and it can spot patterns the human eye might miss. As an example, Google showed pictures from one of its engineers. The Photos AI was able to assemble a gallery of photos from a specific backpacking trip he took by pulling in all the pictures where his orange backpack appears. Another example: The AI can spot all of your shots with a menorah in them, and put together a collection of Hanukkah memories.
Importantly, Photos users can control which photos show up in these collections. You can remove specific photos from memories, rename the memories, or prevent specific photos from ever showing up. This is a boon for anyone who’s lived through a heavily photographed life experience they’d rather forget.
On the creepier end of things, the company showed a new tool that can turn two static images into one animated image. It looks at the objects in the two images, then inserts interpolated frames to make animations that were never actually captured by the camera. Yes, it makes two still photos come to life. The effect is very unsettling.
Google is enhancing Chrome’s built-in password manager to aid users in keeping better track of their various account credentials across desktop and mobile. First, there’s a new password import tool that helps new users aggregate their many passwords into Google’s manager. Once the passwords are stored in Google’s password manager, users will have an easier time deploying them outside of Chrome; better integrations between Chrome and Android will store passwords and auto-fill information for apps as well as websites in a way that feels more seamless. Google’s password manager currently alerts you to security breaches on the web that may have compromised your passwords. Now, there’s a new feature in the password manager that adds one helpful step to that alert: a quick-fix tool that guides you through the process of changing any passwords that have been compromised.
Of course, Google isn’t the only company that wants to manage your passwords for you. We have a list of excellent options in our password manager guide —including some advice about why in-browser options like Google’s are more limited.
Video: Google If you’ve been lucky enough to have a job that’s allowed you to work from home for the past 14 months, you’re probably used to living your work life in the cloud. Google’s new remote working tools aim to make that a little easier. Smart Canvas is a project management tool that lets multiple users work together across different document types. They can keep track of progress with checklist items tagged to specific dates and people, and brainstorm ideas live in one place.
Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Gear You’ll Be Able Buy Cars on Amazon Next Year Boone Ashworth Gear The Best Black Friday Deals on Electric Bikes and Accessories Adrienne So Gear The Best USB Hubs and Docks for Connecting All Your Gadgets Eric Ravenscraft Google Meet, the video chat platform, will soon be integrated directly into Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. You’ll be able to click the little Meet button in the top corner, and collaborators can pop up on video in a column alongside the doc to argue about what gets edited. A new Companion Mode in Meet is meant to display members of a team in more equally placed tiles, along with better noise cancelation and automatic visual tweaks to zoom and lighting to make all participant videos more visually consistent. For anyone watching who needs captions, those can be turned on using live transcription, or even translated into one of Google’s supported languages.
Google showed off some new AI-powered conversational capabilities that will eventually turn up in products that use Google Assistant. First, it’s developed a new conversational model called LaMDA that can hold a conversation with you, either typed or spoken, about any topic you’re curious about. The AI will look up information about the topic while you’re talking, and then enhance the conversation in a natural way by weaving facts and contextual info into its answers. What we saw on Tuesday was just a controlled demo, but the LaMDA model really does look like it could make conversations with a computer feel even more human.
There’s another natural-language processing model headed to Google’s Search tools. Dubbed the Multitask Unified Model, or MUM, Google says the feature is intended to make sense of longer, multi-pronged questions submitted by users. In theory, you could ask it to compare different vacation locations, or tell you what kind of gear you’ll need to bring on a hike. It can gather information from websites in other languages, then use what it finds to uncover even more relevant information published in your native language. That way, what may be the most pertinent info on the web is not locked behind a language barrier.
These enhancements are part of Google’s larger effort to understand the meaning and context of questions in the way a human might. Still, Google says the features are still in the experimental phase, so it’ll be a while before the Assistant starts making decisions about any pod bay doors.
Google is tweaking bits of its Maps app in an effort to offer users more real-time information. When you’re asking for directions, Google will present an option for “eco-friendly routes” that factor in distance and road or traffic conditions to find a more fuel-efficient way to get where you’re going. A “safer routing” feature in Maps can analyze road lanes and traffic patterns to help you avoid what it calls “hard braking moments,” when traffic slows down unexpectedly.
If you’re walking around, there are also improvements to Google’s AR mode, Live View, that help contextualize where you are by analyzing streets signs and providing information like “busyness” levels for whole neighborhoods instead of just specific restaurants and shops. Live View also now works indoors, so you can see that contextual info inside a train station or a mall. The main Maps tool will also tailor what it shows you to the time of day and your location. Open Maps in the morning and you’ll see pins for breakfast options. Open Maps in a city you’ve never visited and you’ll see tourist spots and popular attractions.
In an effort to make you even more likely to buy stuff on the internet, Google has tweaked some of its shopping tools. Now users can use Google Lens to search images in screenshots taken on their phone and link third-party memberships directly to their Google account. Also, the days where you could idly add a 5-pound bag of gummy bears to your shopping cart and then forget about it are gone. Now, whenever you open up a new tab in Chrome, Google will show you all of the pending purchases you have sitting in shopping carts around the web.
Google also announced a Shopify integration feature, which will let sellers who use Shopify make their products appear across search, Maps, images, Google Lens, and YouTube.
Update, Tuesday May 18 at 6:20 pm: This story was updated to further clarify the way the Multitask Unified Model gathers information across websites published in different languages.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 6/10 Open rating explainer Welcome to Apple World. That’s what launching an Apple Fitness+ workout is like, stepping into a world of wood-paneled walls, charming accents, and Apple Watches. You can almost smell the eucalyptus towels, except you can’t, because this is a virtual gym beamed through one of your Apple screens.
Apple has just debuted this new subscription fitness service , and it’s either right on time or much too late. A lot of people have been locked down at home this year, looking for ways to stay active and maybe even formulating some fitness plans for the new year (a bold move, considering how 2020 panned out). But companies like Peloton, Nike, and Strava have had years-long head starts, and their apps are sticky. They also offer social networks, which Apple has never quite been able to successfully integrate into its products.
I’ve been using the Apple Fitness+ app since it launched last week. I managed to do eight workouts across different categories (some of the workouts were only 10 to 20 minutes long). I’ve been comparing it primarily to Peloton, both the bike and the mobile app. My WIRED colleagues and I plan to do a comprehensive roundup of popular fitness apps and home gym equipment in the coming months, but that’s going to take a little more time.
Apple Fitness+ is … fine? I signed up for a three-month free trial, so I’ll continue to use it in rotation with other workout activities and apps. It’s one of the finest integrations of fitness and tech I’ve experienced—assuming “integration” is really a thing to want in home fitness. The app doesn’t offer the live classes or coaching for outdoor runs you'll find on other platforms, and in general the Fitness+ classes lack the entertainment value that Peloton has. Those things could improve over time. The one thing that’s likely not going to change: You’re gonna need a lot of Apple products to use Apple Fitness+.
First: You have to have an Apple Watch to use Apple Fitness+. The least expensive version you could buy and still access the necessary software is the $169 Apple Watch Series 3.
This means you’ll also need an iPhone , since you can’t set up an Apple Watch without an iPhone. And if you plan to stream Apple Fitness+ classes on your TV, you’ll need an Apple TV box ($149 and up).
The Fitness+ app.
Photograph: Apple You can also download the Fitness+ app to your iPad and access classes on the tablet. However, you’ll still need the combination of Apple Watch and iPhone, since you can’t set up an Apple Watch on the iPad. And again, you need an Apple Watch to access Apple Fitness+. It’s not hard to see what Apple’s doing here; the company’s very inclusive fitness program just happens to exclude anyone who has an Android phone or another company's wearable.
The cost of the Fitness+ subscription is $10 per month, with a few options to consider. For anyone who has purchased an Apple Watch in the past three months, the first three months of Fitness+ are free. You can also pay $80 per year, saving $40 bucks annually. And if you and your family are totally locked into Apple’s ecosystem, you can opt to cough up $30 per month, and then you and five others can access a bundle that includes Apple Music, TV+, Fitness+, News+, and 2 terabytes of iCloud storage.
You’ll also likely need some workout basics—ample space, a yoga mat, hand weights if you’re one of the lucky few who has acquired some this year—and a stationary bike if you plan to indulge in Apple’s cycling classes.
These are surely first-world problems, but anyone who likes experimenting with fitness technology knows that it’s never get-up-and-go. You’ve got to strap on the smartwatch or arm band, connect it to your phone, program the playlist, find the right yoga video on YouTube, then cast it to your TV, et cetera, et cetera. If you’re using a first-generation Peloton bike (the horror!) you’ll have to hit Start on both the bike and whatever smartwatch you’re using.
Apple has gone to great lengths to remove some of that friction in Fitness+, and it has largely succeeded. I was able to test the app with the full trifecta in place: Apple Watch, iPhone/iPad, and a third-generation Apple TV box. It really was as easy as choosing a class on my phone, sharing it to the living room TV, and pressing Start on the Apple Watch. (The green Start button automatically pops up on your Watch when you select a Fitness+ class.) Apple Fitness+ Rating: 6/10 $9 at Apple If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED During workouts, your Apple Watch rings—three color-coded concentric circles—appear in the upper right-hand corner of whichever screen you’re using. Apple is very clearly leaning into the rings as part of its fitness schtick; they’re not only painted on a giant brick wall in one of the studio locations, but instructors regularly shout out, “Don’t forget to close those rings!” In the upper left corner of the screen is a module that shows a timer, your heart rate—beamed in real-time from your Apple Watch—the number of calories you've burned, and something called the Burn Bar.
I’ll explain the Burn Bar in a bit, but it’s probably important to cover exactly what kind of classes you’ll have access to if you subscribe to Fitness+. There are no live classes and nothing that will coach you outdoors. (I love Peloton’s outdoor running programs, which you can access through a mobile app for $13 per month.) Apple Fitness+ does offer classes for high-intensity interval training, yoga, core work, strength training, treadmill, cycling, rowing, dance, and “mindful cool down.” The classes vary in length, from 5 to 45 minutes, with 21 different instructors and an assortment of music genres to keep you pumped.
The classes are taped in what looks like the world’s most spacious Equinox gym.
My sense is that Apple has tried to create a fitness program that will appeal to the broadest audience possible, given the reach of its brand and the many millions of people who use Apple hardware. As such, it’s probably less geared toward fitness fanatics than it is towards beginners and moderate exercisers. Most Fitness+ classes feature more than one instructor, and there’s usually someone demonstrating modified versions of exercises. The classes also skew short; there are no 60-minute yoga classes, and when I applied a 30-minute filter to the strength training category, only a handful of options running that long popped up.
Fitness+ is also undeniably Apple-y.
The classes are taped in what looks like the world’s most spacious Equinox gym. It’s also the world’s most verdant fitness studio, apparently, because the plant game is very good. Every instructor wears an Apple Watch, many are clad in Nike gear (Apple CEO Tim Cook also sits on Nike’s board of directors).
Fitness+ music playlists are sourced from Apple Music. You don’t have to be an Apple Music subscriber to hear tunes during a workout, but you do have to be a Music subscriber to save the playlist for later. You can’t swap in another music service of your choice, and you also can’t adjust the volume without lowering the instructor’s audio, so you’re pretty much stuck with Apple Music playing at whatever volume Apple feels is most appropriate. Most playlists are pretty good, except for when they’re distracting. I’ve grown used to the ambient royalty-free tracks on most YouTube videos, and hearing Drake in a yoga class feels jarring.
The classes work on any device, as long as it's a device powered by Apple.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED For what it’s worth, you don’t really have the option to change the playlists on Peloton, either; though if you have a bike or treadmill, you can indicate that you want the music channel to be at a higher or lower volume than the instructor’s voice. And you can always do an unstructured workout on the machine while playing your own music in the background.
You also can’t utilize any sensors other than your Apple Watch or whatever connects to Apple Watch. So for a strength training workout, I was able to pair a Wahoo heart rate monitor with my Apple Watch, and my real-time heart rate appeared in the Fitness+ app. But when I used the Peloton bike in “Just Ride” mode and propped up an iPad alongside the bike to stream a Fitness+ cycling class, there was no way for me to see in Fitness+ the cadence, resistance, or mileage data being collected by the Peloton bike.
There also aren’t that many Fitness+ classes, depending on which category of workout you’re looking for. I took a dance class with instructor LaShawn Jones and loved it, but I wish there were more classes like that one available. There are more than two dozen yoga classes available, but that’s paltry compared to the millions of free yoga classes available on YouTube. If there’s any tech company with deep enough pockets to invest in production, it’s Apple, so I’m expecting to see more videos populate the app over time. Fitness+ also lacks the most basic tool of any app: a search bar.
Of course, these days you can’t just produce some exercise instruction videos and call it a fitness app. People want to be entertained and feel like they’re a part of a community. And with all of this technology at our fingertips and all the money we’re investing in our gadgets, who could blame them? Peloton has won me over with its cast of charismatic instructors, whereas an app like Strava is the de facto app for people who want to show off their 80-mile bike rides or their record-breaking marathon times (like this guy ). Ultimately, these apps are about making you feel less alone when you’re grinding it out alone. Or at the very least, less bored.
Peloton is all about the competitive leaderboard, which lets you race against other members. You’re also competing with yourself on the Peloton bike or treadmill, because your historical best output is visible at all times. Apple Fitness+ has the Burn Bar, which relies on data points like your heart rate and calories burned to calculate your exertion level and compare it to other (anonymous) users. But this is a small pink bar in the upper left corner of the screen, and it’s hard to tell whether you’re behind, ahead, or right in the middle of the workout pack.
Apple’s dedication to privacy in its services means it doesn’t really have a social network. I could share my completed Apple Fitness+ workout with family and friends via Apple Messages, but there’s no live competition or way to see each other’s past workouts. Another friend, who I’m currently sharing my Apple Watch workouts with, said my Fitness+ workouts came up as “null” on his wrist.
Some people would probably prefer a more individualized experience, and if that’s the case then Fitness+ might do the trick for them. Also, just because I’m on the Alex-Ally-Cody-Christine-Denis-Kendall-Sam train (don’t make me choose one) doesn’t mean the Apple Fitness+ instructors aren’t great. It’s a diverse group of trainers, athletes, dancers, and teachers, and when they’re not reminding you to close your rings, some are sharing tidbits about their lives—Jessica is a surfer, Betina wanted to be an actual rock star, UK-born Jamie-Ray is amused by America’s obsession with basketball, Bakari is both a dancer and a former college soccer player.
In the workout classes I’ve tried so far, there’s something careful and controlled about their deliveries. I’d love to see the instructors let loose and not be so committed to Apple branding. Apple could put together the most sophisticated personal fitness experience on the market, but if there’s anything this new era of at-home fitness has shown us, it’s that human connection may go a lot farther. Even if it all has to happen on screens.
Apple Fitness+ Rating: 6/10 $9 at Apple If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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"Google Home Max Review: A Bigger (and Louder) Smart-Home Speaker | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/review/google-home-max"
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"Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories.
Close Alert To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Michael Calore Gear Review: Google Home Max Facebook X Email Save Story Google Facebook X Email Save Story $299 at B&H $299 at Walmart If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 8/10 Open rating explainer I know there's one big reason you're reading this review, so I'll get right to it: The Google Home Max sounds just fantastic. It's a big speaker, powerful and dramatic. It's deep and weighty on the bottom, clear everywhere else, and well-rounded overall. It's voice is better than I expected, and also much louder. As much as I wanted to turn it up while I was testing it, I kept nervously nudging the volume down because it puts out such a wallop.
But the Google Home Max isn't a speaker I can rate solely based on the sound quality because it does so much more than just play music. It's a smart-home speaker with Google Assistant inside. Just like the Google Home and Google Home Mini before it, you can to talk to it, and it connects your voice commands to Google's myriad services and device ecosystems. Ask it to run web searches, tell it to adjust your Nest thermostat, request that it play a video on your Chromecast-ready television, or demand that it spool up your reggaeton Spotify playlist, and it delivers. These extra capabilities are what make it worth $400 (and yes, it is worth it, if you're a Google person). It's a party machine, sure. But it's also a voice-activated remote control for all of the available information and gadgets around you.
The visual design is quite boring, honestly; a gray blob covered in wool-like fabric. (Color choices are limited to a light gray or a darker charcoal so far.) The seemingly bland and uninspired look can be considered a feature, since it lets the speaker blend into any decor, which is likely the point.
The Home Max is roughly the same size as a Sonos Play:3 , and just like that device, it works in two configurations. You can leave it laying down flat, where it delivers a stereo image from the four front-facing drivers, or you can tip it up vertically, where it runs in mono. If you buy two Maxes, you can tip them both up vertically and run them as a stereo pair. After they pair to each other wirelessly, you can place them on either side of a turntable or (cough) a CD player for something close to a traditional home stereo arrangement. There's a rubber base that sticks magnetically onto the body of the Max, so you can easily slap it onto whichever side of the speaker you want to place onto your table or shelf. It's a fun little touch.
Google Another neat innovation is the way the Max responds to its surroundings. Plopping it onto my desk in my nook-like home office, it sounded great. When I slid it closer to the wall, the sound changed—the bass reduced slightly and the high frequencies got slightly brighter. Next, I moved it to a stool in the middle of the room and it opened up, seemingly releasing the throttle on the high and low frequencies.
The Max does all of this adjusting on the fly, using the six microphones on the speaker to monitor the room and change the sound parameters accordingly. Those mics are the same ones it uses to listen for your demands, and they're plenty sensitive. It snaps to attention at the wake phrase even when you're blasting Slayer. It also has Google's voice match feature , so it can recognize different family members' voices and give personalized answers depending on who's asking.
Every time I review a smart speaker, I set aside 20 to 30 minutes for setup. This thing, though, was up and running in less than five. It uses the same app as the other Google Home devices, so I didn't need to download anything onto my phone. And since my phone is a Pixel, the Assistant already knows everything about me. It knows my voice, it sees my calendar, it knows where my home and office are (which it needs for traffic reports), and it's already connected to my Spotify, Google Play Music, and YouTube accounts. I didn't need to enter any passwords. When the speaker awoke after a few taps in the app, I asked it, "OK Google, play The Daily podcast." The Max picked up the episode exactly where I left off just ten minutes prior, when I was listening to it on my phone. I asked, "OK Google, what's my commute look like," and after telling me (through the Max) about the travel time and how heavy the traffic was, the Assistant told me to check my phone for a detailed map. And there it was, as a notification on the Pixel's screen. Later, when I asked it to play Spotify, it went right back to the point where I had paused my last session (Echo & The Bunnymen, Crocodiles ).
That's the power of Google's Home devices—seamless integration of all the services you use, with the Assistant functioning as the ubiquitous expeditor, collecting data streams and delivering them to you wherever you are at that moment. But iPhone devotees are surely reading this and shrugging. They have good reason. Google's Assistant is available on iOS devices, but it's not the native voice platform. When you press the iPhone home button, you still get Siri. So iPhone people may not get the same fuzzy future vibe from the Max. Sure, iOS users can still talk to Google's speaker, use it as a smart-home manager, and ask it to play music, and it will do all of those things with vigor. But while it can summon answers and cue up media, it can't add that extra layer of state awareness —the magical feeling that all of your devices, from phone to computer to speaker, are all attached to the same brain.
If you want a great-sounding speaker and you're already all-in on Assistant—whether you run Android, you command a small battalion of Google Homes, or you take the extra steps to talk to Google on an iPhone—then the Google Home Max is a worthy upgrade for your home audio situation. The utility and sound quality of the Max is absolutely worth the $400 when matched with the almost scary usefulness of the Assistant.
But if you're indebted to another cloud-based domestique , look elsewhere. As good as the Max sounds, it's really only truly useful if you and the Assistant are besties. If you're just looking for an Alexa alternative, maybe consider one of the cheaper Home speakers. Better yet, buy the Sonos One speaker. It has Alexa now, but it's getting Google Assistant in just a few months. Actually, the Sonos One is only half the price of the Max. Go ahead and get two.
Google Home Max Rating: 8/10 $299 at B&H $299 at Walmart If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED $299 at B&H $299 at Walmart Senior Editor X Instagram Topics Google Home Google smart home Speakers Assistant David Pierce David Pierce David Pierce David Pierce David Pierce Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Review: Smarter Lighting for Your Desktop | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/review/govee-ai-gaming-sync-box"
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 8/10 Open rating explainer Smart lighting is a great way to spice up your gaming rig, add some ambiance to a room, and make gaming sessions more immersive. No one offers a more diverse range of customizable lighting options than Govee, and it scores several entries in our Best Smart Lighting guide. Its latest release seeks to illuminate your desktop.
The Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit comprises an RGB strip, two light towers, and an HDMI box capable of accurate color matching with AI that can recognize in-game actions and direct a light show to match. Billed as the ultimate in desktop-gaming smart lighting, it is expensive, and while the light syncing impressed, there are some cons to consider.
Photograph: Govee Unpacking the Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit, you will find a light strip divided into four sections to fit the edges of a monitor between 27 and 34 inches in size. Simply peel off the backing and stick it on. Govee includes cable management to keep things as tidy as possible. There are two stylish light towers, and all you need to do is fit the bases and find a spot for them on your desk. To complete the setup, plug the strip and towers into the rectangular sync box.
The box sports three HDMI 2.0 inputs and a single HDMI 2.0 output that supports up to 4K at 60 Hz, 1440p at 144 Hz, and 1080p at 240 Hz. There’s also support for Dolby Vision and HDR 10+, but falling short of HDMI 2.1 means there’s no 4K at 120 Hz. Most folks will plug in a PC and run the HDMI out to the main monitor they game on. You could also plug in a console or a Blu-ray player. It strikes me that this design would be more at home under your main TV; perhaps Govee will release a TV version down the line.
Govee via Simon Hill Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit Rating: 8/10 $300 at Amazon £300 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED The Govee Home app for Android or iOS enables you to configure your new system. It is enormously versatile, but there are so many options that you will need time to get to grips with it. It’s a shame there’s no desktop version, but the mobile app works well and connects swiftly via Bluetooth. You can select from a wide range of colors and lighting effects. There are 24 individual LED zones to customize, 14 on the light strip and five on each light bar.
If you have other Govee lights in the room, you can also have the sync box control them, setting their relative positions in the app for a coordinated light show. The syncing is what sets this system apart. It can sync to music, match the onscreen colors, and employ AI to react to the onscreen gaming action.
Photograph: Govee The lights are vibrant, the color matching feels pretty accurate, and there is no delay (a common flaw with older systems that rely on a camera). But none of that stuff is new. The headline here is Govee’s AI. While the color matching breaks the screen into a grid to match colors in the relevant zones, the AI is supposed to recognize in-game actions and spark lighting effects that tell you something.
Sadly, this only works with a handful of titles, including Apex Legends , Valorant , Overwatch , and League of Legends.
Customized game lighting effects include red flashes when you take damage, green for a med kit, or flashing and sparkling to celebrate victories. It’s a smart idea that works well and adds genuine utility to the lighting. Govee promises that support will grow. Only time will tell. As cool as they are, these effects are best suited to fast-paced FPS and action games.
Because it analyzes the picture through HDMI, the Govee AI Gaming Sync Box can conjure reactive lighting for anything you play on your monitor, including movies and TV shows. While it is accurate and eliminates the slight lag of systems like the Govee T1, which I’ve been testing with my TV, it can prove distracting at times. For most TV shows, movies, and slower-paced games, light syncing simply isn’t desirable, but it’s nice to have background block colors to set the mood and help the screen pop.
Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit Rating: 8/10 $300 at Amazon £300 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED The obvious comparison is the overpriced Philips Hue Play HDMI Sync Box, which is significantly more expensive than this system when you add a strip and light bars. The color-matching features are very similar, though the Hue Play HDMI is aimed at your main TV and lacks the AI smarts.
A better option for desktop gamers is the more recent Philips Hue Play Gradient Lightstrip for PC ( 8/10, WIRED Recommends ). Interestingly, Philips moved away from HDMI with this light strip, relying on software to match the screen instead. There are pros and cons to this. It means less clutter, but streaming services like Netflix interpret it as recording and won’t run with light syncing.
I favor a minimalist desktop, and I like the diffuser on the Philips light strip, so it’s not ugly to look at directly. The Govee light strip is not designed to be viewed directly, and it looks horribly messy. You ideally only want to see the reflected light from it. You also need considerable space for the light towers and the box, and the Govee system adds a bunch of messy cables to your desktop.
The plastic box lights up too, but it often failed to sync with the rest of the system during testing, and it does not appear in the app as a customizable option. I was also a little disappointed that the system failed to turn on or off with the input source, though you can link the Govee app to your Google Home or Amazon Alexa setup and use voice commands.
Ultimately, I'm not a huge fan of any of these systems right now. The Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit is expensive, adds clutter, and the novelty wears off. But if you're dead set on desktop lighting, it is the system to beat right now. It delivers immersive, vibrant, and highly customizable lighting to your desktop, and the AI features are super cool (provided you play one of the supported games).
Govee AI Gaming Sync Box Kit Rating: 8/10 $300 at Amazon £300 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED $300 at Amazon Contributor X Topics Lights Reviews review smart home Shopping Accessories and Peripherals Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Nintendo Labo Review: Which Kit is Best? (Vehicle, Variety, Robot Kits) | WIRED"
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"https://www.wired.com/review/review-nintendo-labo-variety-vehicle-and-robot-kits"
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Close Alert To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Jeffrey Van Camp Gear Review: Nintendo Labo (Vehicle, Variety, and Robot Kits) Facebook X Email Save Story Nintendo Facebook X Email Save Story $45 at Amazon £30 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Rating: 9/10 Open rating explainer I was a rambunctious, energetic child. It was hard for me to sit still for anything, but if you gave me a box of Lego and a good set of instructions, I could sit for hours. I had Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, K’Nex, model cars, you name it.
There’s a wonderful zen to quietly assembling something. But then, what do you do after you're done? The true test of a building toy is whether you find creative ways to play with it once it’s finished. Toys like K’Nex could always be repurposed for games or rebuilt in perpetuity. Models and electronic Technozoids (yes, they were a real thing on the other hand tended to end up in the closet or on a garage sale table sooner rather than later.
As crazy as my little building projects got, nothing from my childhood was as ludicrously weird and inventive as the new Nintendo Labo.
Nintendo’s latest nutty idea is a trio of Switch games that each come with more than two dozen sheets of corrugated cardboard. To play the included games, you must first spend at least an hour snapping and folding together what Nintendo calls Toy-Cons: cardboard controllers.
One kit comes with smaller Toy-Cons you can use on a table, like a piano and fishing rod, another lets you create steering wheels to control three types of vehicles, and the last lets you spend hours making a wearable robot backpack and suit. All the step-by-step instructions are on your Switch, and when you finish a Toy-Con, a mini game is unlocked. You slide the Switch touchscreen into its designated slot in the cardboard, then slip in the Switch’s two motion control Joy-Con controllers into, say, the handle of the fishing rod you just assembled, and off you go. Before you know it you’re reeling in digital fish.
I’ve built some forts out of cardboard and opened my share of boxes, but I never realized how serenely thrilling corrugated cardboard is as a material. I found myself in a state of pure calm freeing the cardboard cut-outs and punching out the little holes and chads as I went (I leave no hanging chads).
Much of the fun comes from the quirky way each cardboard Toy-Con is designed. No build is predictable and it’s fun to figure out precisely how the odd mess of cardboard will ever come together, but it always does so in surprising, brilliant ways. After a few days with Labo, I feel like I’ve already learned a bit about construction and how to fortify a cardboard creation. I can only imagine what a creative kid who normally plays Minecraft might dream up after getting a taste for Toy-Cons.
Nintendo Nintendo Labo Cardboard Kits Rating: 9/10 $45 at Amazon £30 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED The on-screen instruction manual for each Toy-Con also adds to the fun. The sometimes snarky, often amusing instructions, feel like a part of the experience, not just a prerequisite before the real game starts. I don’t remember Lego instructions ever telling me to choose “whichever [shortstrap] speaks to you in your soul,” encouraging me to take breaks after finishing sections, or making up rhymes like “Dum diddly dum dade! Not long ‘til the arms are made!” to keep me engaged.
Each set of instructions walks you through every fold and snap, complete with sound effects for every touchscreen tap. Each step clearly lays out which pieces you’ll need to snap out of which cardboard sheet and 3D models let you zoom in or move the camera with the Switch touchscreen. Most of the projects tend to take at least a half hour, and some last as long as 4 hours.
The only thing that occasionally broke my zen was the Nintendo Switch itself. The most comfortable way for me to get to work was with the Switch on my dining room table, propped up with its kickstand. Unfortunately, the Switch is wobbly and fell down more than a few times, and ran out of battery in the middle of long projects. Hopefully Nintendo will make a Switch with more than 3-5 hours of battery life someday.
Which Labo Should You Buy? There are three Nintendo Labo kits, and they each include multiple cardboard Toy-Cons to build, games to play with them, and a Discover section, where a group of kooky characters with suspiciously appropriate names like “Professor Gerry Rigg” and “Lerna Lotte” will teach you tons of tips and tricks, and unlock extra modes, customizations, and doo-dads in the games. All of three kits are fun, but they’re made for different kinds of players.
Nintendo Photograph: Nintendo The Vehicle Kit ($70) is the newest Labo Toy-Con, and my favorite (probably yours, too). It's just hitting shelves in September, about five months after the Variety and Robot Kits debuted. This kit is all about steering and piloting, and has a pretty deep and wacky exploration game attached to it.
You can build a spray can, gas pedal, an airplane joystick, a double-handed submarine steering box, and an extremely robust steering wheel. The steering wheel looks polygonal, like it's from an old Nintendo 64 game, but it's packed with features, including a jet boost cord you can yank, a horn, a lever for reverse, and two twistable, flickable stalks for other functions, like window wipers and shifting gears.
With the gas pedal, it sometimes felt like I was using a full racing wheel for driving simulators. Granted, it always felt like a racing wheel made of cardboard, but the control is impressive nonetheless.
It will take 5-10 hours to build the five kits, and they're a lot of fun to put together, like the Variety Kit. Unlike the Variety Kit and Robot kits, the gameplay they unlock is actually more fun than the build. The Vehicle Kit also has an adventure mode where you can freely drive or fly around an open world with 10 zones to explore, each with at least eight small little challenges in them, like finding the gas station in each zone, herding plastic toy cows, or shooting balloons out of the sky. I've already spent a few hours driving, flying, and subbing around the island, and there's a lot I haven't completed. The submarine is my least favorite, but I'm sure other players will love it.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Nintendo Even if you're not into the challenges, it's still a delight to use the motion control to fly and drive. Even non-gamers will enjoy trying it out. It shows the potential of Labo kits to bring new types of control to life. It's also easy to swap between control types, taking the air or water in seconds, with a Joy-Con "key" that you slide in and out of each steering gadget. Your second Joy-Con is always in the gas pedal.
If a friend also has a Vehicle Kit, you can face them in a surprisingly fun Battle mode (I had fun blasting the AI opponent alone, too). A few other minigames are also included.
Nintendo has already committed to bringing Labo steering wheel to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (the Variety Kit motorcycle handlebars will, too). Hopefully these steering options become usable in more games.
Nintendo Nintendo If you’re interested in Labo, or you're shopping for a kid, it’s probably because you want to construct a lot of cardboard gadgets and make some of your own. The Labo Variety Kit ($70) is a good introduction. It includes five different table-top Toy-Cons, letting you construct a working piano, a fishing rod with a sandbox-style fishing game, two small cars that buzz across the floor, motorbike handlebars for racing, and a house with a Tamagotchi-like creature living in it.
Most of these mini games are fun to play for a few minutes, but lack a ton of depth unless you spend time to learn their secrets.
There are moments when you’ll wish Nintendo would hold your hand more or keep teaching. After having a ton of fun constructing a cardboard piano for three hours, the end result was a surprisingly functional piano that could play all the notes, and a bunch of extra tools that make fun noises (like cats meowing or weird men yelling). The Toy-Con Piano even has the ability to swap between octaves and record music.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED My problem: I don’t know how to play a piano. I wish Nintendo had included more tutorials on how to play some classic songs or old Nintendo themes. It hints at some ideas, but leaves it to you to be creative and play whatever you want. For for some kids, this is a gateway to ideas. For the little Jeffreys out there, it may mean that the piano Toy-Con doesn’t get used as much.
Other games are more fun to tinker around with. And the Variety Kit has a Garage section, which lets you make your own Toy-Cons. If you or your kid loves to play open-ended games like Minecraft or create inspired Lego creations without instructions, the Variety Kit is a great way to go.
Nintendo Nintendo If you or your child like the idea of using your arms, legs, head, and body to control a giant flying robot fighting machine, the Labo Robot Kit ($80) is for you. Instead of five unique, cardboard Toy-Cons, this kit has a single 4-hour project. Your mission is to construct a complex backpack, headset, and string-tethered controls for your feet and hands. It’s very fun, but more about gameplay than discovery.
Once you’re wearing the suit, you can use your hands to punch objects and your feet to walk. As a 30-something adult man, I felt a tad embarrassed wearing this corrugated getup, even alone in my apartment, but I also had a ton of fun. It’s not virtual reality, but feels more immersive than some VR games I’ve played thanks to its responsive controls.
Your first mission is to smash a city, so you can stomp on buildings or anything else you feel like destroying. If you crouch down, you can transform into a tank and blast enemies that way too. But that’s just the start.
Nintendo Nintendo Labo Cardboard Kits Rating: 9/10 $45 at Amazon £30 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED There are five different types of challenges with multiple levels and they each teach you a new move or ability. If a sibling or friend also has a Labo Robot suit, and you own an extra set of Joy-Cons , you can fight each other in a multiplayer mecha deathmatch.
There are other extras, like the ability to fully recolor and customize the look of your robot, a free-for-all music mode that lets you play instruments by moving your arms and legs, and a calorie counter that tells you how many calories you’re burning by stomping and punching away. You won't find endless fun here, and it's a lot of work to put on a full suit every time you want to play, but you can goof around for many hours before feeling like you've mastered the game. Like the Variety Kit, this set also has a Garage that lets you program your own cardboard Labo (or the new robot suit you own).
Nintendo For some of you, the Garage will be too much, but for others, it's where the real fun begins. In this area of the software, you can set up rules to program Labo to do a bunch of things. You just tell it what the trigger is (example: if a Joy-Con moves) and then what the result should be (example: make the screen light up). Any of the console's sensors, motors, and buttons are are your disposal.
It hasn't happened yet, but if the games attract a community, there could be websites full of instructions on how to make custom Toy-Cons, and Etsy sellers could have a field day peddling pre-cut cardboard to curious kids. Nintendo already sells Labo masking tape in Japan and offers a U.S.
Customization Set.
It's clear that more cardboard is coming.
There are a lot of STEM games and programming toys out there, but there isn’t anything quite like the Nintendo Labo. Building out of cardboard is far more freeing and rewarding than I thought it would be. Even if you rip something or make a mistake, there’s always an easy fix: grab some tape. Anything can be modded, too—as soon as you feel comfortable tinkering with Nintendo’s simple programming interface (and once your parents give you permission to use the scissors).
The Labo Toy-Cons work so well they're often magical, but you also get to learn exactly how they work as you build them. That said, some of the Toy-Con games, especially those in the Variety Kit , are open ended and might seem shallow once you're done putting everything together. If building isn’t the top reason you’re buying a Labo, opt for the Vehicle Kit , which has a more comprehensive game attached to it.
Nintendo Labo Cardboard Kits Rating: 9/10 $45 at Amazon £30 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED When I first got Labo, I wondered if it would be like a good set of Lego, or more like something you make and then put on the shelf. The answer will depend on you (or your kid). Nintendo has stuffed an incredible amount of playful software into its three Labo Kits, and goes out of its way to encourage creativity by letting you customize and experiment. With enough imagination, kids and adults can get way more than $70 worth of fun out of any Labo. Heck, I might pay $70 just to sit and peacefully assemble another cardboard gadget.
Nintendo Labo Cardboard Kits Rating: 9/10 $45 at Amazon £30 at Amazon If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism.
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Please also consider subscribing to WIRED $45 at Amazon Reviews Director X Topics Nintendo Reviews Shopping Console Games video games Jeffrey Van Camp David Pierce Chris Kohler Brendan Nystedt Jeffrey Van Camp Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Chris Berdik for the Hechinger Report Business Tech's Favorite School Faces Its Biggest Test: the Real World Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save On lengths of yarn stretched between chairs, sixth-grade math students were placing small yellow squares of paper, making number lines—including everything from fractions to negative decimals—in a classroom at Walsh Middle School. Working in teams one recent morning, they paper-clipped the squares along the yarn like little pieces of mathematical laundry.
Their teacher, Michele O'Connor, had assigned the number lines in previous years, but this year was different. She, personally, hadn't spent much time leading students through practice problems or introducing the basic math concepts they would use in the project. That had largely been relegated to online math lessons, part of separate periods of learning time when students were free to work through computer-based lessons in any subject they chose, at their own pace.
The change at Walsh, located in Framingham, Massachusetts, is part of a nationwide pilot program, one that could indicate just how deeply and how quickly the personalized-learning trend will penetrate the average classroom. Indeed, despite the buzz around personalized learning, there's no simple recipe for success, and the common ingredients — such as adaptive-learning technology and student control over learning — can backfire if poorly implemented.
Inside the Online School That Could Radically Change How Kids Learn Everywhere Forget Big Data—Little Data Is Making Learning Personal American Schools Struggle to Keep Online Fights From Turning Physical A looming question is whether personalized learning that works in, say, a tight-knit, mission-driven charter school can be reliably translated into traditional district schools with many more students, less flexible schedules, keener standardized-test worries and cultures steeped in established ways of teaching and learning.
Some passionately believe that it can and must, while skeptics fear that personalized-learning hype has outpaced research into if and, importantly, how it helps students. The pilot Walsh joined could be a big part of the answer.
It's led by one of the most celebrated leaders of the blended- and personalized-learning movement, California-based charter network Summit Public Schools. For the last two years, Summit has set out to replicate its success, not by opening more Summit schools, but by offering other schools free tools, training and support to transform themselves. The centerpiece of Summit's franchising effort is their Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, a free, open-sourced learning management system that boasts a full curriculum for grades 6 through 12, including projects, online learning resources and tests. Teachers and administrators from interested schools can apply to join Summit Basecamp, which includes an intensive week-long summer training session on Summit's technology and approach. Basecamp schools then receive mentoring from and troubleshooting by Summit staff, as well as PLP access throughout the academic year.
Summit's Basecamp is far from the only personalized-learning effort out there, but it's among the most ambitious. Nineteen pilot schools participated in 2015; this year, the number skyrocketed, with 119 more joining the Basecamp ranks. More than two-thirds of them are district-run schools.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Bits of student performance data are only just starting to trickle out of the pilot schools, so it's too early to quantitatively assess most of them. Qualitatively, however, some broad themes emerged in visits and conversations with teachers, administrators, students and parents at several Basecamp schools. For most schools, the jump into personalized-learning was really hard. Tales abound of frustrated teachers, crying students and flummoxed parents. Still, the Basecamp participants said they overcame the rocky starts and that any school can follow their lead if its teachers and students are willing to shed old assumptions, comfortable routines and a few tears along the way.
One early November afternoon in Sunnyvale, about an hour's drive south of San Francisco, a class of ninth-graders at Summit Denali sat at computers for a 45-minute session of personalized learning time (some days, there are two sessions). Many watched instructional videos or worked with adaptive-learning software that adjusted lessons based on each student's proficiency. Other than a few murmured conversations and the clicking of keyboards, the only sound was mellow acoustic guitar music played on their teacher's laptop. Their school director, Kevin Bock, stood by the door.
"We put the music on because it used to get too quiet in here, and it weirded people out," Bock whispered.
Among people new to the Summit program, such scenes of silent, computer-based work can arouse worries that personalized learning means parking kids in front of screens. So it was with parents at one of the first Basecamp schools, Marshall Pomeroy Elementary in Milpitas, a small city off the southern tip of San Francisco Bay.
Last year, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English on California tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide.
"Our days aren't as long as Summit's days, and so we have to send some of the [personalized-learning time] home as homework," said Sheila Murphy-Brewer, principal of Marshall Pomeroy. As a result, she said, during the school's first Basecamp year in 2015, "many parents were thinking, 'oh, this is just about kids being on the computer.'" The school has since done more parent outreach to combat that misperception.
Back at Summit Denali, Bock said the goal of personalized-learning time is not to replace teacher-student interactions but to enhance them. By offloading some rote learning to a computer—such as memorizing the steps of cell division or the formulas for sine, cosine and tangent—"we can make the most of the connections between teachers and kids," he said. "We want more of those interactions to be about big ideas, deeper learning and the sort of feedback that you can only get from a real, live adult." Those connections start with one-on-one mentoring, in which teachers meet with students weekly to discuss short-term goals, such as completing a certain number of units in a history course, and long-term goals that stretch into college and career. Mentor time is also meant to reinforce "habits of success," such as time management and persistence.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "My long-term goal is to go to Stanford and major in aerospace engineering," said Christina Nguyen, a ninth-grader at Summit Denali. Nguyen was working on quadratic equations with her friend, Chloe Starbird, who had recently discussed summer internship options with her mentor in pursuit of a career in medicine or biogenetics.
Back at Walsh Middle School in Framingham, O'Connor said Summit's approach "opened up a little more room for creativity and higher-level thinking in the [number-line] project." "I'm not spoon-feeding them anything," she explained. "That's a relief, because there's a lot less of me trying to run around and help everybody with little details, and more of us having conversations about math." Still, asking preteens to guide their own learning "was a huge adjustment, for everybody," said O'Connor. At the start of the year, her students were often frustrated, and she had to resist the urge to step in and rescue them. For nearly two months of school, she said, "It was tough. There were tears." 'You get to take tests over again, and you get to see what you’ve done wrong, instead of just getting a bad grade and leaving it like that.' Stephen Boulas, Walsh Middle School While her students worked, O'Connor circulated among them, asking questions and steering chatter back to math. Later, she would grade not the number lines themselves, but the explanations students gave for the placement and spacing of each number. The students were typing those explanations into a page on PLP, and would later present them to the class.
Summit requires Basecamp schools to follow its practice of basing 30 percent of grades on mastery of content and 70 percent on students' use of various cognitive skills, such as making inferences and clearly communicating their ideas. Summit partnered with Stanford's Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity to develop the rubric for evaluating the cognitive skills in each grade.
While Summit's PLP does include tests of content knowledge for each subject, students take them only when they feel ready and, if they fail, can re-take them until they pass. Some Walsh parents, such as Paula Swift, whose sixth-grade son, Trevor, is in the Summit program, are fully supportive of this "mastery-based" grading.
"My son comes home so excited when he passes a focus area," Swift wrote in an email. "I've never seen him react to school so well." Other parents are puzzled by the approach. "I've definitely heard from at least 10 parents who are like, ‘I don't know what's going on,' " O'Connor said. " ‘Is this good for my child?' " Her students seemed less ambivalent. "You get to take tests over again, and you get to see what you've done wrong, instead of just getting a bad grade and leaving it like that," said Stephen Boulas. "That's something I like about Summit." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "It's so much better," said Brooke Williams, who sat on the classroom floor with her Chromebook in her lap, adjusting her number line. "I used to fail a lot of math tests. But now, I love school math, because I'm learning better." There's tremendous hype swirling around personalized learning, with money pouring in from foundations and education technology companies eager to capitalize on the trend. Still, there are some stalwart critics, notably Benjamin Riley, who visited many personalized-learning classrooms from 2010 to 2014 as the policy and advocacy director for the NewSchools Venture Fund. Shortly after leaving that post, Riley planted his skeptic's flag with an oft-cited blog post titled, "Don't Personalize Learning." Riley, who now leads Deans for Impact, a nonprofit he founded to improve teacher training, argued that putting students in charge of their learning defies research on how we learn best. According to Riley, the personalized learning advocates wrongly assume that all students are able to effectively guide their own learning. "Knowledge is cumulative," he wrote, meaning that our ability to learn is changed by what we already know. Teachers guide students through the foundational knowledge they need to think critically about a topic, to structure their inquiries for learning more and to understand new information when they encounter it.
'Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It’s easy to do it superficially.' Beth Rabbitt, CEO, The Learning Accelerator Logically, this concern about the need for guidance heightens with novice learners. The Summit program was designed for high school students and expanded to middle schools. While some Basecamp educators think Summit's model could work at every grade, others are more cautious. Pleasant View Elementary in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, started Summit with fifth-graders in 2015, and this year introduced a few aspects of the approach to fourth-graders. Pleasant View's principal, Colleen Loughlin, said she has no plans to expand Summit to the whole school.
"When you have little ones, it's harder to do the full, self-directed learning. There needs to be a lot more scaffolding and support," said Loughlin, singling out her school's structured and deliberate literacy instruction. "We need to set a strong foundation. We don't want to create gaps in our learning for our little ones." Last year, according to Summit administrators, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English Language Arts on California's state tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide, and 51 percent of Summit students met or exceeded the standards for math, compared to 37 percent statewide. The college acceptance rate for Summit graduates perennially pushes 100 percent.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Nevertheless, in a phone interview, Riley pointed out that there isn't much rigorous research showing what aspects of the model specifically lead to that student success. Is it more about the personalized learning, for instance, or the super-committed and highly skilled teachers? "I would be shocked if Summit was not an excellent school, because I believe [Summit founder and CEO] Diane Tavenner cares deeply about pedagogy and instruction," Riley said. "But that shouldn't necessarily be the model that we're all rushing out to replicate throughout our education system, because I can point to examples that I've seen time and again where personalized learning isn't working." Even some of personalized learning's biggest backers admit that it's easy to get it wrong.
'We want more interactions to be about big ideas, deeper learning and the sort of feedback that you can only get from a real, live adult.' Kevin Bock, principal, Summit Denali "Folks like Ben [Riley] have a valid point," said Beth Rabbitt, CEO of The Learning Accelerator, a nonprofit that works to scale up blended and personalized learning. "Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It's easy to do it superficially." Last August, for instance, the Center on Reinventing Public Education published a brief field report from their ongoing study of personalized-learning initiatives warning that some schools focus on the "iconography" of personalized learning — the technology or the project-based learning — but sacrifice rigor.
In fact, some experts would argue that if the transition to personalization is easy, then you're probably doing it wrong.
"When I walk into a classroom and see all the kids on a computer, mostly on the same screen, and the teacher is moving around the room like a test proctor, that is where we've gone way wrong and need to right the ship," said Shawn Rubin, chief education officer for the Highlander Institute, a Rhode Island nonprofit that promotes education innovation.
About 10 percent of Basecamp schools are in Rhode Island, a concentration that trails only California, Texas and Illinois, thanks partly to the efforts of the Highlander Institute, which steers schools interested in personalized learning to one of three technology platforms — PLP by Summit, Cortex by the Brooklyn Lab School or Buzz by the technology company Agilix. But, before Highlander recommends any technology, the nonprofit works extensively with the schools to get them ready.
It's a one- to three-year process that includes recruiting principals and teachers to be early adopters for their schools and touring schools that have made the transition to successful personalized learning.
"Then we do the hard work of embedding coaches in their classrooms," said Rubin, "so they can get better at helping students set goals, and use blended learning to tailor their instruction and develop meaty projects." According to Lizzie Choi, the chief program officer for Summit who leads Basecamp, that kind of groundwork is helpful, but not required. The only prerequisites for would-be Basecamp schools are a commitment to Summit's grading policy, a one-to-one ratio of computers to students and a team of at least four teachers covering the core academic subjects for about 100 students.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Beyond that, Choi said Summit welcomes any school willing to take on the program's rigorous application, which requires vision statements, teacher videos and strategy papers on everything from parent engagement to mentoring and project-based learning. It takes months to complete and is meant to introduce schools to the rigors of a transition to Summit's model — and to weed out those who aren't ready. About half the schools that started Basecamp applications last year didn't finish.
"We don't want to have to say no to anybody," said Choi. "We try to tell people, wherever you are on that continuum, if you're excited and have a vision for where you want your school to be, then we are here to support you." "Historically, there are virtually no game-changers in the history of school innovations," said Justin Reich, executive director of MIT's Teaching Systems Lab and the author of Education Week's EdTechResearcher blog. "And most innovations don't have a strong track record of transferring from one place to another in their original form." Basecamp is not a school cloning operation. Summit encourages pilot schools to adapt its model to fit local needs. For instance, Basecamp schools are creative with scheduling, finding myriad ways to fit in personalized-learning time, mentoring and projects while carving out extra time for teachers to jointly plan lessons and confer about students.
'In these next couple years, we need to get as many communities as possible to rally around this and want to keep it going.' Lizzie Choi, chief program officer, Summit Public Schools Most Basecamp schools make a lot of changes to the platform's lesson plans, projects and assessments. For instance, the platform had no fifth-grade curriculum when Pleasant View Elementary became a Basecamp pilot in 2015, so the teachers spent all summer crafting one. At Marshall Pomeroy, teachers added a bunch of extra supports and scaffolds for students with learning disabilities. The Basecamp schools in Pasadena, Texas, outside Houston, added materials for Spanish-speaking English language learners as well as a required Texas history course.
Eventually, Summit hopes to include these additions as options for every user of PLP.
"Our vision is an entire community of educators across all contexts who are building on each other's work," said Choi. For now, Choi said her "number-one goal" is to build up the capacity of local areas to develop Basecamp leaders, "so Summit isn't providing all the direct support all the time." In Summit's first year of Basecamp, for instance, mentors from Summit staff made regular visits to every pilot school to help coach teachers and troubleshoot. "We realized that we were having so many of the same coaching sessions and conversations over and over," said Choi. So this year, Summit's mentors have been keeping in touch with Basecamp schools by phone and holding periodic regional meetings for collaborative problem solving.
Choi wouldn't put a target on further expansion. She said that Basecamp was "intentionally designed to start small," noting, for instance, that they train just four or five teachers (one grade) from each school.
At the same time, she added, "there is some incredible amount of excitement in the country around changing the way we teach and learn. And we want to capitalize on that.
"We know how education reform is. Every couple of years, something comes and then it goes. So, in these next couple years, we need to get as many communities as possible to rally around this and want to keep it going." This story was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about blended learning.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Kiliii Yüyan Backchannel The Quiet, Intentional Fires of Northern California A firefighter manages the boundary of an indigenous prescribed burn near Weitchpec, California, during a fire training exchange in October.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Save this story Save Save this story Save In the wake of catastrophic wildfires like the one in 2018 that burned the California city of Paradise, wildfire management has become a pressing topic, to say the least. Especially under scrutiny is the US Forest Service’s hundred-year policy of suppressing fire—on the surface it makes sense. Fire burns houses and kills people. It’s a terrible, uncontrollable enemy. Right? Not necessarily. The native communities across California have been practicing traditional, controlled forest burning techniques for 13,000 years. From the great grasslands of central California to the salmon runs of the Klamath River, the Miwok, Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, and other nations have tended and provided for those plant and animal species that were useful to them. To do this, they created a patchwork of different ecological zones using low-intensity fire, creating niches that support California’s unbelievable biodiversity. Some of the California landscapes that look like pristine wilderness to the nonindigenous are actually human-modified ecosystems.
And many species have come to depend on low-intensity fire at a genetic level. “We have fire-dependent species that coevolved with fire-dependent culture,” says Frank Lake, a US Forest Service research ecologist and Yurok descendant. “When we remove fire, we also take away the ecosystem services they produce.” To understand how indigenous cultural fire management works, I attended a Training Exchange, or TREX, a collaboration between the Yurok-led Cultural Fire Management Council and the Nature Conservancy’s Fire Learning Network. A couple of times a year, firefighters from around the world gather to learn from the best of the best, the Yurok traditional fire managers. We learned about the traditional uses of prescribed fires—they aid the acorn and huckleberry harvests—but we also worked with modern tools like drip torches and atmospheric weather instruments. When everyone returns to manage their own homelands, they bring with them a deeper knowledge of how to use fire holistically to heal the land while preventing catastrophic and out-of-control wildfire.
For me, as a photographer used to working almost exclusively in the Arctic, I found this story to be challenging—it was hot in Northern California in October! The first day I was on assignment, the mercury hit 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and I tried my best to keep making photographs with sweat dripping down my camera. Thankfully, within a day, the weather shifted and I learned to navigate this dry, beautiful landscape with the same sense of wonder as I do up North. It’s hard to walk around inside a Yurok-burned forest without a sense of awe at the renewal of life and the ingenuity of its indigenous caretakers.
Two halves of a forest on Yurok land separated by a fire line near Orleans, California. The charred side is from a recent indigenous prescribed burn by the Yurok community, and it demonstrates the open nature of the forest after a burn, the reduction of fuels, and the sequestration of carbon in the form of charcoal on the ground. In high-intensity wildfires, the trees die and the majority of the carbon in their wood is released into the atmosphere.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Frank Lake, a research ecologist for the Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station Fire and Fuels Program and Yurok descendant, selects stalks of beargrass from the forest floor, which was culturally burned three months prior. The low intensity of the 6-acre prescribed fire did not kill the beargrass plants, which are used in the weaving and patterning of traditional coiled baskets, but removed older leaves that are unsuitable for traditional weaving.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Tan oak acorns rest on the charred forest floor, where they stand out for easy harvesting due to the lack of leaf litter and debris. This forest floor was culturally burned by Yurok land managers to reduce tan oak acorn pests like weevils, and to make the harvest of acorns, a traditional food source, more productive. Tan oaks also produce more acorns after a fire.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Hazelnuts grow on Frank Lake’s property in Orleans, California, which he uses to showcase traditional burning: The hazelnuts don't have to compete for light and space in the undergrowth, and the nuts are much easier to access after fire.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Traditional materials like evergreen huckleberry, a traditional winnowing tray, and baskets of woven confer roots, maidenhair ferns and beargrass are managed to their ideal harvest state through indigenous fire.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Sunset over the Klamath River and its forests near Weitchpec, California. “The Klamamth-Siskiyou bioregion has the most diverse conifer forest in the world,” says Lake.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan A Yurok tribal member fishes for salmon using a dip-net at his traditional fishing grounds on the Klamath River in Northern California in late September. Declines in the spring salmon here have, at times, forced closures of the fishery. Historically, it is believed that smoke from indigenous burning shaded regional rivers during periods of the highest water temperatures, increasing the survival rate of spawning salmon. “The few degrees of cooling from the smoke can make a life or death difference for many of those fish,” says Lake.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Elizabeth Azzuz, a member of the Cultural Fire Management Council, opens an indigenous cultural burn training by lightning a ceremonial fire with sage. The mission of the council is to facilitate the practice of cultural burning on the Yurok Reservation and ancestral lands, which will lead to a healthier ecosystem for all plants and animals, long term fire protection for residents, and support the traditional hunting and gathering activities of the Yurok.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Margo Robbins, head of the Cultural Fire Management Council and a Yurok tribal member, leads firefighters as they light an indigenous prescribed burn with dried and bundled branches, which are in turn lit from a single coal from a sage bundle.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Smoke from an indigenous prescribed burn filters through the forest canopy on Yurok lands, near Weitchpec, California.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Margo Robbins not only leads Training Exchanges, but also weaves her culture’s celebrated baskets. “We use TREX to ensure the continuance of our culture and protect cultural resources. Our culture is fire dependent. Our people are hunters, gatherers and basket weavers,” says Robbins. “Restoration of the land, and preservation of our culture is a number one priority for people living on the Yurok Reservation. We MUST put fire on the ground if we are to continue the tradition of basket weaving.” Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Firefighters participating in a Yurok-led cultural fire training exchange (TREX), practice controlled burning, coordination, and fire management skills near Weitchpec, CA, in early October. Although the widely used practice of burning brush piles is not traditional, it is a skillset that supports indigenous burning.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Rhodri Wiseman, a firefighter from Alberta, Canada, participates in a Yurok-led cultural fire training exchange. She is managing the spread of the fire by micro-managing its fuel, wood, and debris.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Firefighters climb down a steep fire line on their way to a controlled prescription burn area. Fires are generally created at the higher points of elevation and then burned downslope to keep them manageable.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Firefighters participating in a training exchange refill their drip torches. Drip torches are fuel canisters used to intentionally ignite fires by dripping flaming fuel onto the ground.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Firefighters cut large debris so that it can be moved into burn piles safely and clear safe zones so that the fire doesn't spread.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Indigenous culturally prescribed fire is carefully managed on the ground, and the firefighters use precise sprays of water control the spread of this small and low-intensity burning and keep it from moving in particular directions.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan A ring of flame is created around a young hazel plant, burning away competitors during a burn. Hazelnuts are an important food for the Yurok, and this type of carefully managed burning can selectively protect particular important cultural plants.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan A section of forest near Weitchpec, California, burned by a moderate-intensity wildfire shows that the fire has killed all of the trees, even though it stayed below the forest canopy. The low-intensity fires of indigenous prescribed burns, on the other hand, keeps older trees alive and can be specifically used to protect species of value.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Blaine McKinnon, the TREX “burn boss,” or fire crew commander, reviews the lay of the land with firefighters. Traditional firefighters benefit from using modern fire tools and measurement instruments, and Western firefighters learn some of the deep ecological knowledge like soil and plant types that can be used to manipulate and manage fire.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Open forests on a ridge show the results of a US Forest Service controlled burn directed by Don Hankins, a Miwok tribal member and professor of geography at California State University, Chico, using indigenous fire management. In the distance are hills illustrating the devastating effects of California's 2018 Camp Fire, the result of a hundred years of USFS fire suppression policy.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan A firefighter runs over the charred ground of a low-intensity indigenous prescribed burn. The small flames of this fire are created and maintained based on factors like humidity conditions, plant species, and soil composition. After the fire is created it is ‘walked’ along, a small section at a time, so that its intensity doesn’t get out of hand.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Jose Luis Duce watches the burn. Duce leads this type of training exchange in Spain, bringing the traditional ecological knowledge of California tribes to other places. A few Spanish firefighters attend each TREX.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Don Hankins directed the indigenous burn that created this open grassland on the experimental Big Chico Ecological reserve. Grasslands, which support many animal and plant species, are one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Hankins harvests grass stems for traditional basketry at the Big Chico Ecological Reserve. The reserve is managed by indigenous prescribed fire, which increases the diversity of native grasses.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan Prescribed burns, though smoky, have few flames and low temperatures, ensuring their spread horizontally rather than vertically through the forest.
Photograph: Kiliii Yüyan The increasing collaboration between the US Forest Service and California indigenous communities is an affirmation by western science that traditional ecological knowledge is both valuable and powerful. Indigenous burning may go back millennia, but it remains a potent technology. It can be used to prevent catastrophic wildfires like those raging throughout the American West, and can be used to mitigate the effects of the warming climate.
Frank Lake reminds us, however, that this indigenous technology is inseparable from the culture. The nuanced understanding of prescribed fire comes from the constant feedback of indigenous community members, from huckleberry gatherers to deer hunters. “For the conservation of endangered species to ecosystem management to an indigenous holistic management, fire is the central tool in the cultural toolkit,” he says. “Humans can use fire, so stewardship of the land becomes our responsibility.” Updated 10-17-19, 4:02 PM EST: This story has been updated to correctly identify a firefighter.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Brooke Jarvis Backchannel How One Woman's Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her Play/Pause Button Pause Art by Yoshi Sodeoka Save this story Save Save this story Save The first time the police arrived on her doorstep, in March of 2015, Courtney Allen was elated.
She rushed to the door alongside her dogs, a pair of eager Norwegian elkhounds, to greet them. “Is this about our case?” she asked. The police looked at her in confusion. They didn’t know what case she was talking about. Courtney felt her hope give way to a familiar dread.
Three days earlier, Courtney and her husband, Steven, had gone to the police headquarters in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, and reported that, for the past few months, they had been the victims of a campaign of online harassment.
They had found a fake Facebook page under Steven’s name with a profile picture of Courtney, naked. Emails rained down in their inboxes; some called Courtney a cunt, whore, and bitch, and one they felt was a death threat. Her coworkers received emails with videos and screenshots of Courtney, naked and masturbating. The messages came from a wide range of addresses, and some appeared to be from Steven.
There were phone calls too. One to Steven’s grandmother warned that her house might burn down, with her in it, if she didn’t stay out of the Allens’ lives. There were so many calls to the dental office where Courtney worked that the receptionists started to keep a log: “Called and said, ‘Put that dumb cunt Courtney on the phone,’ ” one of them wrote in neat, bubbly handwriting. “I said, ‘She is not here at the moment, may I take a message?’ ” At one point Courtney created a Google Voice number to ask, “If I talk to you, will you leave me alone?” Instead, dozens of voicemails poured in: “Do you think I’m ever going away?” one said. “Now that my private investigator went and got all the tax information? There’s no job either one of you guys can have that I won’t know about and be there.” December 2017.
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Rebecca Benderite/Eyeem/Getty Images The Kent police officer who took the Allens’ statement seemed unsure of what to make of their story. Courtney and Steven told him who they believed was behind the harassment: a man in Arizona named Todd Zonis with whom Courtney had an online relationship that she had recently broken off. She says she told the officers that she had sent Zonis the videos of herself while they were still involved and that he had sent ones of himself to her, but that she had deleted their exchange. In a report, the officer noted that, while Courtney and Steven insisted that his role was obvious, Zonis’ name barely appeared in the folder full of printouts and CDs that they had with them. The officer assigned them a case number and advised them not to have any more contact with Zonis.
Now, three days later, the two officers on Courtney’s doorstep explained why they had come: An anonymous tipster, who claimed to work with Steven, had left a report on the Crime Stoppers website. It said that Steven “had been telling everyone for months that his wife was leaving him but he had a plan to beat her into staying.” The tipster added that he had noticed “a lot of bruises.” When prompted for more information on the suspect, the informant wrote that the Allens had a “large gun collection” and two big dogs. (One detective later noted that some of the reports seemed designed to trigger “a large/violent police response.”) The police left after interviewing Courtney, but three days later, two detectives knocked on the Allens’ door in the early afternoon. Courtney wondered, more cautiously this time, if she would now get a response to her complaint. But no—the detectives were investigating another anonymous tip. This one was about an alleged incident at a park involving Steven and the Allens’ 4-year-old: “His son screamed and he smacked him repeatedly on the back, butt, legs, and head, but not the face,” the tipster wrote. “He then berated his wife, calling her ‘whore’ and worse … She covers for him when the abuse is to her, but abuse to the child I don’t know what will happen.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In her report of the visit, detective Angie Galetti wrote that the Allens’ son “came downstairs and appeared to be happy and healthy.” She described how Courtney had to coax her nervous son into showing his skin to the detectives: “There was no suspicious bruising or marks of any kind,” she wrote. He “appeared appropriately attached to his mother and Detective Lorette and I had no concerns.” Opinion Nina Jankowicz It's a Trap! Andy Greenberg Opinion Albert Fox Cahn and Eva Galperin But Courtney’s concerns were mounting. The day before, she had gotten an email to an account she only used for spam. “How did you even GET this email address?” Courtney wrote back. “Leave me and my family alone!” A reply came accusing Steven of also using unsavory cybertactics to find out about Courtney’s online behavior, but added: “I am MUCH better at it. For example. Your Jetta, in the driveway”—and yes, that’s where it was. The message included the car’s vehicle identification number. Courtney had started having nightmares; just going outside made her afraid. She felt violated by the images of her that were circulating who knew where, and anxious about what might come next.
And now this. It was “one of the worst moments of my life,” she said later, hoping that help was coming but instead “having to lift up my son’s shirt and show them my son’s body to make sure he had no bruises.” When the detectives asked for her phone number, she realized she didn’t remember it—she had just changed it in an attempt to evade the endless calls. She found herself sobbing in front of the detectives. The harassment was so creative, so relentless, so unpredictable. Around the same time, at least 15 of her neighbors received a “community alert” in the mail warning them that they were living near a dangerous abuser, Steven Allen. It was postmarked from Arizona.
But the most frustrating thing was how hard it all was to explain or prove. Courtney was beginning to feel trapped in a world of anonymous abuse. She didn’t know if she would be able to convince anyone that what she believed to be happening was real.
It began, as relationships often do these days, online. From the start it was a strange and tangled story of exposure and distrust in the internet era.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the fall of 2012, Courtney and Steven had been together for 12 years but had known each other for 20: They met in a high school biology class and reconnected later when Courtney was going through a divorce. The couple—now in their mid-thirties, with a house full of fantasy books and clay dragons that Courtney sculpted—were avid players of Grepolis , an empire- and alliance-building browser game set in ancient Greece.
One day a player in an opposing alliance asked if he could join theirs. The small council that ran the alliance agreed. This was Courtney’s first introduction to Todd Zonis and she liked him from the start: “He was crude and rude and I thought it was actually kind of funny,” she says.
Courtney’s player name was sharklady76. As she recalls it, Zonis sent her a note on the game’s messaging service to say he had once owned a shark, and from there the conversation took off. They talked about gardening and pets. She shared pictures of her elkhounds; Zonis sent ones of his tortoise. The two progressed to video-chats.
Both were married, but “it just kind of grew from there,” Courtney remembers. “It was a really strong friendship and then turned into not a friendship.” At the time, Courtney was staying home with her toddler. She and Steven had made that decision together, but still, it was rough on their marriage: Steven was working long hours as an IT instructor and felt the stress of being the sole breadwinner. He often traveled for work. Courtney was a nervous new mother, afraid to let her son stay with sitters, which only increased her sense of isolation. She was often angry at Steven, whom she began to see as controlling and neglectful.
Zonis was a freelance sound engineer with a flexible schedule. The relationship with him offered “an escape,” Courtney says: “He was charming. He told me everything that I ever wanted to hear about how wonderful I was.” She adds, “I just thought the world of him. Because it was online, it was very easy to not see the faults someone has, to not see warning signs.” Eventually Courtney was spending a lot of time online with Zonis and pulling further away from Steven. She kept telling herself that they were just good friends, even when Zonis sent her a penis-shaped sex toy. One day, nearly a year after Zonis first joined the alliance, Steven noticed Courtney’s email open while updating her laptop. He read an exchange between her and Zonis. It was explicit, and it mentioned videos. He confronted Courtney. She was furious that he had read her emails but said she would stop communicating with Zonis. Instead, she moved the relationship to her tablet, behind a password; she also labeled Zonis’ contact information with a fake name.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Steven, sensing his marriage falling apart, turned to Google. He searched “adultery” and “online affair” and found a website called Marriage Builders that bills itself as “the #1 infidelity support site on the internet.” It was founded by Willard F. Harley Jr., a psychologist who encourages his readers to work to understand and meet their spouse’s needs but also recommends a radical response when a spouse won’t end an affair: making it public to the family of the people involved. Love, he writes, should be based not on trust but on transparency. “Imagine how little crime would be committed if everyone’s activities were videotaped.” Steven tried to follow Harley’s advice for healing a marriage. He apologized for being distant and tried to get Courtney interested in answering the site’s questionnaires. But Courtney, often busy on her tablet, was leery of the Marriage Builders philosophy.
In November of 2014, just over a year after first seeing Courtney’s emails with Zonis, Steven noticed her tablet unlocked on the counter. She was in the shower, so he looked. He saw messages from a name he didn’t recognize but a writing style that he did. He then found more messages. The relationship hadn’t ended. His mind went to the advice from Marriage Builders: “Exposure helps prevent a recurrence of the offense. Your closest friends and relatives will be keeping an eye on you—holding you accountable.” A few days later, Steven contacted his parents and Courtney’s parents and told them about the relationship. He found Zonis’ wife and wrote and texted her. He looked up Zonis’ parents on a people-finder site. “I would ask that you encourage your son to stop this affair before it completely ruins our family,” he wrote, adding that he had heard that the Zonises had an open relationship. “If you have any questions or would like to see some of the evidence, please email me.” Courtney was livid. She told Steven not to come home that night; when he did, she took their son to her parents’ house. She returned the next day, but they slept in separate rooms and Courtney discussed divorce.
Zonis, too, was outraged. He saw the messages that Steven sent as an attack on his family, and one that was unjustified. Zonis tells the story of the relationship differently. After he joined the alliance, he says, he noticed Courtney talking about her husband in forums in a disturbing way, saying he was controlling and would punish her. He says Courtney reached out and became friends with him and his wife, Jennifer—“The two would chat, you know, for hours,” he says—though Courtney denies this. She asked a lot of questions about their marriage, he says, looking for advice. He denies that either he or Courtney ever sent explicit videos, or that they were more than friends.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg To Zonis, calling his relationship with Courtney an “affair” was a false characterization and cost him dearly; Steven’s comment about an open marriage, he says, turned his parents against him. He claimed that his parents cut off contact and wrote him out of their will, which meant he would not inherit the “ancestral home.” In total, he says he lost an inheritance worth more than $2 million. Zonis began saving for a lawyer so he could take Steven to court. “He destroyed my family,” Zonis says, “just to basically keep his own wife in line.” After the “exposure,” the Allens received barrages of virulent emails from Zonis’ account. He later denied writing both the anonymous emails and some that came from his account, speculating that perhaps someone to whom he’d told his story had taken it upon themselves to punish the Allens, or that the Allens were harassing each other and blaming him. He didn’t much care, he says, because he considered the harassment trivial: “My rights were violated and nobody cares, and we’re still talking about what happened to poor Courtney?” After exposing the affair, Steven continued asking for advice from other people on the Marriage Builders site. He even posted emails between Courtney and Zonis, and a copy of a letter that he wrote to Courtney: “I am so very sorry I hurt you and hurt you so deeply for years, by not considering your feelings near as much as I should have, and by demanding and disrespecting your opinion to get what I wanted. I was abusive and controlling. I was so sure I was right, and getting what I wanted would help you too, that I didn’t realize the hurt I was causing you.” He didn’t realize that Zonis had found these posts and took them as Steven admitting to being an abuser.
Steven had hoped the exposure would allow them to move on; it had the opposite effect. One of his coworkers received an email accusing Steven of assaulting Courtney. When Steven told Courtney that Zonis must have sent it, she refused to believe him. Zonis “had my ear,” she says. “I was listening to everything that he said, and I was assuming anything Steve said was a lie.” Art by Yoshi Sodeoka Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But she also felt cracks forming in her relationship with Zonis—she accused him of making the threatening call to Steven’s grandmother, which he angrily denied—and asked for space to try to get her head straight. She went back to work, seeking more independence. In an email to Zonis, the former sharklady described something she’d seen on TV: “There is a whale carcass. All the great whites gobble it up, ripping huge chunks out of it at a time. That is what I feel like … the whale.” “In my new world,” she wrote Zonis, “EVERYONE is lying to me. I don’t believe anyone anymore.” In the meantime, Steven, angry about the message to his coworker, emailed Zonis, writing that he could “look forward to continued exposures to people in your life.” Zonis, who considered this a second attack, forwarded a copy of the email to Courtney, but when she read it she sensed something was wrong. The writer referred to their child as “her” son instead of “our” son, and a boast about his ability to manipulate her did not sound like her husband. (“I know Steven looks down upon people who try to manipulate,” she says. “It just didn’t fit with his character.”) In a modern act of trust, she and Steven showed their emails to each other. She saw that the version Zonis sent to her had been edited—that Steven’s words had been changed. Courtney felt she finally knew whom to trust. “That,” she said later, “was when I turned to Steve and said, ‘I need help. I don’t know how to get myself out of this.’ ” Courtney decided to ease Zonis out of her life. Her messages to him became short, bland, and infrequent, but still she received long, aggressive responses. Finally she began demanding to be left alone, then stopped responding at all. But emails and calls continued, as many as 20 in a single day; even Courtney’s mother was getting calls. Zonis said later that he was calling the Allens to get an apology, something that he could show to his parents. One email from his personal account said that the sender had just been in the Allens’ city —“VERY nice place”—and promised a visit to the area again soon. (Zonis denies writing the message.) There were also voicemails: “I will burn myself to the ground to get him. I told you, you’re going to lose him one way or the other.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Emails arrived from other accounts too: Courtneythewhoresblog@blogspot.com, Courtney[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], Youareaselfishcocksucker@noonewilleverreallyloveyou.com. There were dozens of others.
Some messages to the Allens’ neighbors and coworkers came from what appeared to be Steven’s email. Courtney’s boss got emails from “Steven” with subject lines such as “My Slut wife Courtney” and “Courtney is not who she seems to be.” One night, as Courtney worked on a sudoku puzzle in bed, she received an email that looked as if it had come from her husband, who was next to her reading a book. The next night, Steven’s cell phone dinged on the nightstand with a new email. He picked it up and turned to Courtney. “Apparently you hate me,” he said.
In March 2015, Courtney filed for a protective order against Zonis, which would make further contact a crime. Steven filed for a similar order for himself and their son the month after the “exposure,” but Courtney had believed that doing so would be too antagonizing. Zonis and his wife responded in kind by getting orders of their own. Two days after Courtney’s order was granted, she got an email from Zonis’ personal account: “Glad that bullshit symbolic gesture is out of the way,” it said. (Zonis denies writing this too.) No charges were filed. The Kent police, while sympathetic, “weren’t really interested in something that was a misdemeanor protective order violation,” Steven says. The Allens got the sense that because Zonis was in Arizona, and because so much of the harassment was confusing and anonymous, it was hard for the police in Kent to act. At the end of March, Courtney and Steven walked into the FBI’s office in Seattle to present their case. (The Kent police, county prosecutor, and FBI all said they were unable to comment for this story.) Three months later the Allens got a letter stating, “We have identified you as a possible victim of a crime,” and informing them that the FBI was investigating. Months passed with no word. When they heard about the FBI’s involvement, the Kent police closed their own case. The Allens, not sure what else to do, continued to bring them evidence of new and ever more inventive harassment.
In early April the Allens received a package in the mail that was full of marijuana. After they reported it to the police, Detective Galetti informed the Allens that there had been more Crime Stoppers reports: allegations that they were selling drugs, that they were cutting them with butane, that their customers were high school kids.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The Allens began to consider a different option. Earlier that year, after Steven started a new job at the University of Washington, he told campus authorities about the harassment. Natalie Dolci, then a victim advocate with the campus police, referred him, as she had many others, to a pro bono program called the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project at the prominent K&L Gates law firm. The project had been started a year earlier to help victims of what is variously known as sexual cyberharassment, cyberexploitation, and revenge porn.
(Dolci prefers the terms “technology-enabled abuse” or “technology-enabled coercive control,” phrases broad enough to include things such as using spyware or hacking in-home cameras.) Often the cases didn’t go to court, meaning the public seldom heard their details. Most people just wanted to settle, get the harassment to stop, keep their images off the internet and their names out of public records.
Steven and Courtney weren’t eager to file a lawsuit, but they hoped the firm—a large one with a cyberforensics unit experienced in unraveling complex online crimes—would be able to help them unmask the harasser and prove their story to police. “We were just trying to get law enforcement to do something,” Steven said later.
On April 29, 2015, Steven and Courtney walked into a conference room overlooking Seattle’s port and Mount Rainier where they met David Bateman, a partner at K&L Gates and one of the founders of the Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project, and Breanna Van Engelen, a young attorney. A mock trial program in college convinced Van Engelen that she wanted to be a litigator—to stand up in court on behalf of clients she believed had been wronged—but she was fresh out of law school and had yet to try her first case.
The lawyers were skeptical of the Allens’ story at first. It was so outlandish that Van Engelen wondered if it was made up—or if one spouse was manipulating the other. Courtney’s fear seemed genuine, but so many of the emails did appear to come from Steven, who knew his way around computers. Van Engelen wanted to be sure that Steven wasn’t the mastermind of a complex scheme in which he hid his own abuse, impersonating Zonis impersonating him. She interviewed the Allens separately and then spent a week poring through the evidence: voicemails and social media profiles and native files of emails. By digging into how they were created, she found that emails from “Steven” had been spoofed—sent through anonymizing services but then tagged as if they came from his email or were sent from an untraceable account. Had Steven been the mastermind, it would have been “like robbing a bank but wearing a mask of your own face,” she said later. “It just doesn’t make any sense.” Van Engelen came to believe the Allens were telling the truth.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But that left another question. What if the case did go to trial? Even if she could convince a jury—which would mean explaining the complexities of how identity is both hidden and revealed on the internet—could she get them to care? Cyberharassment is still an unappreciated crime. Gary Ernsdorff, a prosecutor in King County, where the Allens live, said that people often don’t think it’s that big a deal—it’s just online, after all. Or they blame victims for sharing intimate images in the first place. What, Van Engelen wondered, would a jury make of the Allens’ saga? Would they think Steven had gone too far in exposing the affair? Would they blame Courtney for the videos? Though Van Engelen saw the Allens as victims, she realized a jury might not.
She wanted to be sure Steven wasn’t the mastermind of a complex scheme.
Many people assume that cyberharassment is easy to avoid: They believe that if victims hadn’t sent a naked photo, then that person would have nothing to worry about. But experts say this assumption is essentially a comforting fiction in a world in which we’re all potential victims. A 2016 survey found that one in every 25 Americans online—roughly 10 million people—had either had explicit images of themselves shared online against their will or had been threatened with such sharing. For women younger than 30, it was one in 10. The same survey found that, photos or no, 47 percent of Americans who used the internet had been victims of online harassment of some kind.
Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace , began studying cyberharassment in 2007. What she found reminded her of her past research on the shocking leakiness of information databases. Nearly all of us are giving away reams of sensitive information about ourselves without understanding how it might be used, whether by a stalker or an unscrupulous company. This includes what we share online— geotags on our photos , workout apps that generate maps to our houses , badly protected Facebook updates or lists that show family ties, or posts that reveal innocuous-seeming facts, such as birthdays, that can be used to access other information. We also leave an enormous digital trail of personal and private information with every credit card purchase and Google search and ad click.
People are starting to understand “that the web watches them back,” says Aleecia McDonald, a privacy researcher at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society. But we still don’t appreciate the extent to which it’s happening or what risks we might face in the future. McDonald suggests thinking of the internet as a backward-facing time machine that we are constantly loading with ammunition: “Everything that’s on file about you for the last 15 years and the next 40 years” may someday be used against you with technology that, at this time, we can’t understand or predict. And much of the information that we leave in our wake has no legal protection from being sold in the future: “We overcollect and we underprotect,” Citron says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Even without access to intimate images, Van Engelen says, “if I was obsessed enough and motivated enough, I could mess up your life.” Many experts now agree that the solution to cyberharassment lies in changing the ways we respond to the release or misuse of private information: to stop trivializing it, to take it seriously as a crime, to show perpetrators that their actions have consequences.
“You can tell people, ‘Don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want to have go public,’ ” McDonald says. “But what kind of life is that?” Art by Yoshi Sodeoka As Van Engelen prepared to take on the Allens’ case, she kept finding more social media profiles. There were accounts impersonating Courtney and Steven; one Google Plus account, which included the videos and Courtney’s contact information, birthday, and maiden name, had more than 8,000 views. There was an account for their son. A Facebook account in the name of “Jennifer Jones”—Courtney recognized one photo as Zonis’ pet tortoise—sent messages to her friends and family accusing Steven of abuse and of having sent “Jones” threatening emails and photos of his penis. (Zonis denies creating any of these accounts, saying: “I’ve never been on Facebook in my life” and “Who puts a picture of their pet on a secret account they’re trying to hide?”) Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The Allens contacted Facebook, Google, YouTube, and other sites to have the accounts taken down, with mixed success. One of the hardest to remove was the Facebook page in their son’s name. When Courtney filled out a form indicating that she wasn’t the one being impersonated, the site suggested she alert that person to have it removed; there seemed to be no expectation that the targeted person might be a 4-year-old. The account stayed up despite repeated requests. (It was finally disabled in late October, after WIRED’s fact-checkers asked Facebook for comment.) But at least Facebook had a complaint option; other sites offered no recourse, and the most the Allens could do was ask search engines not to include them in results. Sites that specialize in posting revenge porn sometimes charge hundreds of dollars to remove images—what Ernsdorff calls “a business model of extortion.” Van Engelen and her colleagues were subpoenaing tech companies to find out who was assigned IP addresses, but they kept having to send new subpoenas as new accounts kept popping up. According to court records, they found that many of the early emails—from addresses such as CourtneyCallMe69 and Dixienormousnu—could be traced to the Zonises’ house. In one case the same message was sent seven times by different accounts in just over a day. Some of the accounts were anonymous but traceable to the Zonises’ home IP address or a hotel where they stayed; one came from what appeared to be Steven’s email but with the tag “Douchebag” attached—it was routed from an anonymizing website based in the Czech Republic that sent email from fake accounts. Van Engelen interpreted this spree as evidence that Zonis was trying to get through spam filters, as well as proof that he used anonymizers and impersonation. Zonis counters that Steven was manufacturing evidence against him.
As time passed, the emails and social media accounts became harder to trace. Van Engelen found that many of the IP addresses, created and disguised with Tor software, bounced through layers of anonymous routing. More came from the Czech website or another anonymizer. The writing style changed too, as if, according to Van Engelen, the writer didn’t want the syntax or orthography to be analyzable: Sometimes they read as though they were written by someone with limited, fluctuating facility with English.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the summer of 2015, the Allens found out that a new credit card had been opened in their names and that one of their existing cards had been used fraudulently. They could see that all the attempted charges were to access sites that might yield personal information: ancestry.com, a site that allows recovery of old W2s, a company that does background checks.
Courtney began seeing a counselor. Her fear had become “an absolute paranoia.” She had night terrors and panic attacks if she saw police in the neighborhood. Zonis had told her that he was able to fly for free because his wife worked for an airline; Courtney feared he might show up at any time. She stopped letting her son play outside. “It just changed who I was,” she says. “I wasn’t functioning.” Almost worse than the fear was the guilt about what was happening to the people in her life. “No one can say anything to me about the horrible things that I’ve done,” she says, “because I’ve already said them to myself.” Courtney had come to see the internet as a danger to which the people around her were oblivious. “Nobody’s safe,” she says. “If you’re on the internet, you’re pretty much a target.” She was appalled at what she saw her friends post—vacation updates that revealed their locations, pictures of their young children. She asked other parents at her son’s school not to post pictures of him, and one asked her, “Aren’t you proud of your son?” When she offered to share the recommendations that the FBI had sent her about keeping information private, only one friend responded—and only to ask whether such precautions were really necessary. Courtney locked down her own social media and stopped giving out her phone number. “Privacy has become top priority to me,” she said. “Anonymity has become sacred.” In late June 2015, K&L Gates filed the Allens’ lawsuit against Zonis, seeking damages and relief related to defamation, negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, electronic impersonation, and invasion of privacy. Two months later, Zonis filed his own suit in federal court in Arizona, making similar claims against Steven. The complaint included excerpts of harassing emails that Zonis alleged were sent to him by Steven: “Too bad your whore wife is still without a child … did I mention that I own [Mrs. Allen] again?” and “All I had to do was act like the benevolent husband, and let you do the work … I plan on continuing to cause you pain like you can’t even imagine.” It took more than a year of motions and replies for the cases to be combined and moved to Washington, where the first case was filed.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In August Courtney received an anonymous email that ended, “Easier if one help everyone and kill self.” She’d had suicidal thoughts before. If she did kill herself, she thought, that might finally make the harassment stop. Maybe this was how she could save her family. She went to get a gun that was kept in a safe. Her hands were shaking and she fumbled the combination to the lock. She began to think about all the things she’d miss if she pulled the trigger—teaching her son to drive, retiring with Steven, the books she would never read. At last, still unable to open the safe, she gave up. “I decided he wasn’t going to win,” she said later. “Me living was how I was going to beat him.” The following month the Allens took a trip to Hawaii. While they were away there were calls and emails, but none of them mentioned the trip. To Courtney it seemed like a small miracle: one moment in her life that belonged only to her. “It was a breath,” she said later. She would hold onto that precious realization for a long time: “I can keep some things private.” “Me living was how I was going to beat him.” But it was only a breath. Emails had begun coming to Steven’s account at the University of Washington—a job he thought had gone unnoticed until he got an anonymous email referencing the school’s mascot: “Public record. all. done.” Soon dozens of accounts, from the IT department to the university president, were getting emails about the Allens, often with images of Courtney. According to court records, two preschools in the Kent area also got emails that appeared to be from Steven; they said that he planned to come in with a gun and start shooting.“It wasn’t me!” Steven cried when the police called him at work. “I’m here!” Gradually the Allens grew somewhat inured to the videos and emails—“There’s no one that I know who hasn’t seen me in very intimate detail,” Courtney says. “He can’t hurt me that way anymore”—though she continued to worry that their son would find the videos one day.
As Halloween neared, the K&L Gates lawyers received a threat they considered credible enough to heighten security. Later that fall, two FBI agents appeared at the Allens’. The couple hoped again that their troubles were ending at last. But while the agents were aware of their case, they said they were required to tell the Allens to cease and desist because Zonis had contacted them with evidence that he said showed the Allens were committing credit fraud against him. Later, Zonis would produce documents that he said showed Steven mocking Jennifer, sending her pictures of his penis, and threatening retribution; in one post, it appears that Steven had asked his Marriage Builders friends to make the threatening call to his grandmother.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “Everything he’s done, he’s claiming I’ve been doing,” Steven said later.
“Every bit of everything that we were accused of was what he did to us,” Zonis says.
In January of 2017, the lawsuit’s discovery process finally ended. Van Engelen and her colleagues had been working on the case for nearly two years. By then Zonis, after cycling through several lawyers, was representing himself, with his wife assisting. Before trial, the parties were required to attempt mediation. The judge encouraged a settlement, telling the Allens that a jury looking at the mess of competing claims would see everyone involved as having unclean hands. The Allens and their lawyers sent an offer to the room next door, where the Zonises were waiting: They would dismiss their suit if Zonis dropped his counterclaim and left the Allens alone. Zonis instead asked them to pay a large sum for what he said he lost. The case proceeded to trial.
On Wednesday, March 22, 2017, the Allens, their lawyers, and the Zonises gathered in a courtroom. Van Engelen watched from her seat as a colleague began questioning potential jurors: How many of you have made a friend on the internet? How many of you have ever taken a selfie? If someone takes and shares intimate pictures and they get published online, is that their fault? Many of the responses were exactly what Van Engelen had feared. She summed them up: “This is trivial. Why am I here? I don’t want to be part of someone’s Facebook dispute. This is high school.” More than one person thought that if you made explicit videos of yourself, it was your fault if they were shared. Others felt the Allens, with their table of lawyers, had an unfair advantage. Van Engelen listened with growing nervousness. That night she went home and cried in the shower. She kept thinking: “What if somebody just decided that they weren’t going to listen to any of the evidence and they’d already made up their minds?” Before the trial, Steven created a timeline of the harassment. Bateman decided to present it to the jury during opening arguments; because it had so many details, the lawyers had to print it on a 10-foot-long poster so that the jurors would be able to see the entries. This isn’t trivial, Bateman told the jury, detailing the false police reports, the enormous number of emails, the videos. Van Engelen felt her anxiety ease. “Right away you could see the jurors’ faces change,” she says. “I think they got that this wasn’t what they thought coming in.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Van Engelen called Courtney as her first witness. Courtney described her relationship with Zonis and said that she thought the videos would be private. Zonis had filed a motion to have the images of Courtney withheld from court. (He said later that the images were unimportant “flash” intended to distract the jury from what he had been through.) Van Engelen feared their absence would make the jurors take the case less seriously. In her questioning she described them as clinically as possible, so that Courtney wouldn’t have to: “Do you orgasm?” she asked. “Do they show your inner and outer labia?” Courtney testified for more than a day, the whole time too ashamed to look at the jurors. Van Engelen asked her to read some of the emails and played some of the voicemails aloud; she then read from the Google Plus profile that bore Courtney’s name and image. “I am a real whore wife,” Van Engelen read, continuing, “and have suffered for years with unsatisfying sex with a husband who is hung like a cocktail frank.” “Did you write that about yourself?” she asked. “Did your husband write this about himself?” “No,” Courtney replied. Van Engelen continued her questions. Courtney wept. She told the story of trying to unlock the gun.
Zonis gave an opening statement. His wife cross-examined Courtney and later testified as her husband questioned her. Together the couple set out their version of the story: that they were Courtney’s friends who had tried to rescue her from an abusive husband. They said that Todd wasn’t romantically interested in Courtney and that Steven had been the one harassing them. The Zonises introduced emails and posts that they said were written by the Allens. But they were paper printouts with no metadata or digital trail to prove authenticity. When the lawyers requested a forensically sound copy of Zonis’ data, Zonis replied that his computer had malfunctioned—he blamed spyware that he claimed Steven had installed via an image file—and he had sold it; that he had copies of the files on CDs but Jennifer had thrown them out by mistake.
Van Engelen played some of the voicemails aloud. Courtney wept. She told the story of trying to unlock the gun.
On the stand, Steven denied writing most of the emails or posts Zonis claimed were from him. The Allens had kept digital copies of emails that appeared to come from Steven, and the K&L Gates team showed the jury how those had been spoofed. They also showed that the email formatting on some posts didn’t match that of the Allens’ computer and that the time zone was not Pacific but Mountain, where Zonis lived. It appeared, the lawyers suggested, that Zonis had created the posts himself.
Zonis later countered that the discrepancies were proof that Steven had used spyware to steal the emails. The Zonises hired an expert witness to testify over Skype. He said that it was theoretically possible that the forensic trails leading back to Zonis could have been faked—though he conceded that he had never seen it done and had not reviewed the evidence.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The lawyers called Andreas Kaltsounis, a cyberforensics expert who used to work with the FBI and the Department of Defense. He explained to the jury how Tor networks and IP addresses function. He then presented a map showing that many of the seemingly separate accounts from which the Allens had received anonymous harassment were actually linked by overlapping IP addresses. One of the linked accounts was the Facebook page for “Jennifer Jones,” the account that used a picture of a tortoise. It could have been, as Zonis argued, an account that Steven, or some unknown person, created. But the lawyers were prepared. One day, months before the trial, as Van Engelen searched painstakingly through IP addresses associated with logins on the Jones account, she made a discovery: Among the many addresses, there had been one apparent slipup, a login not through Tor but from the Zonises’ home IP address. When she found it Van Engelen ran into Bateman’s office, yelling: “We’ve got him!” It would have been unheard of for someone to fake a login using Zonis’ IP address, Kaltsounis told the jury, because of a safeguard called the three-way handshake that requires hosts to establish a connection with the IP address belonging to the account before any information can be sent.
By the end of arguments, the Allens’ legal team had introduced 1,083 exhibits into evidence. The chart Van Engelen made just to organize the emails was 87 pages long. It was a level of scrutiny that few cyberharassment cases ever receive—and an illustration of what victims face when dealing with such a complicated case, especially if they don’t have access to pro bono help. K&L lawyers and paralegals had spent thousands of hours digging through the evidence. The value of Van Engelen’s time alone was in the ballpark of $400,000.
Zonis never took the stand. He blamed the lawyers for purposefully taking up too much time questioning Courtney and Jennifer, and introducing endless emails that he said had nothing to do with him. Van Engelen was disgusted: “He got his one big chance to tell his side of the story, and he didn’t take it,” she says. “This is somebody who’s very strong behind a keyboard. And when the opportunity arises to actually prove himself and be vindicated, he just folds like a flower.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg On Thursday, March 30, Van Engelen stood up to deliver her closing argument. It was the first time she’d ever done so in a real court.
She began by playing one of the voicemails that Zonis had admitted to leaving—“How does it feel to know that I’m never, ever, ever going to stop?” Then she turned to the jury: “Someone needs to tell him to stop.” She described Courtney’s lowest moment: going for the gun. She reminded them of a message promising isolation, shame, and ridicule, and the email from Zonis’ personal account after Courtney got a protective order: “Glad that bullshit symbolic gesture is out of the way.” It was impossible to trace all of the harassment directly to Zonis with cyberforensics, Van Engelen told the jury, so she encouraged them to also consider repetition of details (like the sex toy he had sent) that were in both the anonymous messages and voicemails from Zonis. She talked about the problems with the evidence that Zonis had introduced.
“Do not,” Van Engelen concluded, “let this be another bullshit symbolic gesture. Tell him to stop, hold him liable.” In his own closing statement, Zonis reiterated that “the stuff doesn’t trace back to me,” talked about the difficulty of being cut off from his parents, and cast himself as a scapegoat: “And what if I’m not the devil? Then what do you do? Oh, my God, we were wrong. We can’t have that, can we?” He told the jury that not testifying wasn’t his choice; the judge said this wasn’t true.
The K&L lawyers had not asked for a specific amount of compensation. The Allens told their lawyers that their goal wasn’t money but simply an end to the harassment.
The next afternoon the jury came back with a decision.
The 12 jurors had been given forms to explain which of the Allens’ and Zonis’ claims they deemed true and which they rejected. For the first claim, “Did Todd Zonis electronically impersonate the Allens?” the presiding juror circled yes.
The jury also chose yes for “Was the electronic impersonation a proximate cause of the injury or damage to the Allens?” The form offered a blank space to write in the total amount of damages warranted. The jury’s answer: $2 million.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg And so it went. The jury found each of the Allens’ other claims against Zonis—intentional invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and defamation—justified, and to each they affixed a boggling sum. The jury did agree with Zonis on one count: The Allens had “intruded upon the seclusion” of the Zonises, but they found that no harm had resulted. When the amounts awarded to the Allens were totaled, they added up to $8.9 million. It was a record for a cyberharassment case that didn’t involve a celebrity. The jury “didn’t believe it was trivial anymore,” Van Engelen said with satisfaction.
After the trial was over, the Allens and some of the jurors had the chance to meet outside the courtroom. One of the jurors came up to Courtney, gave her a hug, and said, “You’ve been through so much.” Neither the Allens nor their lawyers expect to actually see the award money, but that moment in the hallway felt just as valuable.
“The fact that other people can see it, and they see the crazy in it, helps me feel that I’m not insane,” Courtney said later. The Allens’ deepest hope, though, remained simple: that the harassment would stop.
For more than a month after the trial, it seemed they would get their wish. Then one afternoon Courtney logged on to her computer and found a new email. It read, “pun ish men t w ill soo n b han ded out to the wic ked. you rti me is sho rt. mis sin g fam ily we wil lno t. pri ce for act ion to be pai d y et it is.” More emails followed. Courtney felt a mixture of dread and exhaustion. It wasn’t over. “I’d love nothing more than for us to be left alone,” she says. “Do I expect that to happen? No. I expect this to be in our lives, in some capacity, forever.” At the time this story went to press, law enforcement had not yet indicated whether criminal charges would be filed. Gary Ernsdorff, of the King County prosecutor’s office, allowed that he kept an eye on the case. Cyberharassment, especially with private images, “is dropping a bomb in somebody’s life,” he said.
After the trial Zonis filed a notice of appeal.
He felt the trial was unfair and that the proceedings hadn’t paid enough attention to what he believed the Allens had done to him. His losses, he said, were real and numerous (to the list he added what he considered stress-induced health problems), while the Allens’ were petty, just “flash” from a “hot-button issue.” He still denied that his relationship with Courtney was an affair or that he had access to the videos of her or sent the anonymous emails. He also said, in a phone interview, “Anything that I said or did was reactionary” and “If they wanted me to plead guilty to harassment, no problem. What am I harassing them about ?” Soon after the trial, a blog appeared in Zonis’ name. In it he questioned the way the trial was run, disputed its findings, excoriated the people involved, and posted much of the same evidence against Steven that the lawyers discredited at trial. “My name is Todd Zonis and I lost my family, my home, my future, and probably my life, and while my life may not teach you anything, hopefully my death will,” the blog began. The evidence he posted included the images of Courtney and a note: “Please feel free to download any and all of the materials that I have posted here, and use or distribute them as you see fit.” Source images by Victoria Hashuk/Getty Images and Robert Daly/Getty Images.
Brooke Jarvis ( @brookejarvis ) is a writer based in Seattle.
This article appears in the December 2017 issue.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Gregory Barber Science New Covid-19 Antibody Study Results Are In. Are They Right? Researchers have eagerly awaited serosurveys to gain insight into the true infection and fatality rates across age groups, and help answer questions about things like asymptomatic spread and how long antibodies last.
Photograph: Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Last month, residents of Santa Clara County, California, stuck at home and newly reacquainted with the Facebook scroll, may have noticed an unusual proposition pop up in their feed: a targeted ad from researchers at Stanford’s medical school offering blood antibody tests for Covid-19. The curious who clicked through were offered a plan to arrive at a parking lot somewhere in the county, where a volunteer would give them a quick finger prick through their car window.
By Meghan Herbst So-called serological tests work differently from Covid-19 diagnostic tests, which require a nose or throat swab and look for viral RNA. Instead, they check a person’s blood for evidence of an immune response to the virus, which can be found even in people with no symptoms or those who have already recovered from the disease. Researchers have eagerly awaited those kinds of tests to gain insight into the true infection and fatality rates across age groups, and to help answer questions about things like asymptomatic spread and how long antibodies last—a key part of understanding how Covid-19 immunity might work. In early April, more than 3,000 people took the Stanford researchers up on their offer.
The results, posted Friday by the Stanford researchers as a preprint , haven’t been peer-reviewed. But they have gotten a lot of attention. And they’ve quickly become emblematic of this age of rapid-fire scientific communications: Surprising results are widely shared before they’re published in an academic journal, followed by an attempt at peer review by Twitter thread.
First, the results: The Stanford researchers calculated that between 2.5 percent and 4.2 percent of the county’s residents were infected as of early April. That sounds like a reasonably small number, but if true, it would mean Covid-19 is drastically more widespread than local swab testing suggests: 50- to 85-fold, the researchers calculated. The math that follows from there is even more significant. Assuming a higher infection rate consequently lowers the disease’s estimated fatality rate, driving it from around 1 percent to just 0.12 to 0.2 percent. For the record, the death rate from the flu is about 0.1 percent.
“The comparison with the flu can be polarizing. I hope that’s not the headline,” Eran Bendavid, an infectious disease professor at Stanford and a coleader of the study, said at a press conference Friday, where he stressed that the seriousness of the pandemic shouldn’t be understated. Of course, for many—especially those who think the pandemic is overblown—that was the headline. The comparison even made it into a Wall Street Journal editorial published Friday by Andrew Bogan, a local biotech investor and one of the coauthors of the study (though he wasn’t identified as such in the editorial). Had policy officials held a comparison with influenza in mind, “would they have risked tens of millions of jobs and livelihoods?” he wondered.
Then on Monday, more fuel was added to the fire. A group at the University of Southern California, sharing a subset of authors with the Stanford group, as well as the same tests and similar methodology, released the conclusions of a serosurvey of residents in Los Angeles County. The exact figures were different—they calculated 28 to 55 times more cases than previously caught via swab testing—but the gist of their conclusions was the same.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Skeptics have noted that the conclusions seem at odds with some basic math. In New York City, where more than 10,000 people, or about 0.1 percent of the population, have already died from Covid-19, this estimated fatality rate would mean nearly everyone in the city has already been infected. That’s unlikely, since the number of new cases, and deaths, is still mounting, fast.
Others pointed to the Stanford group’s unusual use of Facebook recruitment, which may have drawn in people who were sick in February or March and couldn’t get a swab test to confirm it—the situation for a lot of people in Santa Clara County, an early Covid-19 hot zone where tests were initially scarce.
That could have led to an oversampling of people who had antibodies to the virus. Others, noting that only 50 out of the 3,330 people tested, or 1.5 percent, actually tested positive, quibbled with the methods used to weight the sample, which skewed heavily white and female. (The USC researchers say their sample is more representative, albeit smaller, and was chosen by gathering participants through a market research firm, not Facebook.) All of that might be moot if the testing devices used in both surveys turn out to be flawed.
The results come amid widespread concerns about the accuracy of blood antibody tests —especially the rapid lateral flow tests like the ones used in this study. The Stanford preprint referred to a test from Premier Biotech, based in Minneapolis, but that company is only a distributor. The firm that makes the test, Hangzhou Biotest Biotech, was previously identified by NBC as among those recently banned from exporting Covid-19 tests because its product hasn’t been vetted by China’s equivalent of the FDA. A representative for Premier Biotech confirmed to WIRED that the same test was used by the Stanford and USC researchers. (On Monday, a USC spokesperson emailed WIRED a statement from Neeraj Sood, the lead researcher, acknowledging the test’s origins and noting they were exported legally, prior to the ban.) At Stanford, the researchers performed their own validation of the tests and found only false negatives, not false positives. But, as a chorus of statisticians have noted (including one who concluded his analysis by demanding an apology from the researchers for wasting everyone’s time), even a low false positive rate would wipe out the significance of their results. Representatives for Stanford declined to make the researchers available for follow-up questions, including whether they planned to retest the positive individuals.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Reached by email, Sood wrote that his USC team did not plan to confirm the positive results with additional blood tests, but had offered genetic swab tests to those who had tested positive and might have current infections. Speaking at the press conference Monday, Sood acknowledged the results were “preliminary,” but said they fell in line with his expectations about the scale of untested infections.
The Stanford researchers said at their press conference on Friday that they’ve accounted for the potential biases in who volunteered and that they stood by their validation methods. They also pointed out that outcomes might be different in Santa Clara County than in overwhelmed New York City. “It seems to me that when the hospitals are overrun, that can make this epidemic a lot worse,” Bendavid said. The researchers do not intend to replicate the tests in Santa Clara, though they note others are conducting serosurveys in the Bay Area. In Los Angeles, they plan to do another round of tests in coming weeks.
That, at least, is one point everyone in this debate agrees on: More serosurveys are a good thing, and will ideally involve properly validated tests and representative populations. “We should be rolling out these tests to everybody,” said Martin Hibberd, an infectious disease researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
While Hibberd called the methods used in the Santa Clara study “dubious,” he also said the group’s conclusions do likely point in the right direction—that the fatality rate will come down as more undetected cases are uncovered. That’s true of any disease outbreak. Other initial serosurvey results trickling in over recent weeks, from places like Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, as well as China, seem to back that up. While the rates of seroprevalence vary—from 1 percent among Scottish blood donors tested in mid-March to 15 percent in one hard-hit German town —they all generally point to lots of untested people. But it’s still a matter of how many. “It’s been guesswork really,” Hibberd added. “Just to see the first bit of data is quite exciting.” Even assuming solid tests and methods, this first round of serosurvey results only gives us a snapshot of the disease’s progress in each place. That means uncertainties abound, Hibberd noted. Antibodies take time to develop, and people also take time to recover—or die—from the disease. We’re still at a relatively early stage of data collection, when the actual number of deaths due to Covid-19 remains uncertain. New York, for example, recently revised its death toll upward to include “likely cases” of Covid-19.
Read all of our coronavirus coverage here.
A better use for these very early results is the simple one: a rough estimate of much further we have to go in this pandemic. One hope among researchers is that we’ll get to a point of herd immunity, when enough people have antibodies to slow or stop the disease’s transmission. (That’s still just a hope, given uncertainties about whether antibodies correspond to actual immunity.) But so far, all the serosurveys show results in the single digits, which means the virus remains dangerous to most of the population.
In the Netherlands, for example, the seroprevalence figure of 3 percent released Thursday by Sanquin , the national blood bank, wasn’t exactly cause for celebration. “I hoped for a few percent more,” Hans Zaaijer, a microbiologist at Sanquin who is leading the testing effort, wrote in an email to WIRED. He noted false positives are an issue with the test they used as well. (More accurate lab-based blood tests are currently being reserved for health care workers; Sanquin’s study anonymously tests the blood of anyone who donates to the bank.) But for Zaaijer, the takeaway is clear: With only 3 percent of the population showing the antibody, many more people could still be infected by Covid-19, and herd immunity—if it exists—is a far-off vision. The plan in Holland is to keep on testing the blood bank supply once a month.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That kind of repetition will be important if we want to answer more complicated questions about the disease, according to Michael Busch, director of the Vitalant Research Institute, which is partnering with the National Institutes of Health to test antibody prevalence in blood donations in six cities across the US. Those tests will also happen monthly, which is useful not only for tracking the spread of the disease over time, but for validating results and ironing out potential biases. (Blood donation tests aim to be more representative than Facebook targeting, but they also skew toward healthy people who are eligible to give blood.) Their method involves lab-based blood tests from Abbott and Ortho, which were validated in the past week by the FDA and are generally held to be more accurate than the finger prick tests. They will do additional validation on all results that come back positive. “That’s what we do, always,” he said. “We do repeat testing and confirmatory testing so we’re absolutely sure it is a positive for antibodies.” A separate study is also planned to track individuals with confirmed infections to see whether these people’s antibody levels wane over time, and use that data to help calibrate the population-based results. And there are plans too to expand to more cities over time to get a better sense of the national picture.
In short, it’s likely we’ll have to wait a little longer before we have clear numbers about how many people have been exposed to this virus and how many have died from it. And when making important policy decisions that affect life and livelihood, that’s a good thing, Busch said: “It’s a big deal to do it right.” What if it returns every year, like the common cold ? “Here in spirit”: an oral history of faith amid the pandemic We need a vaccine—let’s get it right the first time Un-miracle drugs could help tame the pandemic WIRED Q&A: We are in the midst of the outbreak.
Now what ? Read all of our coronavirus coverage here Staff Writer X Topics coronavirus COVID-19 diseases health Emily Mullin Grace Browne Celia Ford Celia Ford Emily Mullin Elizabeth Finkel Max G. Levy Jim Robbins Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Cade Metz Business A Go Grandmaster Will Battle Google's AI in a $1M Prizefight Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Three weeks from today, Google's artificial intelligence will go head-to-head with the real thing.
Over the past 18 months, researchers at DeepMind---a Google AI lab in the heart of London---have designed a computing system that can play the game of Go , the ancient Eastern version of chess. On March 9, in Seoul, South Korea, the DeepMind system—known as AlphaGo—will begin a five-game match against Lee Sedol, one of the very best (human) Go players on the planet. Over the last twenty years, machines have beaten the best human players at checkers, chess, Othello, Scrabble, even Jeopardy.
But Go is still unconquered territory. Unlike chess, Go is so complex that no machine could cycle through all possible moves in a reasonable amount of time. In order to win, a machine must mimic the intuition of a human.
The match will serve as a bellwether for modern artificial intelligence.
For that reason, the match will serve as a bellwether for modern artificial intelligence.
The techniques used by AlphaGo can be applied to so many other tasks, including image and speech recognition, natural language understanding, robotics, and perhaps even artificial common sense. There's also a $1 million prize at stake. The match will be live-streamed on YouTube. And WIRED will be on the ground in Korea covering this heavyweight bout from behind the scenes.
Who is likely to win? It depends on who you ask. Earlier this week, as reported by Geekwire , Demis Hassabis, who leads the DeepMind team, estimated that Go players give AlphaGo a mere five percent chance of winning. Lee Sedol himself has released a statement saying he's confident of winning. But Hassabis is just as confident in his artificial intelligence.
But should he be? In October, during a behind-closed-doors match at the DeepMind offices in London, AlphaGo topped the European Go champion, Fan Hui. But the match in Korea is a very different prospect. Fan Hui is ranked 633rd in the world. Lee Sedol is ranked 5th. Last month, after revealing the win against Fan Hui, Hassabis acknowledged in an interview with WIRED that the match with Lee Sedol would be significantly more difficult. Fan Hui is the equivalent of a chess grandmaster, he said, while Lee Sedol is a super grandmaster.
Given their respective Go rankings, we can estimate Elo scores for each of them---a mathematical estimate of their relative skill levels. Fan Hui has an Elo score of roughly 2750, while Lee Sedol scores about 2940. Those scores mean Fan Hui has a pretty slim chance of even winning a single game against Lee Sedol over a five game match.
Fan Hui also didn't stand much of a chance against AlphaGo, which won their match five-nil. He's now an adviser on the DeepMind (he will be in Korea with Hassabis and other DeepMind engineers). Since the match in October, Hassabis and crew have continued to improve AlphaGo. That's a good four months of additional advances.
In a Huge Breakthrough, Google’s AI Beats a Top Player at the Game of Go Google and Facebook Race to Solve the Ancient Game of Go With AI Google Just Open Sourced TensorFlow, Its Artificial Intelligence Engine What's more, AlphaGo will take on Lee Sedol backed by some serious infrastructure. Hassabis and crew originally built AlphaGo to run on a single fairly ordinary computer. For the match against Fan Hui, they upgraded to a network of machines that includes 1,200 central processing chips and about 170 cards packed with graphics processing units, or GPUs. These chips were originally designed for games and other highly graphical software applications but have proven quite adept at deep learning and reinforcement learning, two forms of AI used by AlphaGo. For the Korea match, Hassabis says, he and his team are "laying down their own fiber" so that they have a good connection to a Google data center that holds such hardware. "You've got a flexible supercomputer on tap that you can just dip in or dip out of," he says.
These AI systems are particularly powerful because they can learn to play Go on their own. That network of GPUs analyzes mountain of human Go moves and then, in essence, repeatedly plays itself in an effort to hone its skills. Prior to the rise of deep learning and reinforcement learning, a AI system didn't stand a chance against someone like Lee Sedol. But these technologies have completely changed the equation. Rémi Coulom, the French researcher behind what was previously the world’s top artificially intelligent Go player, predicts that AlphaGo will win.
As Geekwire points out, popular opinion is mixed. At the online bitcoin betting site BitBet, punters favor Sedol. But at GoodJudgment, prognosticators give AlphaGo the edge---only just.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Senior Writer X Topics AlphaGo artificial intelligence DeepMind Enterprise Google Steven Levy Gregory Barber Will Knight Will Knight Will Knight Steven Levy Paresh Dave Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Alan Levinovitz Business The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can't Win Remi Coulom (left) and his computer program, Crazy Stone, take on grandmaster Norimoto Yoda in the game of Go.
Takashi Osato/WIRED Save this story Save Save this story Save TOKYO, JAPAN --- Rémi Coulom is sitting in a rolling desk chair, hunched over a battered Macbook laptop, hoping it will do something no machine has ever done.
That may take another ten years or so, but the long push starts here, at Japan's University of Electro-Communications. The venue is far from glamorous -- a dingy conference room with faux-wood paneling and garish fluorescent lights -- but there's still a buzz about the place. Spectators are gathered in front of an old projector screen in the corner, and a ragged camera crew is preparing to broadcast the tournament via online TV, complete with live analysis from two professional commentators.
Coulom is wearing the same turtleneck sweater and delicate rimless glasses he wore at last year's competition, and he's seated next to his latest opponent, an ex-pat named Simon Viennot who's like a younger version of himself -- French, shy, and self-effacing. They aren't looking at each other. They're focused on the two computers in front of them. Coulom's is running a piece of software called Crazy Stone -- the work of over seven years -- and the other runs Nomitan, coded by Viennot and his Japanese partner, Kokolo Ikeda.
Crazy Stone and Nomitan are locked in a game of Go, the Eastern version of chess. On each screen, you can see a Go board -- a grid of 19 lines by 19 lines -- filling up with black and white playing pieces, each placed at the intersection of two lines. If Crazy Stone can win and advance to the finals, it will earn the right play one of the best human Go players in Japan. No machine has ever beaten a top human Go player -- at least not without a huge head-start. Even if it does advance to the man-machine match, Crazy Stone has no chance of changing this, but Coulom wants to see how far his creation has come.
Computers match or surpass top humans in chess, Othello, Scrabble, backgammon, poker, even Jeopardy.
But not Go.The challenge is daunting. In 1994, machines took the checkers crown, when a program called Chinook beat the top human. Then, three years later, they topped the chess world, IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer besting world champion Garry Kasparov. Now, computers match or surpass top humans in a wide variety of games: Othello, Scrabble, backgammon, poker, even Jeopardy.
But not Go. It's the one classic game where wetware still dominates hardware.
Invented over 2500 years ago in China, Go is a pastime beloved by emperors and generals, intellectuals and child prodigies. Like chess, it's a deterministic perfect information game -- a game where no information is hidden from either player, and there are no built-in elements of chance, such as dice.
1 And like chess, it's a two-person war game. Play begins with an empty board, where players alternate the placement of black and white stones, attempting to surround territory while avoiding capture by the enemy. That may seem simpler than chess, but it's not. When Deep Blue was busy beating Kasparov, the best Go programs couldn't even challenge a decent amateur. And despite huge computing advances in the years since -- Kasparov would probably lose to your home computer -- the automation of expert-level Go remains one of AI's greatest unsolved riddles.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Rémi Coulum is part of a small community of computer scientists hoping to solve this riddle. Every March, the world's most dedicated Go programmers gather at the University of Electro-Communications to compete in the UEC Cup, a computer Go tournament that, uniquely, rewards two finalists with matches against a "Go sage," the equivalent of a chess grandmaster. Organizers dub these machine-versus-man matches the Densei-sen, or "Electric Sage Battle." At this year's UEC Cup, Coulom's Crazy Stone is the favorite. On the first day of the competition, the software program went undefeated, which earned it top seed in today’s 16-member single-elimination bracket and a bye in the first round. Now, it's the second round, and Viennot, a relative newcomer to the computer Go scene, tells me he'll be happy if his program just puts up a good fight. "Nomitan uses many of Rémi's tricks, but I don’t think it will be enough," he says. "Crazy Stone is a much stronger program." Rémi Coulom and Crazy Stone.
Takashi Osato/WIRED The computer screens in front of Coulom and Viennot display statistics that show the relative confidence of each program. Although the match has just begun, Crazy Stone is already 58 percent sure it will prevail. Oddly, Nomitan’s confidence level is about the same. When I point this out to Coulom and Viennot, they both laugh. "You can't trust these algorithms completely," explains Viennot. "They are always a little over-confident." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The official commentary doesn't start until the final match, but as the second round progresses, a small crowd forms around commentator Michael Redmond to hear his thoughts. The charismatic Redmond, an American, is one of very few non-Asian Go celebrities. He began playing professionally in Japan at the age of 18, and remains the only Westerner to ever reach 9-dan, the game's highest rank. "I don’t know the black player," he says, referring to Nomitan, "but it has a flashy style, flashier than Crazy Stone. Very good tesuji. With humans, tesuji are a fairly accurate gauge of strength, and now, I'm seeing computers do them more." Tesuji means something like "clever play," and Nomitan's tesuji are giving Crazy Stone serious trouble. With the game nearly halfway done, Crazy Stone is only 55 percent confident, which means it's even money. After a few more turns, another professional named O Meien pronounces Nomitan the leader. As other games in the room finish, the crowd in front of the projector screen grows larger and louder. From the sound of it, Crazy Stone's prospects are increasingly bleak.
>Even for Coulom -- a good but not great Go player himself -- Crazy Stone's moves can be incomprehensible.
Most people in the room take the pros like O Meien at their word. We have to, since games of Go are often so complex that only extremely high-level players can understand how they're progressing. Even for Coulom -- a good but not great Go player himself -- Crazy Stone's moves can be incomprehensible. But Coulom identifies as a programmer more than a player, which allows him to remain calm in the face of professional skepticism. He trusts the confidence level Crazy Stone shows him. "Maybe O Meien is thinking about which side looks better," he says, with a lilting French accent. "But I know Crazy Stone is much stronger than Nomitan. So I just think at some point Nomitan will probably mess up." And so it does. Crazy Stone makes a number of moves that prompt murmurs of approval from the crowd. Despite those initial tesuji, Nomitan squanders its advantage. Soon, Crazy Stone's confidence levels are in the high 80s, and Nomitan resigns.
The other matches leading up to the final are uneventful, with the exception of one semi-final contest. Zen, Crazy Stone's biggest rival and last year's runner-up, nearly loses to a program called Aya. The game begins with a complicated local battle in the upper right corner, each side trying to keep their stones alive. At first, Zen plays with excellent kiai, or fighting spirit. The area looks settled. Then, without warning, Zen makes an obvious mistake, eliciting a collective gasp from the room. Zen's co-programmer, a Japanese man with long graying hair named Hideki Kato, keeps his eyes on the confidence levels streaming across his laptop screen, and eventually, Zen manages to eke out a lead, before Aya resigns. The final is decided, a rematch of last year's match: Crazy Stone vs. Zen.
Even in the West, Go has long been a favorite game of mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists. Einstein played Go during his time at Princeton, as did mathematician John Nash. Seminal computer scientist Alan Turing was a Go aficionado, and while working as a World War II code-breaker, he introduced the game to fellow cryptologist I.J. Good. Now known for contributing the idea of an "intelligence exposition" to singularity theories -- predictions of how machines will become smarter than people -- Good gave the game a huge boost in Europe with a 1965 article for New Scientist entitled "The Mystery of Go." A woman and a man play Go in Korea sometime in the early 1900s.
Library of Congress Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Good opens the article by suggesting that Go is inherently superior to all other strategy games, an opinion shared by pretty much every Go player I've met. "There is chess in the western world, but Go is incomparably more subtle and intellectual," says South Korean Lee Sedol, perhaps the greatest living Go player and one of a handful who make over seven figures a year in prize money. Subtlety, of course, is subjective. But the fact is that of all the world's deterministic perfect information games -- tic-tac-toe, chess, checkers, Othello, xiangqi, shogi -- Go is the only one in which computers don’t stand a chance against humans.
>'There is chess in the western world, but Go is incomparably more subtle and intellectual.' This is not for lack of trying on the part of programmers, who have worked on Go alongside chess for the last fifty years, with substantially less success. The first chess programs were written in the early fifties, one by Turing himself. By the 1970s, they were quite good. But as late as 1962, despite the game's popularity among programmers, only two people had succeeded at publishing Go programs, neither of which was implemented or tested against humans.
Finally, in 1968, computer game theory genius Alfred Zobrist authored the first Go program capable of beating an absolute beginner. It was a promising first step, but notwithstanding enormous amounts of time, effort, brilliance, and quantum leaps in processing power, programs remained incapable of beating accomplished amateurs for the next four decades.
To understand this, think about Go in relation to chess. At the beginning of a chess game, White has twenty possible moves. After that, Black also has twenty possible moves. Once both sides have played, there are 400 possible board positions. Go, by contrast, begins with an empty board, where Black has 361 possible opening moves, one at every intersection of the 19 by 19 grid. White can follow with 360 moves. That makes for 129,960 possible board positions after just the first round of moves.
The rate at which possible positions increase is directly related to a game's "branching factor," or the average number of moves available on any given turn. Chess's branching factor is 35. Go's is 250. Games with high branching factors make classic search algorithms like minimax extremely costly. Minimax creates a search tree that evaluates possible moves by simulating all possible games that might follow, and then it chooses the move that minimizes the opponent's best-case scenario. Improvements on the algorithm -- such as alpha-beta search and null-move -- can prune the chess game tree, identifying which moves deserve more attention and facilitating faster and deeper searches. But what works for chess -- and checkers and Othello -- does not work for Go.
>'I'll see a move and be sure it's the right one, but won't be able to tell you exactly how I know. I just see it.' The trouble is that identifying Go moves that deserve attention is often a mysterious process. "You'll be looking at the board and just know," Redmond told me, as we stood in front of the projector screen watching Crazy Stone take back Nomitan's initial lead. "It's something subconscious, that you train through years and years of playing. I'll see a move and be sure it's the right one, but won't be able to tell you exactly how I know. I just see it." Similarly inscrutable is the process of evaluating a particular board configuration. In chess, there are some obvious rules. If, ten moves down the line, one side is missing a knight and the other isn't, generally it's clear who's ahead. Not so in Go, where there's no easy way to prove why Black's moyo is large but vulnerable, and White has bad aji. Such things may be obvious to an expert player, but without a good way to quantify them, they will be invisible to computers. And if there's no good way to evaluate intermediate game positions, an alpha-beta algorithm that engages in global board searches has no way of deciding which move leads to the best outcome.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Not that it matters: Go's impossibly high branching factor and state space (the number of possible board configurations) render full-board alpha-beta searches all but useless, even after implementing clever refinements. Factor in the average length of a game -- chess is around 40 turns, Go is 200 -- and computer Go starts to look like a fool's errand.
A traditional Go gameboard.
Takashi Osato/WIRED Nonetheless, after Zobrist, Go programmers persisted in their efforts and managed to make incremental progress. But it wasn't until 1979 that a five-year project by computer scientist Bruce Wilcox produced a program capable of beating low-level amateurs. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Wilcox and his advisor collected detailed protocols from games played against James Kerwin, who soon after would leave for Japan to become the second-ever Western professional Go player.
Unlike successful chess programmers, Wilcox focused almost entirely on modeling expert intelligence, collecting a vast database of stone relationships from Kerwin's games. His program divided the board into smaller, more manageable zones, and then used the database to generate possible moves, applying a hierarchal function to choose the best among them. Forward-looking searches like alpha-beta, long the cornerstone of AI gaming, were entirely absent from the program's first incarnation >Then, somewhat abruptly, progress stalled. The programs had encountered an obstacle that also gives human players trouble.
During the development process, Wilcox became a very strong amateur player, an indispensable asset for early Go programmers, given that programs depended so much on a nuanced understanding of the game. Mark Boon (Goliath), David Fotland (Many Faces of Go), Chen Zhixing (Handtalk and Goemate) -- the winners of computer Go competitions throughout the 80s and 90s -- were all excellent players, and it was their combined prowess as players and programmers that facilitated steady improvements through the 90s. Then, somewhat abruptly, progress stalled. The programs had encountered an obstacle that also gives human players trouble.
"A lot of people peak out at a certain level of amateur and never get any stronger," David Fotland explains. Fotland, an early computer Go innovator, also worked as chief engineer of Hewlett Packard’s PA-RISC processor in the 70s, and tested the system with his Go program. "There's some kind of mental leap that has to happen to get you past that block, and the programs ran into the same issue. The issue is being able to look at the whole board, not the just the local fights." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Fotland and others tried to figure out how to modify their programs to integrate full-board searches. They met with some limited success, but by 2004, progress stalled again, and available options seemed exhausted. Increased processing power was moot. To run searches even one move deeper would require an impossibly fast machine. The most difficult game looked as if it couldn't be won.
Enter Rémi Coulom, whose Crazy Stone would inaugurate a new era of computer Go. Coulom's father was a programmer, and in 1983, he gave his son a Videopac computer for Christmas. Coulom was nine, around the time most Go prodigies leave home to begin intensive study at an academy. After less than a year, he had programmed Mastermind. In four years, he had created an AI that could play Connect Four. Othello followed shortly thereafter, and by 18, Coulom had written his first chess program.
>Enter Rémi Coulom, whose Crazy Stone would inaugurate a new era of computer Go.
The program, Crazy Bishop, was awful. Without access to the internet, Coulom had to invent everything from scratch. But a year later, he started engineering school, where university computers allowed him to swap algorithms and strategies in online chess programming communities. Crazy Bishop improved quickly. In 1997, the year Deep Blue defeated Kasparov, Coulom attended the world computer chess championship in Paris, where he made a decent showing and met members of his online community in person. The event inspired him to continue graduate study as a programmer, not an engineer. Following a stint in the military and a masters in cognitive science, Coulom earned a PhD for work on how neural networks and reinforcement learning can be used to train simulated robots to swim.
Although he'd encountered Go at the 2002 Computer Olympiad, Coulom didn't give it much thought until 2005, when, after landing a job at the University of Lille 3, he began advising Guillaume Chaslot, a masters student who wanted to write a computer Go program as his thesis. Chaslot soon left to start his PhD, but Coulom was hooked, and Go became a full-time obsession.
It wasn't long before he made his breakthrough. Coulom had exchanged ideas with a fellow academic named Bruno Bouzy, who believed that the secret to computer Go might lie in a search algorithm known as Monte Carlo. Developed in 1950 to model nuclear explosions, Monte Carlo replaces an exhaustive search with a statistical sampling of fewer possibilities. The approach made sense for Go. Rather than having to search every branch of the game tree, Monte Carlo would play out a series of random games from each possible move, and then deduce the value of the move from an analysis of the results.
>Rather than having to search every branch of the game tree, Monte Carlo would play out a series of random games from each possible move.
Bouzy couldn't make it work. But Coulom hit upon a novel way of combining the virtues of tree search with the efficiency of Monte Carlo. He christened the new algorithm Monte Carlo Tree Search, or MCTS, and in January of 2006, Crazy Stone won its first tournament. After he published his findings, other programmers quickly integrated MCTS into their Go programs, and for the next two years, Coulom vied for dominance with another French program, Mogo, that ran a refined version of the algorithm.
Although Crazy Stone ended up winning the UEC Cup in 2007 and 2008, Mogo's team used man-machine matches to win the publicity war. Coulom felt the lack of attention acutely. When neither the public nor his university gave him the recognition he deserved, he lost motivation and stopped working on Go for nearly two years.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Coulom might have given up forever had it not been for a 2010 email from Ikeda Osamu, the CEO of Unbalance, a Japanese computer game company. Ikeda wanted to know if he'd be willing to license Crazy Stone. Unbalance controlled about a third of the million-dollar global market in computer Go, but Zen's commercial version had begun to increase its market share. Ikeda needed Coulom to give his company's software a boost.
The first commercial version of Crazy Stone hit the market in spring of 2011. In March of 2013, Coulom's creation returned to the UEC Cup, beating Zen in the finals and -- given a four-stone head-start --- winning the first Densei-sen against Japanese professional Yoshio "The Computer" Ishida. The victories were huge for Coulom, both emotionally and financially. You can see their significance in the gift shop of the Japan Go Association, where a newspaper clipping, taped to the wall behind display copies of Crazy Stone, shows the pro grimly succumbing to Coulom's creation.
Takashi Osato/WIRED During the break before this year's UEC final, the TV crew springs into action, setting up cameras and adjusting boom mikes. Redmond, microphone in hand, positions himself at the front of the room next to the magnetic board. On the other side is Narumi Osawa, a pixieish 4-dan professional who, in standard Japanese fashion, will act as an obsequious female foil -- "What was that? Oh, wow, I see! Hai! Hai!" -- for Redmond’s in-game analysis.
Once everything is in place, Kato and Coulom are called to the front of the room for nigiri, to determine who plays first. Since he is the favorite, Coulom reaches into one of two polished wooden goke and grabs a fistful of white stones. Kato places one black stone on the board, indicating his guess that Coulom holds an odd number of stones. The white stones are counted. Kato guessed correctly. He will be Black, and the game is underway.
>The move is utterly bizarre, and even Kato is somewhat baffled.
It takes only three turns before the room explodes with excitement. After claiming two star points in the corners -- a standard opening -- Zen has placed its third stone right near the center of the board. The move is utterly bizarre, and even Kato is somewhat baffled. "An inhuman decision," Viennot whispers to me. "But Zen likes to make moyo in the middle of the board, like Takemiya. Maybe this is a new style." Kato and Coulom are sitting next to each other, eyes fixed on their laptops, occasionally exchanging confidence levels. An interesting struggle develops in the upper left corner, where Crazy Stone has invaded and Zen is trying to strengthen its position. The crowd mutters when Redmond pronounces one of Zen's moves "extremely human." ("Hai! Hai!") Black and white stones continue to fill the board, beautiful as always, forming what is technically known as a percolated fractal.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Suddenly, Coulom tenses up. Crazy Stone's confidence levels are rising quickly, too quickly, and soon, they are far too high, up in the sixties. It appears the program has misjudged a semeai, or capturing race, and believes a group of stones in the upper right corner is safe, when in fact it is not. Since Crazy Stone's move choices depend on an accurate assessment of the overall board position, the misjudged group proves fatal. On its 186th move, Crazy Stone resigns, and Zen becomes the new UEC Cup champion.
Later that evening, at the celebratory banquet, Coulom says he doesn't feel too bad, but I suspect he's extremely disappointed. Still, there's a chance for redemption. As a finalist, Crazy Stone gets to compete in the Densei-sen.
Coulom plays down the Electric Sage Battle. "The real competition is program against program," he told me during one early phone interview. "When my opponent is a programmer, we are doing the same thing. We can talk to each other. But when I play against a professional and he explains the moves to me, it is too high level. I can't understand, and he can't understand what I am doing. The Densei-sen -- it is good for publicity. I am not so interested in that." But when we meet at the Densei-sen, he seems excited. The building is humming with activity. Last weekend's conference room is reserved for press and university dignitaries, and a new, private room has been equipped for the matches. Only the referee and timekeepers will be allowed in the room, and cameras have been set up to capture the action for the rest of us. The professional commentators are now in the building's main auditorium, where at least a hundred people and three TV crews are ready to watch Crazy Stone and Zen take on a real pro.
In 2013, the Electric Sage Battle starred Ishida "The Computer" Yoshio, so-called because of his extraordinary counting and endgame abilities. This year, the pro is Norimoto Yoda, known for leading the Japanese team to a historic victory over Korea in the 2006 Nongshim Cup, and for shattering Go stones when he slams them down on the hardwood goban. After an introductory ceremony, Coulom and Yoda enter the private room, bow, and take their seats. In his typical style, Yoda has come dressed in an olive green kimono. His left hand holds a folded fan. Coulom, in his typical style, is wearing a blue turtleneck sweater. On the wooden goban between them sit two gokes filled with stones -- Black for Coulom, White for Yoda.
>In his typical style, Yoda has come dressed in an olive green kimono. His left hand holds a folded fan.
This time, there is no nigiri. Crazy Stone receives a massive handicap, starting with four black stones placed advantageously on the corner star points (the 4 by 4 intersections on a Go board's 19 by 19 grid). Yoda has no choice but to adopt an aggressive style of play, invading Crazy Stone's territory in hopes of neutralizing his initial disadvantage. But Crazy Stone responds skillfully to every threat, and Yoda's squarish face starts to harden. The fan snaps open and shut, open and shut.
In the press room, we can't hear the auditorium commentary. Instead, I watch as Muramatsu Murakasu, a main organizer of the event, plays the game out on his own board with O Meien. The two take turns trying to predict where Yoda and Crazy Stone will move next, and as the game progresses, both agree that Crazy Stone is doing an excellent job maintaining its lead.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Meanwhile, Coulom is looking at the board, his laptop, the timekeepers, anywhere but the increasingly frustrated Yoda. After Coulom places one particular stone, Yoda's eyes narrow perceptibly. He grunts and fans himself furiously. "That was an excellent move," says O Meien. "Yoda-san must be upset." Crazy Stone continues to play brilliant Go, and all of Yoda's incursions prove fruitless. It is only as the end approaches that Crazy Stone reveals its true identity. With a lead of eleven points, any decent human in Crazy Stone's position would play a few obvious moves and then pass, allowing Yoda resign. But Crazy Stone's algorithm is structured to care only about winning -- not by how much. Coulom winces as Crazy Stone makes a wasted move in its own territory, and then another. The game drags on as Crazy Stone sacrifices points, until mercifully it decides to pass, and the machine is finally declared the winner.
Coulom leaves the fuming Yoda as quickly as possible and joins us in the press room. He's both ecstatic and mortified. "I am proud of Crazy Stone," he says. "Very proud. But the first thing I will do at home is work on the endgame, so it does not make such embarrassing moves." Then things get better. Yoda manages to beat Zen in the second Densei-sen match, and just like that, the glory of the Electric Sage Battle belongs to Coulom, whose program has now bested two professionals after a four-stone handicap.
Takashi Osato/WIRED After the match, I ask Coulom when a machine will win without a handicap. "I think maybe ten years," he says. "But I do not like to make predictions." His caveat is a wise one. In 2007, Deep Blue's chief engineer, Feng-Hsiung Hsu, said much the same thing. Hsu also favored alpha-beta search over Monte Carlo techniques in Go programs, speculating that the latter "won't play a significant role in creating a machine that can top the best human players." Even with Monte Carlo, another ten years may prove too optimistic. And while programmers are virtually unanimous in saying computers will eventually top the humans, many in the Go community are skeptical. "The question of whether they'll get there is an open one," says Will Lockhart, director of the Go documentary The Surrounding Game.
"Those who are familiar with just how strong professionals really are, they’re not so sure." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg According to University of Sydney cognitive scientist and complex systems theorist Michael Harré, professional Go players behave in ways that are incredibly hard to predict. In a recent study, Harré analyzed Go players of various strengths, focusing on the predictability of their moves given a specific local configuration of stones. "The result was totally unexpected," he says. "Moves became steadily more predictable until players reached near-professional level. But at that point, moves started getting less predictable, and we don't know why. Our best guess is that information from the rest of the board started influencing decision-making in a unique way." >'Moves became steadily more predictable until players reached near-professional level. But at that point, moves started getting less predictable, and we don’t know why.' This could mean that computer programs will eventually hit another wall. It may turn out that the lack of progress experienced by Go programs in the last year is evidence of yet another qualitative division, the same one that divides amateurs from professionals. Should that be the case, another breakthrough on the level of the Monte Carlo Tree Search could be necessary before programs can challenge pros.
I was surprised to hear from programmers that the eventual success of these programs will have little to do with increased processing power. It is still the case that a Go program's performance depends almost entirely on the quality of its code. Processing power helps some, but it can only get you so far. Indeed, the UEC lets competitors use any kind of system, and although some opt for 2048-processor-core super-computers, Crazy Stone and Zen work their magic on commercially available 64-core hardware.
Even more surprising was that no programmers think of their creations as "intelligent." "The game of Go is spectacularly challenging," says Coulom, "but there is nothing to do with making a human intelligence." In other words, Watson and Crazy Stone are not beings. They are solutions to specific problems. That's why its inaccurate to say that IBM Watson will be used to fight cancer, unless playing Jeopardy helps reduce tumors. Developing Watson might have led to insights that help create an artificial diagnostician, but that diagnostician isn't Watson, just as MCTS programs used in hospital planning are not Crazy Stone.
The public relations folks at IBM paint a different picture, and so does the press. Anthropomorphized algorithms make for a better story. Deep Blue and Watson can be pitted against humans in highly produced man-machine battles, and IBM becomes the gatekeeper of a new era in artificial intelligence. Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death, Ray Kurzweil and other futurists feed this mischaracterization by trumpeting the impending technological apotheosis of humanity, their breathless idiocy echoing through popular media. "The Brain's Last Stand," read the cover of Newsweek after Kasparov's defeat. But in truth, these machines are nowhere close to mimicking the brain, and their creators admit as much.
Many Go players see the game as the final bastion of human dominance over computers. This view, which tacitly accepts the existence of a battle of intellects between humans and machines, is deeply misguided. In fact, computers can't "win" at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe. Computer Go matches aren't the brain's last stand. Rather, they help show just how far machines have to go before achieving something akin to true human intelligence. Until that day comes, perhaps it's best to view the Densei-sen as programmers do. "It is fun for me," says Coulom, "but that's all." Alan Levinovitz is assistant professor of philosophy and religion at James Madison University. His writing has appeared in Slate, Salon, The Believer, and elsewhere. Follow him: @alanlevinovitz.
1 Update 00:05 EST 05/13/14: An earlier version of this story referred to Go as a "perfect information game." It is more accurate to call it a "deterministic perfect information game." Topics Alan Turing Chess Einstein Enterprise Watson Will Knight Kari McMahon Andy Greenberg Amit Katwala Joel Khalili David Gilbert Khari Johnson Joel Khalili Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"https://www.theguardian.com/science/2007/jul/10/uk.obituaries1"
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"US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness Science Donald Michie Stephen Muggleton Professor Donald Michie and his former wife Dame Anne McLaren, distinguished scientists in separate fields that overlapped at one point, have died together in a car accident; Donald was 83.
He made contributions of crucial international significance in three distinct fields of endeavour. During the second world war, he developed code-breaking techniques which led to effective automatic deciphering of German high-level ciphers. In the 1950s, he worked with Anne on pioneering techniques which were fundamental in the development of in vitro fertilisation. Donald subsequently became one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, an area to which he devoted the remainder of his academic career. It was within this field that I came to know Donald as an inspirational supervisor of my PhD at Edinburgh - not only insightful, forceful and even heroic, but possessing a wicked sense of humour.
Donald was born in Rangoon. He attended Rugby school and was awarded an open scholarship to study classics at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1942.
In 1943, inspired by his father to do "something unspecified but romantic" behind enemy lines in China, Donald attempted to enrol on a Japanese language course for intelligence officers. On arrival at the School of Codes and Ciphers in Bedford, he was told that the course was full, and decided instead to take up training in cryptography. A fast learner, he was soon recruited to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, and was assigned to the "Testery", a section working on solving the German high-level teleprinter cipher, code-named Fish.
Owing to recent declassification, it is now clear how profoundly important Donald's wartime research was. In April 1944 he invented a technique for using the Colossus computer, developed at Bletchley, to automatically decode the secondary wheel of the Lorentz machine, which the Germans used for encoding Fish.
The innovation, tested by Donald and Jack Good, endowed the machine with a degree of general-purpose programmability and led to a radical last-minute enhancement in the construction of Colossus II. The results were dramatic. Texts which previously had taken days to decipher could now be completed in hours, allowing repeated effective interception of enemy attacks.
During this period at Bletchley, Donald held frequent lunchtime discussions with Alan Turing on the possibility of building computer programs that would display intelligence. Before the war, Turing had developed the mathematical basis for modern digital computation, and was applying the principles he had developed in the decoding efforts at Bletchley. Both Donald and Turing were interested in programming computers to play chess, as well as developing programs which could learn automatically from experience.
Following the end of the war, Donald decided to take up his offer from Oxford. His wartime experience had diverted his former interest in classics into a passion to study science. Supported by a Balliol College war memorial studentship, he received his MA in human anatomy and physiology in 1949. During his subsequent DPhil degree at Oxford, Donald put his boyhood hobby of breeding pet mice to work in a series of genetic studies published in the journal Nature.
In Oxford, he married his fellow student Anne McLaren in 1952. The following year, he received his DPhil in mammalian genetics and went on to work with Anne on techniques related to in vitro fertilisation, first at London University and then at Edinburgh. Donald and Anne were divorced in 1959.
While working at the department of surgical science in Edinburgh, Donald co-wrote one of the first introductory textbooks on the new science of molecular biology. However, his heart and mind were already elsewhere. From 1960, his attention returned to his wartime discussions with Turing, and in particular the question of whether computers could be programmed to learn from experience.
For demonstration purposes, he developed a noughts-and-crosses playing machine called Menace, for which he developed a general-purpose learning algorithm called Boxes. Since no computers were then available to him, he hand-simulated the Boxes algorithm, using a device made from an assembly of matchboxes. By 1963, Donald had assembled a small artificial-intelligence research group at Hope Park Square in Edinburgh. With the support of the Edinburgh vice-chancellor, Sir Edward Appleton, Donald established the experimental programming unit in 1965.
In 1966 he was joined in Edinburgh by Richard Gregory and Christopher Longuet-Higgins, both interested in the development of a brain research institute. The following year, he was appointed to a personal chair of machine intelligence and became the first director of the department of machine intelligence and perception.
The period up to 1973 is widely perceived as one of the most fertile in the history of artificial intelligence research, and its history is documented by the frequently cited Machine Intelligence book series of which Donald was editor.
His crowning achievement was the development, under a team he led, of Freddy II, the world's first demonstration of a laboratory robot capable of using computer vision feedback in assembling complex objects from a heap of parts. Unfortunately, a series of events conspired to bring this period of rapid achievement to an end.
Disagreements concerning the priorities of the field broke out between Donald, Longuet-Higgins and Gregory. At the same time, the growing economic crisis at the beginning of the 1970s was cutting into the budget of the Science Research Council, which was starting to look for savings.
Sir James Lighthill, a well-known British fluid dynamicist, was commissioned by the Science Research Council to analyse the prospects for the high-cost robotics project in Edinburgh. The resulting report, published in 1973, called a halt to artificial intelligence research in all but two areas.
The robot program was discontinued with knock-on effects for similar research programs in the US. The resulting dissolution of Donald's research group in Edinburgh left him isolated in the research unit. There he continued his research studies into computer chess and machine learning for the remainder of the 1970s.
By the early 1980s, automated assembly robots in Japan were outstripping traditional methods of manufacturing in other countries including the UK. Additionally, computer systems which imitated the decision-making of human experts were becoming increasingly successful. As a consequence, governments in the UK, Europe and US resumed large-scale funding of artificial-intelligence projects in response to the Japanese Fifth Generation project.
In 1986, as head of the Turing Trust in Cambridge, Donald founded the Turing Institute in Glasgow, in honour of his former colleague's key contributions to the field. Under Donald's leadership, the institute conducted advanced, industrially oriented research in machine learning, robotics and computer vision.
Following his retirement in the early 1990s, he continued actively in research on machine learning with his third wife, Jean Hayes-Michie. They had married in 1971, but she died from cancer in 2002, after which he resumed his friendship with Anne. His first marriage, to Zena Davies, had ended in divorce in 1949.
Donald is survived by his son Chris, from his first marriage, and by his daughters Susan and Caroline and son Jonathan from his marriage to Anne.
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By Siddhartha Mukherjee Facebook X Email Print Save Story In some trials, “deep learning” systems have outperformed human experts.
Illustration by Daniel Savage Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story One evening last November, a fifty-four-year-old woman from the Bronx arrived at the emergency room at Columbia University’s medical center with a grinding headache. Her vision had become blurry, she told the E.R. doctors, and her left hand felt numb and weak. The doctors examined her and ordered a CT scan of her head.
A few months later, on a morning this January, a team of four radiologists-in-training huddled in front of a computer in a third-floor room of the hospital. The room was windowless and dark, aside from the light from the screen, which looked as if it had been filtered through seawater. The residents filled a cubicle, and Angela Lignelli-Dipple, the chief of neuroradiology at Columbia, stood behind them with a pencil and pad. She was training them to read CT scans.
“It’s easy to diagnose a stroke once the brain is dead and gray,” she said. “The trick is to diagnose the stroke before too many nerve cells begin to die.” Strokes are usually caused by blockages or bleeds, and a neuroradiologist has about a forty-five-minute window to make a diagnosis, so that doctors might be able to intervene—to dissolve a growing clot, say. “Imagine you are in the E.R.,” Lignelli-Dipple continued, raising the ante. “Every minute that passes, some part of the brain is dying. Time lost is brain lost.” She glanced at a clock on the wall, as the seconds ticked by. “So where’s the problem?” she asked.
Strokes are typically asymmetrical. The blood supply to the brain branches left and right and then breaks into rivulets and tributaries on each side. A clot or a bleed usually affects only one of these branches, leading to a one-sided deficit in a part of the brain. As the nerve cells lose their blood supply and die, the tissue swells subtly. On a scan, the crisp borders between the anatomical structures can turn hazy. Eventually, the tissue shrinks, trailing a parched shadow. But that shadow usually appears on the scan several hours, or even days, after the stroke, when the window of intervention has long closed. “Before that,” Lignelli-Dipple told me, “there’s just a hint of something on a scan”—the premonition of a stroke.
The images on the Bronx woman’s scan cut through the skull from its base to the apex in horizontal planes, like a melon sliced from bottom to top. The residents raced through the layers of images, as if thumbing through a flipbook, calling out the names of the anatomical structures: cerebellum, hippocampus, insular cortex, striatum, corpus callosum, ventricles. Then one of the residents, a man in his late twenties, stopped at a picture and motioned with the tip of a pencil at an area on the right edge of the brain. “There’s something patchy here,” he said. “The borders look hazy.” To me, the whole image looked patchy and hazy—a blur of pixels—but he had obviously seen something unusual.
“Hazy?” Lignelli-Dipple prodded. “Can you describe it a little more?” The resident fumbled for words. He paused, as if going through the anatomical structures in his mind, weighing the possibilities. “It’s just not uniform.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Just looks funny.” Lignelli-Dipple pulled up a second CT scan, taken twenty hours later. The area pinpointed by the resident, about the diameter of a grape, was dull and swollen. A series of further scans, taken days apart, told the rest of the story. A distinct wedge-shaped field of gray appeared. Soon after the woman got to the E.R., neurologists had tried to open the clogged artery with clot-busting drugs, but she had arrived too late. A few hours after the initial scan, she lost consciousness, and was taken to the I.C.U. Two months later, the woman was still in a ward upstairs. The left side of her body—from the upper arms to the leg—was paralyzed.
I walked with Lignelli-Dipple to her office. I was there to learn about learning: How do doctors learn to diagnose? And could machines learn to do it, too? My own induction into diagnosis began in the fall of 1997, in Boston, as I started my clinical rotations. To prepare, I read a textbook, a classic in medical education, that divided the act of diagnosis into four tidy phases. First, the doctor uses a patient’s history and a physical exam to collect facts about her complaint or condition. Next, this information is collated to generate a comprehensive list of potential causes. Then questions and preliminary tests help eliminate one hypothesis and strengthen another—so-called “differential diagnosis.” Weight is given to how common a disease might be, and to a patient’s prior history, risks, exposures. (“When you hear hoofbeats,” the saying goes, “think horses, not zebras.”) The list narrows; the doctor refines her assessment. In the final phase, definitive lab tests, X-rays, or CT scans are deployed to confirm the hypothesis and seal the diagnosis. Variations of this stepwise process were faithfully reproduced in medical textbooks for decades, and the image of the diagnostician who plods methodically from symptom to cause had been imprinted on generations of medical students.
But the real art of diagnosis, I soon learned, wasn’t so straightforward. My preceptor in medical school was an elegant New Englander with polished loafers and a starched accent. He prided himself on being an expert diagnostician. He would ask a patient to demonstrate the symptom—a cough, say—and then lean back in his chair, letting adjectives roll over his tongue. “Raspy and tinny,” he might say, or “base, with an ejaculated thrum,” as if he were describing a vintage bottle of Bordeaux. To me, all the coughs sounded exactly the same, but I’d play along—“Raspy, yes”—like an anxious impostor at a wine tasting.
The taxonomist of coughs would immediately narrow down the diagnostic possibilities. “It sounds like a pneumonia,” he might say, or “the wet rales of congestive heart failure.” He would then let loose a volley of questions. Had the patient experienced recent weight gain? Was there a history of asbestos exposure? He’d ask the patient to cough again and he’d lean down, listening intently with his stethoscope. Depending on the answers, he might generate another series of possibilities, as if strengthening and weakening synapses. Then, with the élan of a roadside magician, he’d proclaim his diagnosis—“Heart failure!”—and order tests to prove that it was correct. It usually was.
A few years ago, researchers in Brazil studied the brains of expert radiologists in order to understand how they reached their diagnoses. Were these seasoned diagnosticians applying a mental “rule book” to the images, or did they apply “pattern recognition or non-analytical reasoning”? Twenty-five such radiologists were asked to evaluate X-rays of the lung while inside MRI machines that could track the activities of their brains. (There’s a marvellous series of recursions here: to diagnose diagnosis, the imagers had to be imaged.) X-rays were flashed before them. Some contained a single pathological lesion that might be commonly encountered—perhaps a palm-shaped shadow of a pneumonia, or the dull, opaque wall of fluid that had accumulated behind the lining of the lung. Embedded in a second group of diagnostic images were line drawings of animals; within a third group, the outlines of letters of the alphabet. The radiologists were shown the three types of images in random order, and then asked to call out the name of the lesion, the animal, or the letter as quickly as possible while the MRI machine traced the activity of their brains. It took the radiologists an average of 1.33 seconds to come up with a diagnosis. In all three cases, the same areas of the brain lit up: a wide delta of neurons near the left ear, and a moth-shaped band above the posterior base of the skull.
“Our results support the hypothesis that a process similar to naming things in everyday life occurs when a physician promptly recognizes a characteristic and previously known lesion,” the researchers concluded. Identifying a lesion was a process similar to naming the animal. When you recognize a rhinoceros, you’re not considering and eliminating alternative candidates. Nor are you mentally fusing a unicorn, an armadillo, and a small elephant. You recognize a rhinoceros in its totality—as a pattern. The same was true for radiologists. They weren’t cogitating, recollecting, differentiating; they were seeing a commonplace object. For my preceptor, similarly, those wet rales were as recognizable as a familiar jingle.
In 1945, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave an influential lecture about two kinds of knowledge. A child knows that a bicycle has two wheels, that its tires are filled with air, and that you ride the contraption by pushing its pedals forward in circles. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—the factual, propositional kind—“knowing that.” But to learn to ride a bicycle involves another realm of learning. A child learns how to ride by falling off, by balancing herself on two wheels, by going over potholes. Ryle termed this kind of knowledge—implicit, experiential, skill-based—“knowing how.” The two kinds of knowledge would seem to be interdependent: you might use factual knowledge to deepen your experiential knowledge, and vice versa. But Ryle warned against the temptation to think that “knowing how” could be reduced to “knowing that”—a playbook of rules couldn’t teach a child to ride a bike. Our rules, he asserted, make sense only because we know how to use them: “Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.” One afternoon, I watched my seven-year-old daughter negotiate a small hill on her bike. The first time she tried, she stalled at the steepest part of the slope and fell off. The next time, I saw her lean forward, imperceptibly at first, and then more visibly, and adjust her weight back on the seat as the slope decreased. But I hadn’t taught her rules to ride a bike up that hill. When her daughter learns to negotiate the same hill, I imagine, she won’t teach her the rules, either. We pass on a few precepts about the universe but leave the brain to figure out the rest.
Some time after Lignelli-Dipple’s session with the radiology trainees, I spoke to Steffen Haider, the young man who had picked up the early stroke on the CT scan. How had he found that culprit lesion? Was it “knowing that” or “knowing how”? He began by telling me about learned rules. He knew that strokes are often one-sided; that they result in the subtle “graying” of tissue; that the tissue often swells slightly, causing a loss of anatomical borders. “There are spots in the brain where the blood supply is particularly vulnerable,” he said. To identify the lesion, he’d have to search for these signs on one side which were not present on the other.
I reminded him that there were plenty of asymmetries in the image that he had ignored. This CT scan, like most, had other gray squiggles on the left that weren’t on the right—artifacts of movement, or chance, or underlying changes in the woman’s brain that preceded the stroke. How had he narrowed his focus to that one area? He paused as the thought pedalled forward and gathered speed in his mind. “I don’t know—it was partly subconscious,” he said, finally.
“That’s what happens—a clicking together—as you grow and learn as a radiologist,” Lignelli-Dipple told me. The question was whether a machine could “grow and learn” in the same manner.
In January, 2015, the computer scientist Sebastian Thrun became fascinated by a conundrum in medical diagnostics. Thrun, who grew up in Germany, is lean, with a shaved head and an air of comic exuberance; he looks like some fantastical fusion of Michel Foucault and Mr. Bean. Formerly a professor at Stanford, where he directed the Artificial Intelligence Lab, Thrun had gone off to start Google X, directing work on self-learning robots and driverless cars. But he found himself drawn to learning devices in medicine. His mother had died of breast cancer when she was forty-nine years old—Thrun’s age now. “Most patients with cancer have no symptoms at first,” Thrun told me. “My mother didn’t. By the time she went to her doctor, her cancer had already metastasized. I became obsessed with the idea of detecting cancer in its earliest stage—at a time when you could still cut it out with a knife. And I kept thinking, Could a machine-learning algorithm help?” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop Early efforts to automate diagnosis tended to hew closely to the textbook realm of explicit knowledge. Take the electrocardiogram, which renders the heart’s electrical activity as lines on a page or a screen. For the past twenty years, computer interpretation has often been a feature of these systems. The programs that do the work tend to be fairly straightforward. Characteristic waveforms are associated with various conditions—atrial fibrillation, or the blockage of a blood vessel—and rules to recognize these waveforms are fed into the appliance. When the machine recognizes the waveforms, it flags a heartbeat as “atrial fibrillation.” In mammography, too, “computer-aided detection” is becoming commonplace. Pattern-recognition software highlights suspicious areas, and radiologists review the results. But here again the recognition software typically uses a rule-based system to identify a suspicious lesion. Such programs have no built-in mechanism to learn: a machine that has seen three thousand X-rays is no wiser than one that has seen just four. These limitations became starkly evident in a 2007 study that compared the accuracy of mammography before and after the implementation of computer-aided diagnostic devices. One might have expected the accuracy of diagnosis to have increased dramatically after the devices had been implemented. As it happens, the devices had a complicated effect. The rate of biopsies shot up in the computer-assisted group. Yet the detection of small, invasive breast cancers—the kind that oncologists are most keen to detect— decreased.
(Even later studies have shown problems with false positives.) Thrun was convinced that he could outdo these first-generation diagnostic devices by moving away from rule-based algorithms to learning-based ones—from rendering a diagnosis by “knowing that” to doing so by “knowing how.” Increasingly, learning algorithms of the kind that Thrun works with involve a computing strategy known as a “neural network,” because it’s inspired by a model of how the brain functions. In the brain, neural synapses are strengthened and weakened through repeated activation; these digital systems aim to achieve something similar through mathematical means, adjusting the “weights” of the connections to move toward the desired output. The more powerful ones have something akin to layers of neurons, each processing the input data and sending the results up to the next layer. Hence, “deep learning.” Thrun began with skin cancer; in particular, keratinocyte carcinoma (the most common class of cancer in the U.S.) and melanoma (the most dangerous kind of skin cancer). Could a machine be taught to distinguish skin cancer from a benign skin condition—acne, a rash, or a mole—by scanning a photograph? “If a dermatologist can do it, then a machine should be able to do it as well,” Thrun reasoned. “Perhaps a machine could do it even better.” Traditionally, dermatological teaching about melanoma begins with a rule-based system that, as medical students learn, comes with a convenient mnemonic: ABCD. Melanomas are often asymmetrical (“A”), their borders (“B”) are uneven, their color (“C”) can be patchy and variegated, and their diameter (“D”) is usually greater than six millimetres. But, when Thrun looked through specimens of melanomas in medical textbooks and on the Web, he found examples where none of these rules applied.
Thrun, who had maintained an adjunct position at Stanford, enlisted two students he worked with there, Andre Esteva and Brett Kuprel. Their first task was to create a so-called “teaching set”: a vast trove of images that would be used to teach the machine to recognize a malignancy. Searching online, Esteva and Kuprel found eighteen repositories of skin-lesion images that had been classified by dermatologists. This rogues’ gallery contained nearly a hundred and thirty thousand images—of acne, rashes, insect bites, allergic reactions, and cancers—that dermatologists had categorized into nearly two thousand diseases. Notably, there was a set of two thousand lesions that had also been biopsied and examined by pathologists, and thereby diagnosed with near-certainty.
Esteva and Kuprel began to train the system. They didn’t program it with rules; they didn’t teach it about ABCD. Instead, they fed the images, and their diagnostic classifications, to the neural network. I asked Thrun to describe what such a network did.
“Imagine an old-fashioned program to identify a dog,” he said. “A software engineer would write a thousand if-then-else statements: if it has ears, and a snout, and has hair, and is not a rat . . . and so forth, ad infinitum. But that’s not how a child learns to identify a dog, of course. At first, she learns by seeing dogs and being told that they are dogs. She makes mistakes, and corrects herself. She thinks that a wolf is a dog—but is told that it belongs to an altogether different category. And so she shifts her understanding bit by bit: this is ‘dog,’ that is ‘wolf.’ The machine-learning algorithm, like the child, pulls information from a training set that has been classified. Here’s a dog, and here’s not a dog. It then extracts features from one set versus another. And, by testing itself against hundreds and thousands of classified images, it begins to create its own way to recognize a dog—again, the way a child does.” It just knows how to do it.
In June, 2015, Thrun’s team began to test what the machine had learned from the master set of images by presenting it with a “validation set”: some fourteen thousand images that had been diagnosed by dermatologists (although not necessarily by biopsy). Could the system correctly classify the images into three diagnostic categories—benign lesions, malignant lesions, and non-cancerous growths? The system got the answer right seventy-two per cent of the time. (The actual output of the algorithm is not “yes” or “no” but a probability that a given lesion belongs to a category of interest.) Two board-certified dermatologists who were tested alongside did worse: they got the answer correct sixty-six per cent of the time.
Thrun, Esteva, and Kuprel then widened the study to include twenty-five dermatologists, and this time they used a gold-standard “test set” of roughly two thousand biopsy-proven images. In almost every test, the machine was more sensitive than doctors: it was less likely to miss a melanoma. It was also more specific: it was less likely to call something a melanoma when it wasn’t. “In every test, the network outperformed expert dermatologists,” the team concluded, in a report published in Nature.
“There’s one rather profound thing about the network that wasn’t fully emphasized in the paper,” Thrun told me. In the first iteration of the study, he and the team had started with a totally naïve neural network. But they found that if they began with a neural network that had already been trained to recognize some unrelated feature (dogs versus cats, say) it learned faster and better. Perhaps our brains function similarly. Those mind-numbing exercises in high school—factoring polynomials, conjugating verbs, memorizing the periodic table—were possibly the opposite: mind-sensitizing.
When teaching the machine, the team had to take some care with the images. Thrun hoped that people could one day simply submit smartphone pictures of their worrisome lesions, and that meant that the system had to be undaunted by a wide range of angles and lighting conditions. But, he recalled, “In some pictures, the melanomas had been marked with yellow disks. We had to crop them out—otherwise, we might teach the computer to pick out a yellow disk as a sign of cancer.” It was an old conundrum: a century ago, the German public became entranced by Clever Hans, a horse that could supposedly add and subtract, and would relay the answer by tapping its hoof. As it turns out, Clever Hans was actually sensing its handler’s bearing. As the horse’s hoof-taps approached the correct answer, the handler’s expression and posture relaxed. The animal’s neural network had not learned arithmetic; it had learned to detect changes in human body language. “That’s the bizarre thing about neural networks,” Thrun said. “You cannot tell what they are picking up. They are like black boxes whose inner workings are mysterious.” The “black box” problem is endemic in deep learning. The system isn’t guided by an explicit store of medical knowledge and a list of diagnostic rules; it has effectively taught itself to differentiate moles from melanomas by making vast numbers of internal adjustments—something analogous to strengthening and weakening synaptic connections in the brain. Exactly how did it determine that a lesion was a melanoma? We can’t know, and it can’t tell us. All the internal adjustments and processing that allow the network to learn happen away from our scrutiny. As is true of our own brains. When you make a slow turn on a bicycle, you lean in the opposite direction. My daughter knows to do this, but she doesn’t know that she does it. The melanoma machine must be extracting certain features from the images; does it matter that it can’t tell us which? It’s like the smiling god of knowledge. Encountering such a machine, one gets a glimpse of how an animal might perceive a human mind: all-knowing but perfectly impenetrable.
Thrun blithely envisages a world in which we’re constantly under diagnostic surveillance. Our cell phones would analyze shifting speech patterns to diagnose Alzheimer’s. A steering wheel would pick up incipient Parkinson’s through small hesitations and tremors. A bathtub would perform sequential scans as you bathe, via harmless ultrasound or magnetic resonance, to determine whether there’s a new mass in an ovary that requires investigation. Big Data would watch, record, and evaluate you: we would shuttle from the grasp of one algorithm to the next. To enter Thrun’s world of bathtubs and steering wheels is to enter a hall of diagnostic mirrors, each urging more tests.
It’s hard not to be seduced by this vision. Might a medical panopticon that constantly scans us in granular—perhaps even cellular—detail, comparing images day by day, enable us to catch cancer at its earliest stages? Could it provide a breakthrough in cancer detection? It sounds impressive, but there’s a catch: many cancers are destined to be self-limited. We die with them, not of them. What if such an immersive diagnostic engine led to millions of unnecessary biopsies? In medicine, there are cases where early diagnosis can save or prolong life. There are also cases where you’ll be worried longer but won’t live longer. It’s hard to know how much you want to know.
“I’m interested in magnifying human ability,” Thrun said, when I asked him about the impact of such systems on human diagnosticians. “Look, did industrial farming eliminate some forms of farming? Absolutely, but it amplified our capacity to produce agricultural goods. Not all of this was good, but it allowed us to feed more people. The industrial revolution amplified the power of human muscle. When you use a phone, you amplify the power of human speech. You cannot shout from New York to California”—Thrun and I were, indeed, speaking across that distance—“and yet this rectangular device in your hand allows the human voice to be transmitted across three thousand miles. Did the phone replace the human voice? No, the phone is an augmentation device. The cognitive revolution will allow computers to amplify the capacity of the human mind in the same manner. Just as machines made human muscles a thousand times stronger, machines will make the human brain a thousand times more powerful.” Thrun insists that these deep-learning devices will not replace dermatologists and radiologists. They will augment the professionals, offering them expertise and assistance.
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, speaks less gently about the role that learning machines will play in clinical medicine. Hinton—the great-great-grandson of George Boole, whose Boolean algebra is a keystone of digital computing—has sometimes been called the father of deep learning; it’s a topic he’s worked on since the mid-nineteen-seventies, and many of his students have become principal architects of the field today.
“I think that if you work as a radiologist you are like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon,” Hinton told me. “You’re already over the edge of the cliff, but you haven’t yet looked down. There’s no ground underneath.” Deep-learning systems for breast and heart imaging have already been developed commercially. “It’s just completely obvious that in five years deep learning is going to do better than radiologists,” he went on. “It might be ten years. I said this at a hospital. It did not go down too well.” Hinton’s actual words, in that hospital talk, were blunt: “They should stop training radiologists now.” When I brought up the challenge to Angela Lignelli-Dipple, she pointed out that diagnostic radiologists aren’t merely engaged in yes-no classification. They’re not just locating the embolism that brought on a stroke. They’re noticing the small bleed elsewhere that might make it disastrous to use a clot-busting drug; they’re picking up on an unexpected, maybe still asymptomatic tumor.
“Pretty good. The ending was a bit predictable.” Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Link copied Shop Shop Hinton now qualifies the provocation. “The role of radiologists will evolve from doing perceptual things that could probably be done by a highly trained pigeon to doing far more cognitive things,” he told me. His prognosis for the future of automated medicine is based on a simple principle: “Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it’s going to be solved by deep learning. There’s going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.” He wants to use learning algorithms to read X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs of every variety—and that’s just what he considers the near-term prospects. In the future, he said, “learning algorithms will make pathological diagnoses.” They might read Pap smears, listen to heart sounds, or predict relapses in psychiatric patients.
We discussed the black-box problem. Although computer scientists are working on it, Hinton acknowledged that the challenge of opening the black box, of trying to find out exactly what these powerful learning systems know and how they know it, was “far from trivial—don’t believe anyone who says that it is.” Still, it was a problem he thought we could live with. “Imagine pitting a baseball player against a physicist in a contest to determine where a ball might land,” he said. “The baseball player, who’s thrown a ball over and over again a million times, might not know any equations but knows exactly how high the ball will rise, the velocity it will reach, and where it will come down to the ground. The physicist can write equations to determine the same thing. But, ultimately, both come to the identical point.” I recalled the disappointing results from older generations of computer-assisted detection and diagnosis in mammography. Any new system would need to be evaluated through rigorous clinical trials, Hinton conceded. Yet the new intelligent systems, he stressed, are designed to learn from their mistakes—to improve over time. “We could build in a system that would take every missed diagnosis—a patient who developed lung cancer eventually—and feed it back to the machine. We could ask, What did you miss here? Could you refine the diagnosis? There’s no such system for a human radiologist. If you miss something, and a patient develops cancer five years later, there’s no systematic routine that tells you how to correct yourself. But you could build in a system to teach the computer to achieve exactly that.” Some of the most ambitious versions of diagnostic machine-learning algorithms seek to integrate natural-language processing (permitting them to read a patient’s medical records) and an encyclopedic knowledge of medical conditions gleaned from textbooks, journals, and medical databases. Both I.B.M.’s Watson Health, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and DeepMind, in London, hope to create such comprehensive systems. I watched some of these systems operate in pilot demonstrations, but many of their features, especially the deep-learning components, are still in development.
Hinton is passionate about the future of deep-learning diagnosis, in part, because of his own experience. As he was developing such algorithms, his wife was found to have advanced pancreatic cancer. His son was diagnosed with a malignant melanoma, but then the biopsy showed that the lesion was a basal-cell carcinoma, a far less serious kind of cancer. “There’s much more to learn here,” Hinton said, letting out a small sigh. “Early and accurate diagnosis is not a trivial problem. We can do better. Why not let machines help us?” On an icy March morning, a few days after my conversations with Thrun and Hinton, I went to Columbia University’s dermatology clinic, on Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. Lindsey Bordone, the attending physician, was scheduled to see forty-nine patients that day. By ten o’clock, the waiting room was filled with people. (Identifying details have been changed.) A bearded man, about sixty years old, sat in the corner concealing a rash on his neck with a woollen scarf. An anxious couple huddled over the Times.
Bordone saw her patients in rapid succession. In a fluorescent-lit room in the back, a nurse sat facing a computer and gave a one-sentence summary—“fifty years old with no prior history and new suspicious spot on the skin”—and then Bordone rushed into the examining room, her blond hair flying behind her.
A young man in his thirties had a scaly red rash on his face. As Bordone examined him, the skin flaked and fell off his nose. Bordone pulled him into the light and looked at the skin carefully, and then focussed her handheld dermoscope on it.
“Do you have dandruff in your hair?” she asked.
The man looked confused. “Sure,” he said.
“Well, this is facial dandruff,” Bordone told him. “It’s a particularly bad case. But the question is why it appeared now, and why it’s getting worse. Have you been using some new product in your hair? Is there some unusual stress in your family?” “There’s definitely been some stress,” he said. He had lost his job recently, and was dealing with the financial repercussions.
“Keep a diary,” she advised. “We can determine if there’s a link.” She wrote a prescription for a steroidal cream, and asked him to return in a month.
In the next room, there was a young paralegal with a spray of itchy bumps on his scalp. He winced as Bordone felt his scalp. “Seborrheic dermatitis,” she said, concluding her exam.
The woman in another room had undressed and donned a hospital gown. In the past, she had been diagnosed with a melanoma, and she was diligent about getting preventive exams. Bordone pored over her skin, freckle by freckle. It took her twenty minutes, but she was thorough and comprehensive, running her fingers over the landscape of moles and skin tags and calling out diagnoses as she moved. There were nevi and keratoses, but no melanomas or carcinomas.
“Looks all good,” she said cheerfully at the end. The woman sighed in relief.
And so it went: Bordone came; she saw; she diagnosed. Far from Hinton’s coyote, she seemed like a somewhat manic roadrunner, trying to keep pace with the succession of cases that treadmilled beneath her. As she wrote her notes in the back room, I asked her about Thrun’s vision for diagnosis: an iPhone pic e-mailed to a powerful off-site network marshalling undoubted but inscrutable expertise. A dermatologist in full-time practice, such as Bordone, will see about two hundred thousand cases during her lifetime. The Stanford machine’s algorithm ingested nearly a hundred and thirty thousand cases in about three months. And, whereas each new dermatology resident needs to start from scratch, Thrun’s algorithm keeps ingesting, growing, and learning.
Bordone shrugged. “If it helps me make decisions with greater accuracy, I’d welcome it,” she said. “Some of my patients could take pictures of their skin problems before seeing me, and it would increase the reach of my clinic.” That sounded like a reasonable response, and I remembered Thrun’s reassuring remarks about augmentation. But, as machines learn more and more, will humans learn less and less? It’s the perennial anxiety of the parent whose child has a spell-check function on her phone: what if the child stops learning how to spell? The phenomenon has been called “automation bias.” When cars gain automated driver assistance, drivers may become less alert, and something similar may happen in medicine. Maybe Bordone was a lone John Henry in a world where the steam drills were about to come online. But it was impossible to miss how her own concentration never wavered and how seriously she took every skin tag and mole that she ran her fingers over. Would that continue to be true if she partnered with a machine? I noticed other patterns in Bordone’s interactions with her patients. For one thing, they almost always left feeling better. They had been touched and scrutinized; a conversation took place. Even the naming of lesions—“nevus,” “keratosis”—was an emollient: there was something deeply reassuring about the process. The woman who’d had the skin exam left looking fresh and unburdened, her anxiety exfoliated.
There was more. The diagnostic moment, as the Brazilian researchers might have guessed, came to Bordone in a flash of recognition. As she called out “dermatitis” or “eczema,” it was as if she were identifying a rhinoceros: you could almost see the pyramid of neurons in the lower posterior of her brain spark as she recognized the pattern. But the visit did not end there. In almost every case, Bordone spent the bulk of her time investigating causes. Why had the symptoms appeared? Was it stress? A new shampoo? Had someone changed the chlorine in the pool? Why now? The most powerful element in these clinical encounters, I realized, was not knowing that or knowing how—not mastering the facts of the case, or perceiving the patterns they formed. It lay in yet a third realm of knowledge: knowing why.
Explanations run shallow and deep. You have a red blister on your finger because you touched a hot iron; you have a red blister on your finger because the burn excited an inflammatory cascade of prostaglandins and cytokines, in a regulated process that we still understand only imperfectly. Knowing why— asking why—is our conduit to every kind of explanation, and explanation, increasingly, is what powers medical advances. Hinton spoke about baseball players and physicists. Diagnosticians, artificial or human, would be the baseball players—proficient but opaque. Medical researchers would be the physicists, as removed from the clinical field as theorists are from the baseball field, but with a desire to know “why.” It’s a convenient division of responsibilities—yet might it represent a loss? “A deep-learning system doesn’t have any explanatory power,” as Hinton put it flatly. A black box cannot investigate cause. Indeed, he said, “the more powerful the deep-learning system becomes, the more opaque it can become. As more features are extracted, the diagnosis becomes increasingly accurate. Why these features were extracted out of millions of other features, however, remains an unanswerable question.” The algorithm can solve a case. It cannot build a case.
Yet in my own field, oncology, I couldn’t help noticing how often advances were made by skilled practitioners who were also curious and penetrating researchers. Indeed, for the past few decades, ambitious doctors have strived to be at once baseball players and physicists: they’ve tried to use diagnostic acumen to understand the pathophysiology of disease. Why does an asymmetrical border of a skin lesion predict a melanoma? Why do some melanomas regress spontaneously, and why do patches of white skin appear in some of these cases? As it happens, this observation, made by diagnosticians in the clinic, was eventually linked to the creation of some of the most potent immunological medicines used clinically today. (The whitening skin, it turned out, was the result of an immune reaction that was also turning against the melanoma.) The chain of discovery can begin in the clinic. If more and more clinical practice were relegated to increasingly opaque learning machines, if the daily, spontaneous intimacy between implicit and explicit forms of knowledge—knowing how, knowing that, knowing why—began to fade, is it possible that we’d get better at doing what we do but less able to reconceive what we ought to be doing, to think outside the algorithmic black box? I spoke to David Bickers, the chair of dermatology at Columbia, about our automated future. “Believe me, I’ve tried to understand all the ramifications of Thrun’s paper,” he said. “I don’t understand the math behind it, but I do know that such algorithms might change the practice of dermatology. Will dermatologists be out of jobs? I don’t think so, but I think we have to think hard about how to integrate these programs into our practice. How will we pay for them? What are the legal liabilities if the machine makes the wrong prediction? And will it diminish our practice, or our self-image as diagnosticians, to rely on such algorithms? Instead of doctors, will we end up training a generation of technicians?” He checked the time. A patient was waiting to see him, and he got up to leave. “I’ve spent my life as a diagnostician and a scientist,” he said. “I know how much a patient relies on my capacity to tell a malignant lesion from a benign one. I also know that medical knowledge emerges from diagnosis.” The word “diagnosis,” he reminded me, comes from the Greek for “knowing apart.” Machine-learning algorithms will only become better at such knowing apart—at partitioning, at distinguishing moles from melanomas. But knowing, in all its dimensions, transcends those task-focussed algorithms. In the realm of medicine, perhaps the ultimate rewards come from knowing together. ♦ More: Health Medicine Science Weekly E-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Gregory Barber Business What's Blockchain Actually Good for, Anyway? For Now, Not Much Illustration: Ariel Davis Save this story Save Save this story Save In early 2018, Amos Meiri got the kind of windfall many startup founders only dream of. Meiri’s company, Colu, develops digital currencies for cities —coupons, essentially, that encourage people to spend their money locally. The company was having some success with pilot projects in the UK and Israel, but Meiri had an idea for something bigger. He envisioned a global network of city currencies, linked together using blockchain technology.
So he turned to a then-popular way to fund his idea: the initial coin offering, or ICO. Colu raised nearly $20 million selling a digital token it called CLN.
Now, Meiri is doing something unusual: Giving the money back. After a year of regulatory and technical headaches, he stopped trying to fit blockchain into his business plan. He thinks other blockchain projects will follow suit.
It’s not unusual for startup efforts to fail or pivot when the product doesn’t work or the funding runs out. But blockchain has offered a wilder ride than most new technologies. Two years ago, ICOs like Meiri’s lured billions of dollars into blockchain companies and spawned a cottage industry of pilot projects. For a while, a blockchain seemed a salve for just about any problem: Fraudulent tuna.
Unreliable health records.
Homelessness.
Remember WhopperCoin? Burger King’s crypto-for-burgers scheme, along with thousands of other projects, has long lost its sizzle. Many were scams from the start. But even among the more legitimate enterprises, there are relatively few winners. Enter, as a recent report from Gartner put it, “blockchain fatigue.” “What you’re seeing right now is lethargy,” says Emin Gun Sirer, a professor of computer science at Cornell and founder of Ava Labs. “The current technologies fall really short.” Bitcoin appears to be here to stay, even if the price has recently slumped. An entire industry has been built around holding and trading digital assets like it. But attempts to build more complex applications using blockchain are hobbled by the underlying technology. Blockchains offer an immutable ledger of data without relying on a central authority—that’s core to the hype behind the technology. But the cryptographic machinery behind blockchains is notoriously slow. Early platforms, like Ethereum, which gave rise to the ICO frenzy, are far too sluggish to handle most commercial applications. For that reason, “ decentralized ” projects represent a tiny portion of corporate blockchain efforts, perhaps 3 percent , says Apolline Blandin, a researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
The rest take shortcuts. So-called permissioned blockchains borrow ideas and terms from Bitcoin, but cut corners in the name of speed and simplicity. They retain central entities that control the data, doing away with the central innovation of blockchains. Blandin has a name for those projects: “blockchain memes.” Hype and lavish funding fueled many such projects. But often, the same applications could be built with less-splashy technology. As the buzzwords wear off, some have begun asking, what’s the point? “I’m having a hard time understanding how blockchain is going to really positively affect my citizens.” Donna Kinville, South Burlington, Vermont City Clerk When Donna Kinville, the city clerk in South Burlington, Vermont, was approached by a startup that wanted to put the city’s land records on a blockchain, she was willing to listen. “We had the reputation of being ahead of things,” she says. The company, called Propy, had raised $15 million through an ICO in 2017 and forged Vermont connections, including lobbying for blockchain-friendly state legislation.
Propy pitched blockchain as a more secure way to handle land records. “It didn’t take long for them to say that they were overzealous,” Kinville says. She worked with Propy for about a year as it designed its platform and recorded the city’s historical data on the Ethereum blockchain. Propy also recorded one sale for the city, for a parcel of empty land whose owners weren’t in much of a rush.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Last month, Propy pitched Kinville a nearly finished product. She was uninspired. The system lacked practical features she uses all the time, like a simple way to link documents. She liked the software she uses now. It was built by an established company that was just a call away, in case anything fritzed.
“I’m having a hard time understanding how blockchain is going to really positively affect my citizens,” Kinville says. “Is it the speed of the blockchain? The security? Between faxes and emails, things get done just as quickly.” The city’s data is backed up on three servers; Kinville keeps a print copy, just in case. “We Vermonters are cautious. We like paper; you can always go back to it.” She sent Propy notes on how to improve its product, but doesn’t expect to buy it.
Natalia Karayaneva, Propy’s founder, says the land records platform is being tested in another Vermont town that didn’t have a computer system. But she acknowledges that privacy issues, as well as local rules and legacy computer systems, mean blockchain isn’t always a good fit for government. Propy is now focusing on an automated platform for realtors. It also uses blockchain, but the company doesn’t always trumpet it.
“In 2017, it was enough to have blockchain technology and everyone reaches out to you,” says Karayaneva. “But now working with traditional investors, we actually avoid the word blockchain in many of our materials.” For a while, blockchain was seen as a panacea, says Andrew Stevens, a Gartner analyst who coauthored the “blockchain fatigue” study. Stevens’ team focused on projects that touted blockchain as a way to identify fraudulent and tainted goods in supply chains. They predicted 90 percent of those projects would eventually stall. Blockchain evangelizers were finding that supply chains more complex than expected, and that blockchain offered no ready-made solutions. When it comes to mission-critical blockchain projects, “there are no deployments across any supply chains,” he says.
But Stevens says the concept of blockchains may yet prove useful as a way to get competitors and other distrustful parties to share data and tools. He compares it to early internet experiments, before anyone knew if the internet would catch on. Even if such projects start as a marketing ploy, they can spark corporate bureaucrats to gamble on initiatives and partnerships they otherwise wouldn’t.
Blandin, the Cambridge researcher, points to efforts at IBM, which has more than 1,000 employees working on blockchain products. There’s IBM Food Trust, tapped by Walmart to trace lettuce among other products, and TradeLens, a platform Maersk and its competitors use to share shipping data. That project has attracted four of the five biggest shipping lines.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Using blockchain simply to track and trace items is pointless on its own, says Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM Blockchain; there are already tools for that. But if there’s a dispute—say, between a retailer and a packer in its supply chain—companies find it useful to have a record with a common set of facts. Blockchain is, in theory, purpose-built to do just that. But it’s still early days, he says. “Try to start something with 20 companies and you’ll be in the room with 20 lawyers.” On IBM’s projects, blockchain components are often just a small part of a larger system. One popular choice is a “ shadow ledger ,” where a blockchain system records data alongside existing systems, allowing clients to test the cryptographic waters. “Blockchain is tracking at a reasonable rate,” he says.
One challenge is keeping those uneasy participants together. Take Libra, the Facebook-led cryptocurrency effort, which recently lost a quarter of its members. That effort has quickly become a case study in the difficulties of getting competitors to play nicely. It’s too soon to see whether those kinds of groups will survive, or whether blockchain will be the glue.
Meiri’s company, Colu, seemed like an ideal fit for blockchain. Digital currencies, perhaps the most basic blockchain application, were already at the core of its business. A user might get digital coins for volunteering for a local nonprofit and then use them to run errands at local shops. Businesses could then use the coins to pay taxes or a water bill, completing a virtuous cycle of local spending. Recently, when the Tel Aviv government wanted to build a light rail line, it worked with Colu to distribute discounts at businesses along the torn-up stretch. Belfast runs a mental health program that subsidizes yoga through its local coin.
Meiri was an early blockchain adopter, involved in projects that tried to make Bitcoin more useful. He wanted to build a tool set on Ethereum that would allow local governments to create their own tokens, which could then be traded using an intermediary token called CLN. “We decided to start the CLN at the top hype of crypto,” Meiri says. “We were so excited.” In early 2018, Colu’s initial coin offering raised $20 million from investors around the world.
Using blockchain to process thousands of transactions is "just too much for the technology today.” Amos Meiri, Colu The move quickly soured. First, uncertain US rules over token sales forced the company to return money to American investors. In other countries, too, rules around digital tokens were in flux. The company “burned through a crazy amount of money” grappling with a patchwork of global regulations, Meiri says. Although it was planning to record data on a decentralized blockchain, Colu was ultimately responsible if any laws or regulations were broken.
The bigger problem, Meiri says, was the technology. Using Ethereum just wasn’t practical for handling day-to-day transactions from thousands of users and vendors. “It’s just too much for the technology today,” Meiri says. His desire for a decentralized ledger didn’t make up for the drawbacks. “You can make the experience work with Amazon AWS, just like any other payments or rewards platform.” As Colu signed on more city partners, the blockchain aspects became less appealing, Meiri says. He met with his lawyers and developed a plan to offer to repurchase the issued coins. Unissued coins will be converted into equity in the company.
But Meiri, for his part, is still a believer in the decentralized future. “I have no doubt [blockchain] will reinvent the global financial system,” Meiri says. “It’s just not there yet.” Neil Young’s adventures on the hi-res frontier The death of cars was greatly exaggerated 7 cybersecurity threats that can sneak up on you “Forever chemicals” are in your popcorn— and your blood The spellbinding allure of Seoul's fake urban mountains 👁 Prepare for the deepfake era of video ; plus, check out the latest news on AI ✨ Optimize your home life with our Gear team’s best picks, from robot vacuums to affordable mattresses to smart speakers.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Early Black Friday Deals Best USB-C Accessories for iPhone 15 All the ‘Best’ T-Shirts Put to the Test What to Do If You Get Emails for the Wrong Person Get Our Deals Newsletter Gadget Lab Newsletter Eric Ravenscraft Culture What Is the Metaverse, Exactly? Photograph: tolgart/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save To hear tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella talk about it, the metaverse is the future of the internet. Or it's a video game. Or maybe it's a deeply uncomfortable, worse version of Zoom ? It's hard to say.
It's been a year and a half since Facebook announced it was rebranding to Meta and would focus its future on the upcoming “metaverse.” In the time since, the term itself has eroded into near meaninglessness. Meta is building a VR social platform , Roblox is facilitating user-generated video games , and some companies are offering up little more than broken game worlds that happen to have NFTs attached.
Advocates from niche startups to tech giants have argued that this lack of coherence is because the metaverse is still being built, and it's too new to define what it means. The internet existed in the 1970s, for example, but not every idea of what that would eventually look like was true.
On the other hand, while the big tech money has started moving into generative AI , a lot of marketing hype (and money) has already been wrapped up in selling the idea of “the metaverse.” Facebook, in particular, is in an especially vulnerable place after Apple's move to limit ad tracking hit the company's bottom line.
It's impossible to separate Facebook's vision of a future in which everyone has a digital wardrobe to swipe through from the fact that Facebook really wants to make money selling virtual clothes.
But Facebook isn't the only company that stands to financially benefit from metaverse hype.
So, with all that in mind … To help you get a sense of how vague the term “the metaverse” can be, here's an exercise: Mentally replace the phrase “the metaverse” in a sentence with “cyberspace.” Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't substantially change. That's because the term doesn't really refer to any one specific type of technology, but rather a broad (and often speculative) shift in how we interact with technology. And it's entirely possible that the term itself will eventually become just as antiquated, even as the specific technology it once described becomes commonplace.
Broadly speaking, the technologies companies refer to when they talk about “the metaverse” can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds. However, it doesn't require that those spaces be exclusively accessed via VR or AR. Virtual worlds—such as aspects of Fortnite that can be accessed through PCs, game consoles, and even phones—have started referring to themselves as “the metaverse.” Many companies that have hopped on board the metaverse bandwagon also envision some sort of new digital economy, where users can create, buy, and sell goods. In the more idealistic visions of the metaverse, it's interoperable, allowing you to take virtual items like clothes or cars from one platform to another, though this is harder than it sounds. While some advocates claim new technologies like NFTs can enable portable digital assets, this simply isn't true , and bringing items from one video game or virtual world to another is an enormously complex task that no one company can solve.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It's difficult to parse what all this means because when you hear descriptions like those above, an understandable response is, “Wait, doesn't that exist already?” World of Warcraft , for example, is a persistent virtual world where players can buy and sell goods.
Fortnite has virtual experiences like concerts and an exhibit where Rick Sanchez can learn about MLK Jr.
You can strap on an Oculus headset and be in your own personal virtual home.
Is that really what “the metaverse” means? Just some new kinds of video games? Well, yes and no. Saying that Fortnite is “the metaverse” would be a bit like saying Google is “the internet.” Even if you spend large chunks of time in Fortnite , socializing, buying things, learning, and playing games, that doesn't necessarily mean it encompasses the entire scope of what people and companies mean when they say "the metaverse." Just as Google, which builds parts of the internet—from physical data centers to security layers —isn't the entire internet.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are working on building tech related to interacting with virtual worlds, but they're not the only ones. Many other large companies, including Nvidia, Unity, Roblox, and even Snap—as well as a variety of smaller companies and startups—are building the infrastructure to create better virtual worlds that more closely mimic our physical life.
For example, Epic has acquired a number of companies that help create or distribute digital assets , in part to bolster its powerful Unreal Engine 5 platform.
And while Unreal may be a video game platform, it's also being used in the film industry and could make it easier for anyone to create virtual experiences. There are tangible and exciting developments in the realm of building digital worlds.
Despite this, the idea of a Ready Player One -like single unified place called “ the metaverse" is still largely impossible. That is in part because such a world requires companies to cooperate in a way that simply isn't profitable or desirable— Fortnite doesn't have much motivation to give players a portal to jump straight over to World of Warcraft , even if it were easy to do so, for example—and partially because the raw computing power needed for such a concept could be much further away than we think.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg This inconvenient fact has given rise to slightly different terminology. Now many companies or advocates instead refer to any single game or platform as “ a metaverse.” By this definition, anything from a VR concert app to a video game would count as a “metaverse.” Some take it further, calling the collection of various metaverses a “ multiverse of metaverses.
” Or maybe we're living in a “ hybrid-verse.
” Or these words can mean anything at all. Coca-Cola launched a “ flavor born in the metaverse ” alongside a Fortnite tie-in mini-game.
There are no rules.
It's at this point that most discussions of what the metaverse entails start to stall. We have a vague sense of what things currently exist that we could kind of call the metaverse if we massage the definition of words the right way. And we know which companies are investing in the idea, but there's nothing approaching agreement on what it is.
Meta thinks it will include fake houses you can invite all your friends to hang out in. Microsoft seems to think it could involve virtual meeting rooms to train new hires or chat with your remote coworkers.
Notably, Apple has thrown its hat into the ring of augmented reality computing, but without ever once saying the word “metaverse.” The company's new Vision Pro headset is pitched as a “spatial computing” platform , working similar to how you might expect a Mac or iPad to work, except with AR-powered apps. Its key distinguishing factor is a screen that can be adjusted to make the real world visible with apps visible as an overlay. While it remains to be seen whether this kind of interface will catch on, Apple is explicitly distancing itself from the kind of rhetoric that aligns with *Ready Player One–*style immersion in a virtual world.
This stands in relatively grounded contrast with other companies' visions of the future, which range from optimistic to outright fan fiction. At one point during Meta's original presentation on the metaverse, the company showed a scenario in which a young woman is sitting on her couch scrolling through Instagram when she sees a video a friend has posted of a concert that's happening halfway across the world.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The video then cuts to the concert, where the woman appears in an Avengers -style hologram.
She's able to make eye contact with her friend who is physically there, they're both able to hear the concert, and they can see floating text hovering above the stage. This seems cool, but it's not advertising a real product or even a possible future one. In fact, it brings us to the biggest problem with “the metaverse.” When the internet first arrived, it started with a series of technological innovations, like the ability to let computers talk to each other over great distances or the ability to hyperlink from one web page to another. These technical features were the building blocks that were then used to make the abstract structures we know the internet for: websites, apps, social networks, and everything else that relies on those core elements. And that's to say nothing of the convergence of the interface innovations that aren't strictly part of the internet but are still necessary to make it work, such as displays, keyboards, mice, and touchscreens.
With the metaverse, there are some new building blocks in place, like the ability to host hundreds of people in a single instance of a server (idealistic metaverse predictions suppose this will grow to thousands or even millions of people at once, but this might be overly optimistic ), or motion-tracking tools that can distinguish where a person is looking or where their hands are. Even Apple's Vision Pro has some breakthrough tech that is genuinely exciting, like controller-free interfaces or pass-through screens that can be very exciting and feel futuristic.
However, there are limitations that may be impossible to overcome. When tech companies like Microsoft or Meta show fictionalized videos of their visions of the future, they frequently tend to gloss over just how people will interact with the metaverse. VR headsets are still very clunky, and most people experience motion sickness or physical pain if they wear them for too long.
Augmented reality glasses face a similar problem, on top of the not-insignificant issue of figuring out how people can wear them around in public without looking like huge dorks.
And then there are the accessibility challenges of VR that many companies are shrugging off for now.
Meanwhile, Apple's Vision Pro “solves” the problem of users who have to wear glasses by … selling prescription lens add-ons.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg So, how do tech companies show off the idea of their technology without showing the reality of bulky headsets and dorky glasses? So far, their primary solution seems to be to simply fabricate technology from whole cloth. The holographic woman from Meta's presentation? I hate to shatter the illusion, but it's simply not possible with even very advanced versions of existing technology.
Unlike motion-tracked digital avatars, which are kind of janky right now but could be better someday, there's no janky version of making a three-dimensional picture appear in midair without tightly controlled circumstances. No matter what Iron Man tells you.
Perhaps these are meant to be interpreted as images projected via glasses—both women in the demo video are wearing similar glasses, after all—but even that assumes a lot about the physical capabilities of compact glasses, which Snap can tell you isn't a simple problem to solve. And as Apple's demo showed, it's not easy to reconstruct a 3D image of someone in another place without edging close to nightmare fuel.
This kind of glossing over reality occurs frequently in video demos of how the metaverse could work. Another of Meta's demos showed characters floating in space—is this person strapped to an immersive aerial rig or are they just sitting at a desk? A person represented by a hologram—do they have a headset on, and if so how is their face being scanned? And at points, a person grabs virtual items but then holds those objects in what seems to be their physical hands.
This demo raises so many more questions than it answers.
To a limited extent, this is fine. Microsoft, Meta, and every other company that shows wild demos like this are trying to give an artistic impression of what the future could be, not necessarily account for every technical question. It's a time-honored tradition going back to AT&T's demo of a voice-controlled foldable phone that could magically erase people from images and generate 3D models , all of which might've seemed similarly impossible at the time.
However, the past year and a half of metaverse pitches—from tech giants and startups alike—have relied heavily on lofty visions that break from reality. Chipotle's “metaverse” was an ad disguised as a Roblox video game.
Stories about scarce “real estate” in “the metaverse” refer to little more than a buggy video game with virtual land tokens (which also glosses over the very real security and privacy issues with most popular NFTs right now).
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The confusion and disappointment surrounding most “metaverse” projects are so pervasive that when a video from 2017 of a Walmart VR shopping demo started trending again in January 2022, people immediately thought it was yet another metaverse demo.
It also helped demonstrate how much of the current metaverse discussion is built on hype alone. Walmart's VR shopping demo obviously never went anywhere (and for good reason). So why should anyone believe that it's the future when Chipotle does it? This kind of wishful-thinking-as-tech-demo leaves us in a place where it's hard to pinpoint which aspects of the various visions of the metaverse (if any) will actually be real one day. If VR and AR headsets become comfortable and cheap enough for people to wear on a daily basis—a substantial “if”—then perhaps a virtual poker game with your friends as robots and holograms and floating in space could be somewhat close to reality. If not, well you could always play Tabletop Simulator on a Discord video call.
The flashiness of VR and AR also obscure the more mundane ways that our existing, interconnected digital world could be improved right now. It would be trivial for tech companies to invent, say, an open digital avatar standard, a type of file that includes characteristics you might enter into a character creator—like eye color, hairstyle, or clothing options—and let you take that data everywhere, to be interpreted by a game engine however it chooses. There's no need to build a more comfortable VR headset for that.
But that's not as fun to imagine.
The paradox of defining the metaverse is that in order for it to be the future, you have to define away the present. We already have MMOs that are essentially entire virtual worlds, digital concerts, video calls with people from all over the world, online avatars, and commerce platforms. So in order to sell these things as a new vision of the world, there has to be some element of it that's new.
Spend enough time having discussions about the metaverse and someone will inevitably (and exhaustingly) reference fictional stories like Snow Crash —the 1992 novel that coined the term “metaverse”—or Ready Player One , which depicts a VR world where everyone works, plays, and shops. Combined with the general pop culture idea of holograms and heads-up displays (basically anything Iron Man has used in his last 10 movies) these stories serve as an imaginative reference point for what the metaverse—a metaverse that tech companies might actually sell as something new—could look like.
Mentally replace the phrase “the metaverse” in a sentence with “cyberspace.” Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't substantially change.
That kind of hype is arguably more vital to the idea of the metaverse than any specific technology. It's no wonder, then, that people promoting things like NFTs—cryptographic tokens that can serve as certificates of ownership of a digital item, sort of —are also latching onto the idea of the metaverse.
Sure, NFTs are bad for the environment and the public blockchains most are built on come with massive privacy and security problems , but if a tech company can argue that they'll be the digital key to your virtual mansion in Roblox , then boom. You've just transformed your hobby of buying memes into a crucial piece of infrastructure for the future of the internet (and possibly raised the value of all that cryptocurrency you're holding.
) It's important to keep all this context in mind because while it's tempting to compare the proto-metaverse ideas we have today to the early internet and assume everything will get better and progress in a linear fashion, that's not a given. There's no guarantee people will even want to hang out sans legs in a virtual office or play poker with Dreamworks Mark Zuckerberg, much less that VR and AR tech will ever become seamless enough to be as common as smartphones and computers are today.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the time since Facebook's rebrand, the concept of “the metaverse” has served as a powerful vehicle for repackaging old tech, overselling the benefits of new tech, and capturing the imagination of speculative investors. A lot of money has also been lost, with little to show for it. Meta itself lost $13.7 billion in 2022 , and then spent the first half of 2023 laying off over 10,000 employees.
But money pouring into a space doesn't necessarily mean a massive paradigm shift is right around the corner, as everything from 3D TVs to Amazon's delivery drones and Google Glass can attest. The history of tech is littered with the skeletons of failed investments.
That doesn't mean there's nothing cool on the horizon. VR headsets like the Quest 2 are cheaper than ever, and Apple's Vision Pro could be really cool if there's ever a version that costs less than a laptop, tablet, and phone combined. Video games and other virtual worlds are getting easier to build and design. And I think the advances in photogrammetry—the process of creating digital 3D objects out of photos or video —make it an incredibly cool tool for digital artists.
But to a certain extent, the tech industry writ large depends on futurism. Selling a phone is fine, but selling the future is more profitable. In reality, it may be the case that any real “metaverse” would be little more than some cool VR games and digital avatars in Zoom calls, but mostly just something we still think of as the internet.
June 15, 2023: This story was originally published in November 2021 and has been updated with additional reporting.
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"The Web3 Movement’s Quest to Build a ‘Can’t Be Evil’ Internet | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Gilad Edelman Backchannel Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution Play/Pause Button Pause Video: Andre Rucker Save this story Save Save this story Save It's getting late on a Saturday afternoon in Denver when I lean back and take in the full weirdness of what I’m doing. I’m seated at a long plastic folding table against the wall in a windowless room, a Discord server open on my laptop. Pizza crusts and empty potato chip bags are piled up around me, evidence of the feverish hours I’ve spent hacking together a project with a trio of blockchain developers. I’m not a programmer, just a journalist with a law degree. Yet somehow I’ve gotten swept up in creating my own DAO—a decentralized autonomous organization, a favorite concept among the starry-eyed proponents of Web3 —and it’s supposed to launch tomorrow.
No doubt you have questions. So do I. Like: What happened to me? Three days ago I was a crypto skeptic who could barely figure out how to buy ether. Now I’m speaking in complete sentences about multisig treasuries and quadratic voting. The devs have almost integrated our site with non-MetaMask wallets, and I’ve just dropped $85 for a domain on the Ethereum Name Service despite having no clear use for it. And rather than feeling exasperated or baffled, I seem to have caught the same thrill, however fleetingly, as everyone around me.
I am among the estimated 10,000 people who arrived in Colorado a few days ago for this year’s ETHDenver conference, the biggest and oldest event in the world of Ethereum and Web3. Most of these folks came here to be among their people. I came to try to understand them. And I think I finally do.
The term Web3, as you may or may not have noticed, emerged from obscurity last year, buoyed by rising cryptocurrency prices and some canny marketing by venture capitalists. Its meaning is hard to pin down. In the media and on Twitter, Web3 has become a catchall for anything having to do with blockchains and cryptocurrency: People paying tens of thousands of dollars for digital collectibles known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs , with neither practical nor aesthetic value, then flipping them for even ungodlier sums.
“Play-to-earn” video games that lure gamers into flimsy virtual worlds with the promise of riches. Celebrities shilling crypto exchanges during the Super Bowl. A ceaseless parade of scams , hacks , and frauds.
This article appears in the June 2022 issue.
Subscribe to WIRED Illustration: Patrick Savile But to a core of true believers, Web3 stands apart from the garish excesses and brazen misbehavior of the flashing-neon crypto casino. If cryptocurrency was originally about decentralizing money, Web3 is about decentralizing … everything. Its mission is almost achingly idealistic: to free humanity not only from Big Tech domination but also from exploitative capitalism itself—and to do it purely through code.
Bitcoin , the original blockchain-based cryptocurrency, created a way to send and receive digital money without needing a bank to approve those transactions. Instead of regulators and cops, a set of carefully designed incentives would, in theory, keep everyone acting in the best interests of all Bitcoin users. Web3 aims to apply these two concepts—decentralization and game theory—to all of digital life. The main vehicle for this is Ethereum, a blockchain that borrowed Bitcoin’s key features and added a major innovation: It was designed with its own programming language so developers could build apps, and eventually a whole new decentralized digital infrastructure, to run on it.
If Bitcoin attracts anarcho-capitalists who want to dethrone the central bankers, the culture around Ethereum and Web3 has a more progressive bent. After I walked into the Denver Sports Castle, a massive former sporting goods store turned events space that served as ETHDenver’s main venue, the first panel I caught was about using blockchains to build “public goods.” Another was titled “Navigating the Web3 Workforce as a BIPOC, Queer, Marginalized Individual.” (The overall crowd skewed heavily white and male.) Aesthetically, ETHDenver embraced a spirit of collaborative, LARPish make-believe; there was quite a bit of talk about the Bufficorn, the cartoon buffalo-unicorn hybrid that was the event’s NFT mascot. (It fuses the magic of the unicorn with the strength of the buffalo.) People communicated with all manner of cheerful memes: gm , for “good morning,” was the universal greeting, regardless of the time of day; wagmi meant “we’re all gonna make it.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The Bufficorn, ETHDenver's mascot, and Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum.
Photographs: Jesse Morgan/ETHDenver; Alexandra Masihy/ETH Denver; Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images During the opening ceremony, the conference organizers emphasized Web3’s idealism. “It’s not about money,” said John Paller, founder of ETHDenver. “We don’t care about that.” The theme of the conference, he explained, was “BUIDLing.” The term, which everyone pronounced “biddling,” is a riff on the crypto meme “HODLing”—holding one’s assets no matter how grim the market looks, as an expression of faith in its long-term value. (In crypto, as in all internet culture, typos are a rich source of memes.) “BUIDL is the rally cry of the Bufficorn,” Paller said.
What exactly were they BUIDLing? It’s easy to find brilliant, idealistic, experienced technology experts who think Web3 is pure nonsense. But it’s almost as easy to find ones who think it’s the real deal—humanity’s best chance of redeeming the entire promise of the internet.
On day two, the toilets broke; the venue’s plumbing wasn’t ready for so many people. Ethereum has a similar problem.
One way to think about Web3 is right there in the name: It’s the successor to Web 2.0, the era that was supposed to democratize the internet but instead became dominated by a handful of huge platforms, like Google and Facebook. Web3 is about re -decentralizing the web.
From its Darpa-funded infancy, the internet was designed to be decentralized. This had a very practical Cold War–era purpose: A network of computers spread around the country couldn’t be wiped out in a single nuclear blast. Early enthusiasts also saw in this distributed structure an inherently liberating tendency, a spirit captured in John Gilmore’s famous 1993 dictum, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg As the 1990s wore on, however, the dream of decentralization frayed. During what would later be dubbed the Web 1.0 era, the typical internet user, though theoretically empowered to create web pages, was in practice doing little more than viewing those made by others. And as a mature economy developed around the internet, powerful companies began to centralize on top of its open protocols—like Microsoft using its operating system monopoly to take over the browser market with Internet Explorer. Then came the dotcom crash, which called into question whether the internet would ever fulfill its potential.
Hope reemerged in the mid-2000s, when new platforms and technologies allowed ordinary users to create and upload content that could reach thousands or even millions of people. If Web 1.0 saw the masses passively consuming media created by publishers, in Web 2.0, the masses would be the creators: Wikipedia entries, Amazon product reviews, blog posts, YouTube videos, crowdfunding campaigns.
Time captured the spirit of the moment with its 2006 Person of the Year selection: “You.” But something very different was happening beneath the surface. User-generated content was free labor, and the platforms were the bosses. The big winners slurped up user data and used it, along with old-fashioned mergers and acquisitions, to build competitive moats around their businesses. Today, one company, Meta, owns three of the four largest social apps in the world, in terms of users. The fourth, YouTube, is owned by Google, which also accounts for around 90 percent of all internet searches. As these companies conquered more and more of the web, it became clear that the user was less a creative partner than a source of raw material to be perpetually harvested. Escape is difficult. Meta controls access to your Facebook and Instagram photos, plus your friend lists. Want to ditch Twitter or find a streaming alternative to YouTube? You can’t take your followers with you. And if a platform chooses to suspend or cancel your account, you have little recourse.
In hindsight, there’s no shortage of explanations for why Web 2.0 failed to deliver on its early promise. Network effects. The unforeseen power of big data. Corporate greed. None of these have gone away. So why should we expect anything new from Web3? For believers, the answer is simple: Blockchain is different.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Gavin Wood, an English computer scientist who helped program Ethereum, coined the term Web3 in 2014, the year Ethereum launched. (He first called it Web 3.0, but the decimal thing has since become passé.) In his view, Web 2.0’s fatal flaw was trust.
Everyone had to trust the biggest platforms not to abuse their power as they grew. Few seemed to notice that Google’s famous early motto, “Don’t be evil,” implied that being evil was an option. To Wood, Web3 is about building systems that don’t rely on trusting people, corporations, or governments to make moral choices, but that instead render evil choices impossible. Blockchain is the crucial technology for making that happen. Brewster Kahle, the creator of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, has described this goal as “locking the web open.” Or, as Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund and a leading Web3 booster, puts it, “Can’t be evil > don’t be evil.” A blockchain is a database that lives across a network of computers rather than on one server. No single person or organization owns it. Every computer, or node, stores a complete record of every transaction, so no one can control or destroy the network without first taking over a majority of the nodes. This makes it impossible for anyone to manipulate the database, say by giving themselves more tokens. Every change and transaction is logged on the chain, for all the world to see. There’s no central authority that must be trusted to enforce the rules.
So how exactly are blockchains supposed to lock the web open? Right now, platforms like Instagram and TikTok own the data that you generate while using them, store it on their servers, and make extracting it hard or impossible. In a Web3 world, the theory goes, your data would live on a blockchain, not a central server. Instead of platforms owning it, you would, controlling access to it via a private cryptographic key that only you possess. If you got tired of one service, you could take your data to another. And a platform couldn’t change the rules of the game by erecting walls around its data, because it would never have owned the data in the first place.
Innumerable Web3 startups are trying to apply this theory by creating blockchain-based alternatives to just about any platform you can name: Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Google Docs. The liberal billionaire Frank McCourt has pledged $25 million toward developing a protocol for putting your social graph—the interlocking map of relationships that you’ve built up over the years but that is probably owned by Facebook—on the blockchain. A company called Sapien purports to be building an entire Web3 metaverse.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Faith in blockchain infrastructure as a forcing mechanism for decentralization is Web3’s first tenet. There are other tenets—but we’ll get to those later. Because the infrastructure is making some ominous creaking noises already.
On day two of ETHDenver, the toilets broke. The plumbing at the Sports Castle wasn’t ready for so many people. Ethereum has a similar problem. Like the Sports Castle, it can’t handle the load of transactions going through its pipes.
Ethereum, like Bitcoin, operates on a system known as “proof of work.” Computers in the network “mine” new tokens by being the first to solve complex math problems and get paid a fluctuating “gas fee” for verifying transactions on the blockchain. The more demand on the network, the higher the gas fee. Ethereum has grown so popular that gas fees are often prohibitively high. During its wild surge late last year, they topped $55 per transaction. The math problems also require a ton of electricity.
By one estimate, if the world’s countries were ranked by energy consumption, the combined nation of Bitcoin and Ethereum would slot in between Italy and the United Kingdom. While many Bitcoiners shrug at this, Web3 proponents are torn up at the thought of contributing to the climate crisis.
It seemed like every third person at ETHDenver was working on some kind of fix for these issues. Ethereum’s core developers have long been trying to execute a shift to “proof of stake,” a more eco-friendly (but possibly less secure) alternative to proof of work, that after years of delay is supposed to launch this year. There are also competing blockchains that don’t use proof of work and thus don’t incur the environmental costs or gas fees of Ethereum. Then there are “Layer 2” blockchains that do most of the work on their own network before logging the results on Ethereum in big batches to lower the cost per transaction.
Beyond the bandwidth problems, there was broad agreement among the ETHDenver crowd that the technology is far too difficult to use. Doing anything in Web3 is unbelievably confusing. I needed help just to redeem my crypto lunch tokens when I checked in at the hotel. If you want to get anything done and aren’t a programmer, you end up just clicking “OK” on a bunch of prompts that you don’t understand. This is a great way to get ripped off. During the conference, word got around that a phishing attack was hitting OpenSea , the leading NFT marketplace. In the end, almost $2 million worth of NFTs would be stolen. So common are these episodes that the news hardly raised eyebrows.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Crypto’s user-unfriendliness puts tremendous pressure on the whole ecosystem to do the one thing it was designed not to do: centralize. In January, Moxie Marlinspike, a cryptographer and creator of the open source encrypted messaging app Signal, wrote an incisive takedown of Web3’s underlying premises on his personal blog. In it, Marlinspike argues that because most people crave convenience, centralized services always end up imposing themselves on top of decentralized technologies. In the early days of Web 1.0, some people thought “we’d all have our own web server with our own website, our own mail server for our own email,” he writes. “However—and I don’t think this can be emphasized enough— that is not what people want.
People do not want to run their own servers.” This pattern, Marlinspike points out, is already repeating itself in Web3. It’s quite cumbersome, if not impossible, for an app on your phone to interact directly with a blockchain. So almost all Web3 apps rely on one of two companies, Infura and Alchemy, to do that. Likewise the digital wallets that most people use to store their crypto assets. In other words, nearly every Web3 product relies on a middleman to say what’s happening on the blockchain. That’s a whole lot of trust for a system designed to make trust obsolete.
The situation is even more centralized than Marlinspike lets on, because one company, ConsenSys, owns both Infura and the most popular wallet, MetaMask. Yes, your data lives indelibly somewhere on the blockchain, but in practice, any Web3 app you might use probably relies on these centralized services to access it. As an illustration, Marlinspike writes that when a satirical NFT he created got pulled from OpenSea, it also stopped appearing in his MetaMask wallet, even though it still existed on the blockchain.
Marlinspike notes that Web3 defenders tend to reply to critiques by insisting, “It’s early days still.” It took exactly one day for Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, to prove his point. In a response to Marlinspike that he posted on Reddit, Buterin wrote that many of Marlinspike’s points “strike me as having a correct criticism of the current state of the ecosystem, but they are missing where the blockchain ecosystem is going.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg A small faction within the Web3 fold argues that blockchain is getting more attention than it deserves—a medium that has come to stand in the way of the true message, which is decentralization. “I would very strongly say, Web3 is not synonymous with blockchains,” says Jeromy Johnson, an engineer at Protocol Labs, a Web3 R&D organization. Johnson works on blockchain projects, but he also helped code the InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer alternative to the hypertext transfer protocol (that “http://” bit at the front of every web address). Using IPFS prevents content from disappearing from the web just because a certain URL expires or changes. It’s a leading example of decentralized tech that isn’t blockchain.
“There’s a lot of things that people try to use blockchain for that you don’t actually need a blockchain for,” Johnson says. “People try to build social networks on blockchains, and they put every tweet, or whatever they call it, and every ‘like’ on the blockchain, and it’s like, What are you doing? That’s so dumb!” Johnson worries that blockchain has become a fetish. But I came to Denver wondering whether the same could be said of decentralization itself, as Web3 people understood it. Because the biggest barriers to decentralizing power may not be technological at all.
Crypto’s user-unfriendliness keeps pushing the system to do the one thing it was designed not to do: centralize.
Centralization is a vague term. One of cryptocurrency’s original aims was to remove intermediaries—banks—from financial transactions. (Hence its appeal among a certain set of libertarians, criminals, and lately Russian oligarchs.) That’s one way to think about centralization: A bank sits at the center of a transaction between two or more entities. But centralization and decentralization can also be framed as a matter of choice: How many options do you have? Is there just one player in the market, or can you shop around? By that standard, the banking industry is pretty decentralized. There are thousands of banks operating in the US alone.
A decentralized technology does not guarantee a decentralized market. Take email. Email is a decentralized protocol. Anybody can, in theory, set up their own email server, but very few people do, as Marlinspike pointed out. Instead, people use email clients, and the market has centralized heavily around a handful of providers, especially Gmail. Even if you personally opt out of Gmail, the person on the other end of every second email you send probably uses it, meaning a copy of your email lives on Google’s servers whether you want it to or not.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Art by Andre Rucker Centralization is one word for this; consolidation is a better one. Consolidation is a feature not of technology but of markets. There is a much older protocol for dealing with consolidated markets than Web3. It’s called antitrust law. But government policy does not really figure into the Web3 blueprint.
On the morning the toilets broke, I moderated a panel titled “Why Decentralization Matters.” At one point, one of the panelists, Nick Dodson, an engineer at Fuel Labs, observed that “traditional fintech”—personal finance apps that don’t use blockchains or crypto—is arguably more decentralized than Web3 “because, to be honest, there’s more companies doing things.” Did you know, I asked, that the fintech sector owes much of its existence to a piece of federal legislation? The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, passed in the aftermath of the financial crisis, has a section requiring US banks to let customers access their account data in a format that can be read by computer applications. You can thank that provision for the ability to sync up your data with personal finance apps like Betterment and Mint. On the back of this observation, I turned to one of the other panelists, Frankie Pangilinan, an accomplished blockchain programmer. Given the daunting technical challenges facing Web3, I asked, wouldn’t a simpler path to decentralization be for Congress to pass laws mandating data portability and interoperability? Wouldn’t that be easier than trying to iron out the kinks in all this complicated, unwieldy tech? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “Oh my God, what—could you just re-ask that question? I’m so sorry,” Pangilinan said, with the half-smile of someone unsure whether their leg is being pulled. I repeated myself. Wouldn’t a data portability law be easier than the whole Web3 thing? “Government moves way slower than software does,” she said, with an incredulous laugh. “They’re an archaic system that we’re replacing, essentially.” Pangilinan was channeling the dominant view within the Web3 movement. Her skepticism is understandable. The internet economy arose during a period of deregulation and historically lax antitrust enforcement. The US government, in particular, has yet to prove itself capable of passing a significant law regulating Silicon Valley or winning a major lawsuit against a platform giant. Congress is, objectively speaking, an archaic system.
And yet law, with all its faults, is still pretty much the most effective technology ever devised for preventing people and corporations from abusing their power—and forcing them to share it. Even within the tech sector, there’s a robust history of government intervention spurring innovation and user choice. Sometimes this comes through dramatic legal confrontations. In the 1950s, antitrust pressure from the federal government forced AT&T and its Bell Labs subsidiary to license out thousands of patents, including one for a little thing called the transistor. Other times, the role of government in decentralizing markets is practically invisible. It’s thanks to a little-known Federal Communications Commission regulation, for example, that Americans get to keep their cell phone numbers when they switch carriers.
But even members of the progressive Web3 community have essentially zero interest in directing their formidable resources toward influencing public policy. They tend to think, instead, as Pangilinan put it, that government is the problem being designed around: just another institution, like Google or Facebook, that demands our trust without earning it.
Later on, I chatted backstage with the third panelist, a former Ethereum core developer named Lane Rettig. He was frank about the shortcomings of crypto and Web3. But he strongly agreed with Pangilinan about the futility of government regulation. Rettig is working on a blockchain called Spacemesh. Unlike Bitcoin or Ethereum, which require tremendous computing power to mine, anyone can mine Spacemesh tokens using spare processing power on their laptop or smartphone, just by downloading an ordinary-looking app—meaning the network could be distributed among millions of participants, rather than the tens of thousands of people who run Bitcoin or Ethereum nodes.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That sounded interesting, so I pulled out my iPhone. Could I download it right then? No, Rettig said; unfortunately, Spacemesh wasn’t available on phones yet. The mobile app hadn’t been built, but even if it had, Apple blocks most crypto-related apps from its App Store. In a call-back to my “regulation is good” routine, I joked that the Open App Markets Act—a bill that has bipartisan momentum in Congress and would force Apple to permit downloading apps not offered in its App Store—would help with that.
Rettig’s eyes lit up. “That’s a bill?” he said excitedly. “That’s huge. I can see that having big implications.” Art by Andre Rucker It’s not quite right to say that crypto people are wholly uninterested in regulation. According to a recent report, the amount spent on crypto lobbying has quadrupled since 2018. But this effort isn’t aimed at using regulation to achieve the goals of decentralized markets or data portability. It’s mostly about blocking new regulations that might stop the gravy train, making sure the state stays out of crypto’s way.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That gravy train has a name: DeFi. Short for “decentralized finance,” DeFi is essentially a crypto betting market, with financial products that allow investors to gamble on cryptocurrencies via options, derivatives, and other avenues. A common one is “yield farming,” which in essence means lending out your crypto in exchange for interest payments. DeFi is big business. The ETHDenver conference may have been a pageant of high-minded ideals, but it was overwhelmingly underwritten by DeFi companies. At any given moment, almost all the most popular Ethereum apps are some form of DeFi platform or exchange. Unlike in traditional finance, these are largely unregulated. If someone steals your money, the bank doesn’t have to pay you back—because there is no bank. This is far from an idle concern. One analysis found that more than $10 billion was stolen from DeFi platforms in 2021 alone.
On my first night in Denver, I headed to a happy hour sponsored by Uma, which bills itself as “a fast, flexible, and secure way to create decentralized financial products.” The event was crawling with DeFi people, each of whom assured me that their product promised super-high yields with minimal risk. Arisa Toyosaki, a former investment banker, told me about the startup she was launching, called Cega. With Cega, she explained, crypto holders will be able to invest in exotic crypto derivatives and generate healthy returns. And, she assured me, it will be nearly impossible to lose money unless the market drops more than 50 percent.
How is this possible? “I used to do this at investment banks,” Toyosaki said. The DeFi derivative market, she said, “exploded in the back half of 2021.” For the first time, there are enough crypto products to slice and dice into derivatives. To do that well, Toyosaki explained, you need a team of quants who can build advanced statistical models of markets. This was evidently meant to be reassuring. Just in case the parallels to the eve of the 2008 financial crisis were too subtle, my next stop was a performance by the Dutch DJ Tiësto that was hosted by Bacon Coin, a startup that offers mortgage-backed crypto tokens.
Even as DeFi dominated the sponsorships and party calendar, many of the Web3 true believers viewed it with disdain. The rows of tables where crypto companies pitched their wares was labeled the “Shill Zone” on the official conference map. As I was leaving a coffee shop one day, I overheard two guys sitting at a table outside. “I’m not into DeFi,” one said. “Oh,” said the other, “you’re not a Ponzinomics person?” Vitalik Buterin was at the next table, by the looks of it gamely letting someone shill their business to him. Even Buterin publicly worries about the cash grab taking place in the Ethereum universe he created. “If we don’t exercise our voice, the only things that get built are the things that are immediately profitable,” he recently told Time.
“And those are often far from what’s actually the best for the world.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg But there’s a paradox. As much as Web3’s dreamers might shun the crypto casino, the fact remains that cryptocurrency—money—is the driving force of what they’re trying to build. This is where all the game theory comes in, along with the other, higher tenets of Web3. It’s also where the Web3 movement breaks with the economic innocence of past waves of internet utopianism.
In case the parallels to the eve of the 2008 financial crisis were too subtle, my next stop was a startup that offers mortgage-backed crypto tokens.
Back in the early days of Web 2.0, the open source movement—that era’s generation of idealists—was guided by a perhaps naive belief in the willingness of people to volunteer their energies and talents for the greater good. Linux die-hards believed software should be free, recoiling at the profit motive. The platforms born in this era played to that spirit, deploying lofty rhetoric about making the world a better, more open, more connected place—while, in the background, quietly setting up global surveillance operations to spy on their users for the benefit of advertisers.
“A lot of open-web, open source people always thought that money was dirty,” says Julien Genestoux, a veteran of the open source movement who created Unlock Protocol, which seeks to put memberships and subscriptions on the blockchain. “One of the things crypto has been doing is putting money front and center,” he says. “By doing this, it removes the ability of corporate actors to capture the value from everybody else without us knowing. By making it explicit, a thing we’re all staring at, we’re making it harder for the people who want to take it from everybody else.” At the most basic level, Web3’s approach to financial incentives is an ingenious way of solving new technology’s adoption problem. Let’s say you make a new decentralized platform built on the blockchain, one that works so smoothly that people can use it without getting a PhD in cryptography. Users control their own data and everything is open source. The thing is, those ordinary users probably don’t care much about data ownership or immutable public ledgers. They care about convenience and fun and being where their friends are. So how do you get anyone to use your new Web3 app? The answer is tokenomics. The business model of nearly every proposed Web3 platform entails distributing tokens to everyone involved, thus incentivizing them to use and improve the platform to make the value of those tokens go up. In Web3-speak, this is called “aligning the incentives.” The concept has its roots in Bitcoin, whose pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, devised a set of rules to prevent conflict between an individual’s self-interest and the interests of Bitcoin. Using game theory principles, Bitcoin could incentivize everyone to act for the collective good. Even if someone took control of enough of the network to be able to rewrite its history and inflate their account, they would have a powerful reason not to: Such treachery would kill confidence in Bitcoin and thus crater the value of their own holdings.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Many people see Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as pyramid schemes, since their value is a pure function of there being someone else who wants to buy in. But tokenomics can, at least theoretically, serve a useful purpose out in the real world. Take Presearch, a Web3 search engine. Presearch is distributed across a network of nodes that anyone can set up on their computer or a virtual private server. Your search term gets passed to one of the nodes, which queries a range of sources before returning a response. People who run nodes are rewarded in the form of PRE tokens, Presearch’s custom crypto coin. Users can also be rewarded with tiny micropayments of the token for performing searches. As the platform gets more popular, the tokens should become more valuable. That value has a real-world reference point: Advertisers have to buy tokens in order to appear above search results. Will this work? Perhaps not. But it’s not a Ponzi scheme.
Web3 apps promise not just to pay users but to give them a say in how the platforms are run. In the case of Presearch, for example, the PRE token will confer ownership and some kind of governance power over the platform. In theory, that distributed structure should prevent anyone from pushing Presearch in any shady or exploitative directions. “Why are we not going to end up like Google?” says Presearch’s founder, Colin Pape, referring to the search giant’s well documented privacy issues. “Because we have everyone aligned around this one value unit, and if we try to extract too much value from users, and they get pissed off, the value of the token goes down.” That sounds plausible in the abstract, but it raises all sorts of practical questions. How do you keep someone from buying enough tokens to exert unilateral control? How do you know the crypto accounts holding tokens belong to separate human beings? If you do manage to keep things decentralized, how will you act quickly enough to compete with traditional businesses that don’t have to put every single decision to a vote? The answers are all speculative, because none of that governance stuff actually exists yet. Pape admits that decentralized control remains an aspiration for Presearch. The reality is that the company, meaning Pape, controls the search engine, just like Alphabet controls Google. This is something of a theme in the Web3 world. Everyone has a white paper spelling out how their new platform will be governed by “the community” … eventually, ultimately, at some future point yet to be determined, once a whole bunch of other issues are sorted out and the platform gets big enough to remove the training wheels.
Oh Lord, give me decentralized control, but not yet.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg If the vision of collectively run mega-platforms sounds implausibly far out, the highest tenets of Web3 are somehow even more ambitious. Using blockchain technology and tokenomics to get people to buy into a set of decentralized apps? That’s just the beginning. For some Web3 luminaries, the real goal is to use cryptocurrencies to lock human beings into a more cooperative, less self-destructive society. I didn’t fully understand this until I met Kevin Owocki.
Art by Andre Rucker Few people are trying harder to turn the idealism of Web3 into reality than Owocki. A resident of Boulder County, near Denver, Owocki is the founder of GitCoin, a platform for funding open source Web3 projects that has raised and distributed roughly $60 million so far. He was one of the most Colorado of the many Colorado guys on hand at ETHDenver, with long hair past his shoulders, a trim beard, and an athletic build. At one point, when I said I was thirsty, he pulled a can of kombucha out of his back pocket and handed it to me.
Owocki was something of a rock star at the conference. He is credited with coining the term BUIDL in 2017. Admirers approached him nonstop to talk, express their support, or ask for a copy of his book, GreenPilled: How Crypto Can Regenerate the World , which was the talk of the conference and quickly sold out of the 400 copies he had ordered. Owocki is about as far from a casino person as you’ll find in the crypto world. In one of several presentations he gave, Owocki told the crowd that since research shows money stops increasing happiness after about $100,000 in annual income, Web3 founders should maximize their happiness by giving their excess money to public goods that everyone gets to enjoy. “There’s cypherpunk, which is all about privacy, decentralization: hardcore libertarian shit,” he told me. “I’m more of a leftist. I’m more solarpunk, which is, how do we solve our contemporary problems around sustainability and equitable economic systems? It’s a different set of values.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The internet, he explained, made it possible to move information between computers. This revolutionized communication. Blockchains have made it possible to move units of value between computers. Owocki believes this can be harnessed to revolutionize how human beings interact through something he calls “regenerative cryptoeconomics.” Cryptoeconomics, he writes in GreenPilled , “is the use of blockchain-based incentives to design new kinds of systems, applications, or networks.” Regenerative cryptoeconomics means doing this in a way that makes the world a better place for everyone. The goal is to break free from the zero-sum, rich-get-richer patterns of capitalism. Owocki believes that the right cryptoeconomic structure can help solve collective action problems like climate change, misinformation, and an underfunded digital infrastructure.
The key tool for achieving this is a decentralized autonomous organization.
In theory, a DAO (yes, pronounced the same as the ancient Chinese word for the way of the universe) uses cryptocurrency to boost collective action. Typically, members join by buying some amount of a custom token issued by the DAO. That entitles them to an ownership stake in the DAO itself. Member-owners vote on what the DAO does—which is mostly to say, what it spends money on, since a blockchain-based entity can do little besides move funds from one address to another.
The young concept already has a checkered history. The first DAO, named simply “The DAO,” collapsed in 2016 after someone exploited a loophole in its code to siphon off what was then worth some $50 million in Ethereum currency. Similarly colorful failures have followed. DAOs were nonetheless all the rage at ETHDenver, where attendees waxed on about their world-changing potential. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s photogenic brother, spoke about his Big Green DAO, a food-related charity. Giving away money via a DAO, he insisted, got rid of all the painful bureaucracy of philanthropic nonprofits. “It’s way better,” he said, though he also granted that “there are many ways to fail, and this one could fail spectacularly.” What is it about a DAO that—unlike, say, a Kickstarter page—frees humanity from the collective action problems that threaten to doom the species? According to Owocki, it’s the ability to write code in ways that tinker with incentive structures. (In this sense, the first DAO was arguably Bitcoin itself.) “Our weapon of choice is novel mechanism designs, based upon sound game theory, deployed to decentralized blockchain networks as transparent open source code,” he writes in GreenPilled.
Indeed, the book has very little to say about technology, per se, and much more to say about various game theory concepts. These range from the sort of thing you’d learn in an undergrad econ class—“public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous”—to things that wouldn’t be out of place in a sci-fi novel: “community inclusion currencies,” “fractal DAO protocols,” “retroactive public goods funding.” It’s hard enough for me to grasp how a DAO works. So while I’m in Denver, I create one.
One of the most powerful incentive design techniques, according to Owocki, is something called quadratic voting. Standing near the edge of the Shill Zone, Owocki turned around to show me the back of his purple baseball jacket, which said “Quadratic Lands.” The Quadratic Lands, Owocki explained, are a mythical place where the laws of economics have been redesigned to produce public goods. “It’s just a meme,” he said. “I don’t want to tell you it already exists.” (Everyone at ETHDenver was concerned, rightly, about my ability to separate metaphorical claims from literal ones.) In a quadratic voting system, you get a budget to allocate among various options. Let’s say it’s dollars, though it could be any unit. The more dollars you allocate to a particular choice, the more your vote for it counts. But there’s an important caveat: Each marginal dollar you pledge to the same choice is worth less than the previous one. (Technically, the “cost” of your vote rises quadratically, rather than linearly.) This makes it harder for the richest people in a group to dominate the vote. GitCoin uses an adaptation, quadratic funding, to award money to Web3 projects. The number of people who contribute to a given project counts more than the amount they contribute. This rewards ideas supported by the most people rather than the wealthiest: regenerative cryptonomics in action.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Glen Weyl, the polymathic Microsoft researcher who came up with quadratic voting, is far more cautious than Owocki about its applicability to blockchain. In a foreword to Owocki’s book, he writes, “I am deeply ambivalent about Web3.” He has positioned himself as a sort of insider critic of the movement, one who supports its broad goals of decentralization and digital public goods but questions its faith in the potential of blockchains and cryptocurrencies in their current state.
Weyl walked me through the weaknesses of using quadratic voting in a DAO. A major problem is Sybil attacks, in which one person creates a thousand “sock puppet” accounts and uses them to take over the voting. Even if you come up with a solution to the proof-of-identity problem so that it’s hard to make duplicate accounts, someone could just get people in the analog world to create accounts on their behalf. Imagine, Weyl said, if the Chinese government wanted to take over a DAO. All it would have to do is instruct its citizens to join and hand over control of their wallets.
Owocki believes he and his co-revolutionaries can sort out these problems. He asked if I’d heard of the Matthew Effect, which, he explained, is how economists refer to the fact that the rich tend to get richer. “It’s a fundamental law of economics,” he said, but that doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable. Conquering laws of nature is what technology is for. “An airplane upends gravity; what if you can build an economic system that upends the Matthew Effect? Dude, quadratic voting is it.” All of this is getting a little heady for me. Never mind the furthest reaches of Owocki’s theory; it’s hard enough for me to grasp how a DAO is supposed to work. So while I’m in Denver, I decide to create one.
My friend Jacksón Smith works for a nonprofit called Learning Economy Foundation that researches the use of blockchain in education. He’s at the conference and agrees to help me create the DAO. We settle on an admittedly low-stakes idea: Our DAO will try to win The New Yorker magazine’s weekly cartoon caption contest, in which readers compete to supply the wittiest punch line to a captionless cartoon. Each week, the DAO members will vote on each other’s submissions and submit the internal winner to the actual contest. We call it lmaoDAO.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg I put in serious hours on the DAO over the weekend, but not as many as Jacksón and a couple of his coworkers, who actually know how to program and generously volunteer time to build it, and whom I half-jokingly start referring to as “my core devs.” I should say, to BUIDL it. We’re BUIDLers, officially hacking together a Web3 application in the spirit of ETHDenver. I am somewhat surprised to find that, when I explain what I’m doing, people at the conference are unfailingly supportive. I thought they might take exception to a journalist creating a DAO as a stunt, an act of mild trolling, but the general sense is that we’ve come up with a clever idea.
Web3 is a realm where coders can feel good again about working in tech.
Two things become very clear as we create the DAO. First, a DAO is nothing more than a group whose membership requires owning a crypto token—in our case, a custom LMAO coin that we mint out of thin air. Like most DAOs, ours is organized on Discord, a Web 2.0 application. Our DAO isn’t really decentralized; we control the Discord, Jacksón controls the voting website, and I manually submit the captions to NewYorker.com. We've committed in principle to building out decentralized governance, but who knows when that will happen. In the meantime, everyone else has to trust that we’re doing what we say we are.
The second thing that becomes clear is that BUIDLing is really fun. Setting up a DAO is a bit like designing a video game. You have to create incentives and rules that will keep people playing and can’t be easily exploited. In fact, it feels like a game within a game, because Web3 itself is not unlike an immersive RPG—an alternate reality with its own rules, customs, and language. Play for long enough and you stop having to check the instructions. All kinds of esoteric jargon starts making sense.
Switch your wallet from the Ethereum mainnet to the Gnosis chain to claim your LMAO tokens. Sync your tokens with the collab.land Discord bot to prove you’re a member and get access to the locked Discord channels.
The real fun of BUIDLing lies in the problem-solving. How will we get people to join, for example? Nathan, one of my devs, comes up with an idea: He can scrape every crypto wallet that holds either a Bufficorn NFT or ETHDenver meal tokens, and use that as a proxy for people who attended the conference. Then we can “airdrop” our custom token to everyone on that list. Most intoxicatingly, this all takes place in a relatively closed system. Very few of these decisions require us to think much about the messy world outside the confines of our DAO. It all helps me understand the draw of Web3. The sense of moral valor that once accompanied working in Web 2.0 is harder to find these days. Whatever else Web3 is, it’s a realm where coders and technologists can reconnect with the joy of hacking, where they can feel good again about working in tech. Jacksón, who in fact builds elaborate board games as a hobby, tells me that escapism is part of Web3’s appeal. The question is whether the escape hatch leads to a real place or a fantasyland.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg As those pizza crusts and empty snack bags pile up, I realize that it’s Saturday evening, and dinnertime is approaching. There’s a rumor that Snoop Dogg, who recently announced his intention to turn Death Row Records into an NFT music label, is throwing a party somewhere. But I have plans to meet up with my childhood friend Dave, who lives in Denver.
As Dave and I catch up over tacos and margaritas, I feel slightly crazed, struggling to explain what I’ve been up to: Web3, cryptoeconomics, BUIDLing a DAO. I’m a bit like Dorothy returned from Oz. Gradually, talk drifts to normal stuff: his family, my job, a trip we’ve been planning. That night, I sleep in Dave’s basement, and on Sunday morning I’m woken early by the patter of his 2-year-old daughter’s feet. The guys at the conference seem to really believe they’re building a better world for her, but in the morning light it’s hard to take seriously the idea that her future depends on precisely calibrating a bunch of incentives in a blockchain membership organization. It all feels like a game that I’ve unplugged from.
Then my phone buzzes. My services are needed before the DAO can officially launch. Without thinking much of it, I plug myself back in.
Source images: CGTrader and Shutterstock This article appears in the June 2022 issue.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Eric Ravenscraft Security NFTs Are a Privacy and Security Nightmare Photograph: Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Venmo's baffling decision to turn payments into a social media feed , where public transactions are the default , has rightly been met with criticism. But at the very least, it's always been possible to make Venmo transactions private.
Now, imagine a financial system that's not just public by default, but can't ever be made private, and nothing can ever be removed or deleted.
That's how crypto works. And for years, it's been too seldom recognized as an issue—in large part because systems like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other crypto platforms are technically “anonymous.” More specifically, unlike a bank or financial app, you don't have to attach your real name, address, or other identifying information to a wallet. Sure, everyone can see what a random wallet is doing, but they don't necessarily know who is doing it.
NFTs, however, radically undermine this already tenuous anonymity.
With any new technology, one supposedly beneficial trait often comes at the expense of another. For example, one way to describe an immutable blockchain that contains a public record of every transaction is that it’s a transparent way to maintain accurate records.
Another way to describe it is as a low-privacy environment that gives, among others, law enforcement access to the transaction history of the entire network —as was the case when the US Department of Justice arrested two individuals accused of stealing $4.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency. Said assistant attorney general Kenneth A. Polite Jr.
at the time , “Today, federal law enforcement demonstrates once again that we can follow money through the blockchain.” Crypto wallets may be pseudonymous, but many exchanges have Know Your Customer protocols and collect tons of other data on users.
Moreover, transactions necessarily require sharing your wallet with another party. As software engineer Molly White wrote , once someone knows your wallet address, privacy can be difficult, if not impossible to maintain: “Imagine if, when you Venmoed your Tinder date for your half of the meal, they could now see every other transaction you’d ever made—and not just on Venmo, but the ones you made with your credit card, bank transfer, or other apps, and with no option to set the visibility of the transfer to ‘private.’” The primary way to combat this public scrutiny is with obfuscation methods like using unique wallets for each transaction, or employing a tumbler or mixer service.
The latter combines many people's money into one pool and then redistributes it so as to obscure which money is going where. While this process itself isn't inherently illegal or even suspicious, you'd be forgiven for thinking it sounds a bit like money laundering , because sometimes it's used for exactly that.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg These techniques are by no means foolproof , but even if they were, it's a cumbersome layer of work that simply doesn't scale. An obsessed crypto investor with plenty of time on his hands might learn how to manage a dozen crypto wallets, a wallet manager, a mixer, and every other tool needed to stay anonymous. But that's work the average person simply can't be expected to do on their own.
A key component to keeping crypto activity anonymous is to avoid tying transactions to any identifying information. Which means NFTs, by their nature, can fundamentally undermine this goal. The idea behind NFTs is that they are fundamentally unique, identifiable tokens. And while they don't work quite the way advocates say they do , it's still technically true that no individual NFT can be duplicated.
This means that, if a user ties an NFT to any part of their online or IRL identity—say by using an NFT as a profile picture on Twitter or maintaining a profile on an NFT marketplace —it becomes trivially easy to find out what else their wallet has been up to.
This doesn't even require using a specific app or service. For example, when Jimmy Fallon showed off his Bored Ape on TV , that made it very easy to find Jimmy Fallon’s wallet address and see what other transactions his wallet has been involved in , including a user sending him 1,776 Let's Go Brandon tokens.
While knowing who bought which JPEG might not seem like a major deal, it becomes a critical issue as crypto advocates push the idea of using NFTs for home ownership , medical records , and social media.
A single wallet—or even a network of wallets that are not adequately obfuscated—could act as a giant bucket of personal data that not only can't be kept private, but can't be deleted from the blockchain.
Not only are transaction histories public for every wallet address on platforms like Ethereum—the largest NFT platform today—but it’s possible to send NFTs to any address, regardless of whether the recipient approves the transaction. For example, in December 2021, rapper Waka Flocka Flame found a number of NFTs he hadn’t purchased appearing in his wallet.
Since blockchains are immutable, append-only records of transactions, tokens dropped into a user’s wallet can’t just be deleted. Instead, they have to be “burned.” Burning is a type of transaction where an NFT (or any other token) is transferred to an address that no one owns and can’t be accessed, effectively making it impossible to recover. This, of course, comes with transaction fees.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Removing anything from your wallet—including spam, unsolicited dick pics, or harassing images or messages —can’t be done without shelling out money. So, for example, if Jimmy Fallon wanted to get rid of those 1,776 Let’s Go Brandon tokens (a transaction someone paid $30.25 worth of ETH to conduct), the only way to remove them is to pay a similar transaction fee to send the tokens somewhere else. And that fee applies per transaction.
Moreover, NFTs aren’t strictly limited to static links. Every NFT is governed by a “smart contract.” These contracts are essentially small containers for code that developers can build mini applets in. This is what enables things like royalty payments, but the code inside can be anything, including misleading scams or even malware.
One high-profile scam involved a play-to-earn game modeled after Netflix’s Squid Game.
The project leaders sold Squid tokens, which rose by nearly 23 million percent in less than a week , but the smart contract forbade selling any Squid tokens without also burning a number of Marbles tokens, which players were meant to earn in the game. The project collapsed after a week , before the game even launched, and after the creators disappeared with the money, leaving the Squid tokens worthless.
Since Marbles tokens can’t be earned, users who bought the Squid tokens can’t sell them , even as a novelty. According to the rules of the smart contract that governs Squid tokens, they will likely remain in investors wallets forever.
The immutable nature of the blockchain also means that patching code is essentially impossible. The point of the system is to maintain an unchangeable, append-only record, so the only way to update smart contracts—which again, are just code that is susceptible to human error and exploitation—is to replace them entirely with a new contract and migrate old tokens to it.
This happened recently with the Sandbox, a game world that sells NFTs of virtual land.
A vulnerability in the previous smart contract could’ve made it possible for an attacker to burn another player’s NFT without permission from the owner. To resolve this, the Sandbox issued a new smart contract and directed users to migrate their land tokens.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg However, since every transaction on the Ethereum blockchain costs fees, someone has to pay for every part of this process. The Sandbox has offered to pay the gas fees for all of its users who must now migrate to a new smart contract, but not every project would be willing or able to do so.
There are countless alternative crypto platforms and services that share some flaws with the most common platforms like Ethereum today. Some might be fixable, but for now the most common players and tools have critical flaws when it comes to basic privacy and security that have gone far too often overlooked.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Eric Ravenscraft Security NFTs Don’t Work the Way You Might Think They Do Photograph: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save It’s been impossible to avoid hearing about NFTs in recent months. Hype for the tokens—pitched as proof of ownership of a digital item—has reached a fever pitch, while billions of dollars have poured into the market for them. To some, these non-fungible tokens are the hottest new collectible hobby, to others a powerful investment tool, and still more, they’re the future of the internet.
The reality is, as always, more complex. In their current state, NFTs aren’t actually capable of doing much of what they’re often claimed to do. The extremely technical nature of how NFTs, blockchains, and cryptocurrencies work means that it’s easy to simplify the explanation of the tech to the point of being misleading.
Explaining the problems with NFTs is complicated, but we’re going to try to break down the issues as succinctly as we can. We have to tackle this with the understanding that no explanation, no matter how in-depth, can ever be totally comprehensive. With that in mind, there are some misconceptions about NFTs that are worth clearing up.
The most persistent misleading claim about NFTs is also the one that’s closest to being true. Enthusiasts frequently claim that since NFTs are fundamentally unique and live on a trustless blockchain , this constitutes proof that you “own” a digital asset. There’s only one token like this one, and you have it in your crypto wallet, so the thing it signifies must be yours.
This framing is misleading for a number of reasons. For starters, NFTs can only convey ownership (or rather, possession, but we’ll come back to that) of the token itself. As software engineer Molly White explained to WIRED, “With NFTs, the thing you've bought does not tend to give you ownership of the underlying item (image, game asset, etc.) in any way you would normally transfer physical or digital art.” Instead, NFTs typically contain links to an asset hosted elsewhere. The NFT doesn’t convey ownership of the copyright, storage, or usage rights to the asset itself. As White explained, when someone buys an NFT, “They've paid to have their wallet address etched into a database alongside a pointer to something. I wouldn't say they really ‘own’ anything at all.” Additionally, as mentioned above, the Ethereum blockchain (currently the most common blockchain for minting NFTs) doesn’t have a mechanism for distinguishing between possessing a token and owning it. If someone steals your bicycle, it’s generally understood that the bike is still yours.
With an NFT, the “owner” is whoever has the token in their wallet. So, if someone’s ape NFT gets stolen via a phishing scam , the blockchain treats the thief as the new owner.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Centralized marketplaces like OpenSea have occasionally stepped in to freeze sales of stolen assets (on their own platform, anyway), but this puts the power to determine “real” ownership not in the NFT itself but in the hands of the marketplaces that trade them.
An NFT is also only unique in the context of the blockchain it was created on. NFT marketplace Rarible, for example, offers the choice of three different blockchains when minting a token, but what happens when two different people mint the same digital item on different blockchains? An artist could decide to mint their art on multiple blockchains and thus have an “original” on each, but deciding which of these blockchains is the “authoritative” or “real” one is still a social and platform problem.
As an example, Twitter recently started supporting NFT profile pictures , which are displayed in a unique hexagonal frame, but it currently accepts tokens only from the Ethereum blockchain.
Having an NFT on the Flow or Tezos blockchains—both of which Rarible supports, and which are often cheaper to mint on right now—won’t get you that hexagon. Twitter could change this in the future, and other platforms could choose to support the other blockchains, or possibly even create their own , but once again this puts the power in the hands of centralized platforms to decide which chains are the “real” one.
Moreover, there’s very little to prevent someone from making multiple NFTs of an image on the same blockchain. Twitter user @NFTTheft has documented numerous cases of users on the OpenSea marketplace stealing artists’ work, creating duplicate NFTs, and selling them right next to the original (or selling NFTs of artworks that the original artist never intended to make into an NFT).
Since the blockchain doesn’t verify that a person minting an NFT has the rights to the asset they’re minting, it’s up to platforms to solve that problem (or not, as it were). “Verifying ownership of an asset at the point at which it is minted into an NFT is more of a social problem than a technical one,” White explained. “It's hard to do through code alone.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg According to OpenSea’s analysis of its own marketplace, over 80 percent of the NFTs listed on the marketplace were plagiarized art, fake collections, or spam. The company attempted to limit this problem by imposing a cap on how many free listings users could create, but reversed the decision after pushback from users.
Meanwhile, DeviantArt has tried to help protect its artists with automated tools to scan for theft, which sent over 80,000 alerts of infringement to artists in five months , but this tool obviously only works for DeviantArt users.
OpenSea has also started verifying accounts and collections to try to combat this problem, but verification is solely up to OpenSea’s discretion. The result is that any given NFT is no more authoritative proof of ownership of the digital item it’s referencing than, say, a Twitter handle is. Every Twitter username may be unique, and if you claim yours first, then it might suggest that you’re the real person behind that username. But the 45th president of the United States still had “real” in his username because a parody account claimed @DonaldTrump first.
Similar to OpenSea, Twitter’s manual verification process is the only authoritative way to know which account belongs to the real person. It’s hardly a foolproof system.
To make matters more complicated, marketplaces are only one method of interacting with the blockchain, but anyone can do it.
So even if every major NFT marketplace put tools in place to block stolen artwork from being minted, and verified all its creators—a very big and complicated task already—there’s no way to prevent someone from minting stolen art on a blockchain like Ethereum with relative ease.
In the best cases, NFTs can only ever be proof of ownership of themselves. Third-party systems still need to verify the external data—artwork, digital items, etc.—that NFTs refer to.
One of the more outlandish claims made of NFTs is that they’ll help enable the true metaverse by allowing users to bring digital items with them from one game or platform to another. And while this is technically possible for very simple data like images (which are already pretty easy to move from one app to another), when it comes to complex things like video game items, it’s almost impossible.
Game developer Rami Ismail outlined some of these challenges in a long Twitter thread , using the example of a simple six-sided die. Even a very simple 3D model involves complex data, including the shape and textures of the model itself, physics and animation info, and deceptively simple information like which way is up. Some game engines use Y as the vertical axis, while others use Z, which means importing a game from one engine to another could result in a model that’s turned on its side.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg A human game developer or animator can modify the 3D model asset to make it work properly in a different game or engine, but it requires time and effort (and labor) to do. Having an NFT of an item from one game doesn’t mean that another game automatically supports that model.
There’s also the problem of intellectual property. Say, for example, you own Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker in World of Warcraft.
The model, textures, and all related assets for that item are Blizzard’s IP. Hypothetically, Blizzard could give players an NFT for the item, but without the company’s permission, no other game could import it into their game. And even if Blizzard did give permission to another developer, they would have to work directly with that company to provide the assets and make sure everything works correctly.
These kinds of crossovers are already common in games like Fortnite , which has partnered with franchises including Marvel, Star Wars, and God of War to bring characters across games. Developers have also given out promotional items to players who own certain games or even who have certain achievements for years. But none of these partnerships require NFTs to accomplish, be marketable, or succeed.
Even if NFTs could be used to build a hypothetical external inventory system—and assuming this is something developers or publishers would want in the first place—this is a tiny part of the work necessary to bring items, characters, or outfits from one game world to another. The bulk of the work still depends on specific humans choosing to work with other specific humans, and no level of automation of future development is positioned to avoid that.
Another benefit proponents of NFTs assert is that they can help artists make money by selling NFTs of their own artwork, but demand for that NFT artwork may be illusory. For example, the jaw-dropping $69 million NFT sale from artist Beeple grabbed headlines in March 2021. However, a few months before this sale, a project called Metapurse had purchased 20 other unrelated Beeple artworks, bundled them together, and in January 2021 sold 10 million fractionalized ownership tokens of the collection , called B20 tokens. Ostensibly, the idea was to let people who couldn’t afford to buy expensive artworks buy portions of the collection and join the speculation game.
The buyer for the $69 million Beeple in March—angel investor Vignesh Sundaresan, also known as Metakovan —also owned 59 percent of the B20 tokens. B20 tokens were initially sold to the public on January 23 at 36 cents per token before hitting a high of $23.62—a 6,461 percent increase—just a couple of days before the two-week-long $69 million Beeple auction reached its end.
By the end of May, B20 was back down to trading for under a dollar. As of this writing, the token is trading for 40 cents.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Beeple himself also owned 2 percent of the B20 tokens. This means both the seller and buyer of the most noteworthy NFT sale at the time had the same vested interest in driving up demand for the artist’s work , with the buyer standing to make more from the arrangement than the seller—the artist himself.
More broadly, one analysis from the Alan Turing Institute , which focused largely on data from OpenSea, found that 75 percent of NFTs that sell at all go for less than $15, while the majority never sell in the first place. Only 1 percent traded above $1,500. “It’s very clear that very few people can really go over $1,500 in selling,” says Mauro Martino, head of IBM’s Visual AI Lab and one of the researchers on the analysis. “It's not a magic place where everybody becomes rich. It’s really much the same reality in any other type of business.” The issue of wash trading—where one person sells an item to their own sock puppet accounts to give the impression of high demand—also makes it difficult to say how many of the high-value NFTs sold are legitimate. One analytics firm, CryptoSlam, found more than $8 billion worth of wash trading on NFT marketplace LooksRare, which at the time had amassed only around $9.5 billion worth of trades in total.
“Our paper went viral on Twitter, etc., because many people connected the concentration that we observed—that 90 percent of transactions are made by 10 percent of the wallets—as a signature of wash trading,” says Andrea Baronchelli, an associate professor at City University of London who also worked on the analysis for the Alan Turing Institute. “Can we say this is true? Not for sure,” Baronchelli continues. “A market with a lot of wash trading wouldn't look necessarily different from this. So what we see is compatible with a lot of wash trading; we cannot prove anything.” The low yield for smaller sellers can also end up costing artists money once accounting for gas fees (money paid to the miners and validators that make up the Ethereum blockchain) and fees paid to marketplaces that list the NFTs. For buyers and sellers that have only traditional currency like US dollars to trade with—which is to say, most people—there’s an extra step of converting money into cryptocurrency just to interact with the system. Currency exchanges, which facilitate those transactions, also take a cut. “It's not enough to cover the expense for the gas, for example,” Martino says of the 75 percent of sales that don’t exceed $15.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “The main people who are winning are the exchanges and the marketplaces,” says Dan Olson, a video essayist and internet researcher who posted a feature-length deep dive into NFTs on YouTube called Line Goes Up.
“They're taking transaction fees, service fees, percent cut royalties. They're the people who are actually making money hand over fist.” In theory, marketplaces like OpenSea and Rarible offer “free” NFT minting for artists, but this comes with some caveats. For starters, the NFT itself won’t be created until someone buys it. The minting fee is also passed on to the buyer (which raises the buy-in price for any transaction), and since gas fees fluctuate over time , even the cost of conducting the transaction can be hard to predict.
At the time of writing, the average fee for an Ethereum transaction over a moving 30-day period was hovering in the area of $14 to 15, but individual transactions can and do spike so starkly by the hour that the same transaction can cost several times more just depending on the time of day or the day of week the transaction goes through.
This leaves most artists who choose to get involved in NFTs with a complicated choice: They can either front a large amount of cash to mint their work as NFTs, in the hopes that an audience will come along and buy enough to make the fees worth it, or they can pass those not-insignificant costs on to the buyer, pricing out portions of their potential customers—and in the meantime they won’t have a record of their NFTs on the blockchain at all.
The royalties function is another pain point. NFTs do not inherently come with royalties built in. Rather, royalties can be added as a part of the “ smart contract ” that governs the NFT. But these contracts are software like any other, and are just as susceptible to bugs, compatibility issues, and manipulation.
In general, NFTs don’t know the difference between being sold between two people and being transferred from one wallet to another owned by the same person. Instead, marketplaces like OpenSea have to mediate a sale and inform the NFT that it’s being sold. A marketplace can enforce royalties for NFTs minted and sold within its own platform, but trading via other platforms can cut out the royalty payments entirely , whether by accident or by design. This makes it relatively easy to bypass royalties altogether.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg While there are proposed solutions to potentially standardize royalty payments across marketplaces, ultimately they can be difficult if not impossible to enforce. When combined with the rampant fraud in the NFT space—and the extra effort it takes artists to send takedowns and notices to combat fraud of their work—NFTs can create more headaches for artists than benefits.
Most of this article has focused on the issues with Ethereum, NFTs based on it, and the biggest marketplaces that use them. However, it’s difficult to map the exact shape of how any specific NFT or crypto project can be misused or an outright scam, due to the highly specific details of how each project and blockchain works.
As an example, when the US Postal Service issued around 25,000 NFTs of its Day of the Dead–inspired stamps , it used a more obscure mobile app platform, not based on Ethereum, but rather using the Ethereum-compatible GoChain. The app simply sells “gems” for $1 apiece (which are designed to be a user-friendly interface for underlying OMI tokens ) that users can then use to buy NFTs within the app. Each of the Day of the Dead NFTs sold for 6 gems each.
The catch is that cashing out gems users earn from selling NFTs is “ currently in testing ,” after over a year of being unavailable entirely. Users can buy the app’s special currency to purchase NFTs, but after that they can be traded only with other users of the app for more gems. Despite users looking for ways to cash out their gems for at least a year , the feature hasn’t been added, though the platform has attracted brand deals including Marvel , DC , and Star Trek in that time.
The overwhelmingly technical details in the NFT and crypto space mean that projects, and news coverage that explains them, are often motivated to simplify. To reduce the complexity down to terms and concepts that are easier to grasp, and often to describe wildly different projects as a monolith despite the fact that services like the one described above can operate very differently than, say, OpenSea, despite both “selling NFTs.” This simplification can sometimes come at the expense of understanding the technology as it truly is. Which, right now, is riddled with fundamental security and privacy issues baked into the design of the most major systems, a confusing and misleading feature set, and lofty promises that range from moonshots to actively impossible.
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"Can You Be an NFT Artist and an Environmentalist? | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Charlotte Kent Ideas Can You Be an NFT Artist and an Environmentalist? Play/Pause Button Pause Photo-Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images; Nancy Baker Cahill Save this story Save Save this story Save Artists have frequently depicted the environmental impact of technology. The Impressionists of the 19th century were known for their paintings of trains and the shifting landscapes of industrialization. Photographers in the early 20th century captured with awe the trams and high-rises of the rapidly escalating urban environment. Amid the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s, environmental art became a major new form as artists tried to express the precarity of local ecologies, increasingly aware of the long-term consequences of economic activities. Artists explore emerging technologies to address their potentials and problems, with recent attention turning to the carbon footprint of our electronic expansion, as well as what might be done about it.
For artists who want to experiment with NFTs and blockchain, the desire to create environmental art seems to conflict with the actual goal of saving the environment. The Bitcoin and Ethereum platforms operate on a principle called “proof of work” (PoW), in which computers solve complex puzzles to verify a transaction, for which that computer (or “miner”) is then rewarded with some amount of the cryptocurrency. Initially, people could mine on a simple gaming computer. However, the system is designed to increase the difficulty of the puzzles as more people, or rather computers, join the peer-to-peer network. This energy increase is an intentional part of the security in the PoW system.
As a result, according to research conducted by artist and computer scientist Memo Akten, by the end of 2020, mining an NFT took at least 35 kWh of electricity—that is, the process, from mouse click to claiming the right to produce the block, demanded that much energy, emitting 20 kg of CO 2.
For comparison, sending an email produces a few grams of CO 2 , and watching an hour of Netflix produces only 36 grams, Akten says.
Others examining NFTs and studies of Bitcoin have found even higher emissions. Though people debate the calculations, the undeniable point is that carbon emissions must be recognized and addressed, since emissions are responsible for the climate crisis’ temperature increase and ocean acidification, both of which kill existing life.
Amid the speculative enthusiasms of Silicon Valley and other global tech breeding grounds, financiers seek profit, not sustainability, in blockchains. Given the energy required to ensure a cryptographically secure blockchain, it seems as though there is no way to be an environmentalist and use the technology. But some artists are now reimagining the system, using blockchain to propose sustainable practices.
As early as 2017, artist and engineer Julian Oliver recognized that the number of computers competing to solve a puzzle and produce the hash for a transaction must demand enormous energy from oil, coal, or natural gas to power those machines. He proceeded to create Harvest (2017), which is both a media work and a working prototype for an alternative crypto-mining operation. Adapting a small wind turbine with environmental sensors, a weatherproof computer, and a 4G uplink, the machine uses wind energy as a source of electricity to mine cryptocurrency. All proceeds were funneled to climate change research.
As more artists became aware of the environmental consequences of blockchain practices, they pressed for platforms to move away from PoW. An alternative now exists called “proof of stake” (PoS), which some alt-coins have been using for a while. PoS uses a pseudo-random process to assign a miner—now called a “forger” in this PoS landscape—the right to validate a block. The forger has to commit a stake in the chain, typically a deposit of a certain amount, to become a validator that can store data, process transactions, and add new blocks to the chain; a greater stake leads to more validation opportunities, and thus more income. There aren’t many computers competing to solve the puzzle, since only one is assigned to forge the block, which greatly reduces the energy expenditure and carbon emissions of the process. Though there are security risks and economic implications that lead some to reject its improved environmental impact, many artists have committed to using PoS chains.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Nancy Baker Cahill is one of them. Her NFTs are largely on PoS chains, but since ether (ETH) is the most popular NFT cryptocurrency, she has received some of that, which is PoW. Baker Cahill has staked that ethe r to a new iteration of the chain known as ETH2 as a vote for the currency to shift to PoS, because these seemingly ethereal realms have very real material impact—which is a topic of her work as well. Baker Cahill adopts augmented reality’s abilities to overlay content on a geo-specific location and help audiences grasp the interconnectedness of the virtual and the tangible. She says, “We are hybrids of technology and microbes , inhabiting a largely undifferentiated natural-artificial world … The artist’s role in this situation is to discover and harness adaptable parts of old systems and mutate them into something new.” Recognizing that “profound truths often lurk in constructed simulations,” Baker Cahill launched Mushroom Cloud , an AR projection and complex of NFTs, in December 2021, during Art Basel Miami, and iterated for Frieze LA. (Showing this project at fairs aims to keep the art industry aware of the carbon footprint associated with global travel.) Courtesy of Nancy Baker Cahill Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The animation opens with an incandescent mushroom cloud exploding over the water, a visual that links the impact of continued carbon consumption in the 21st century with the nuclear devastation of the 20th century. And yet, the mushroom is also a symbol of hope; fungi have the power to break down most hydrocarbon materials, including oil spills , and can be used to produce sustainable alternatives to plastic.
Their underground mycelia transport carbon through a mycorrhizal lattice connecting and communicating with plants, in what the biologist Merlin Sheldrake called the wood wide web.
The fungal system is similar to our internet—the basis for blockchain and therefore the NFT that enables sale of this work, but also 4th Wall App , which allows anyone to access this public AR work. The app also curates geolocated projects around the world. In this way, art can transport ideas across the internet, like mushrooms communicate life across the planet.
There is no context in which we can speak of the environment separate from economics. The two are bound together. In 1972, a team of international researchers published Limits to Growth , urging the need to take global warming seriously, not only for environmental and humanitarian reasons, but for national security and economic reasons as well. Blockchain is a technology with protocols and features still in development. Its ecological impact can be mitigated when designed to do so. The Crypto Climate Accord, launched by the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Energy Web Foundation, and the Alliance for Innovative Regulation, encourages all blockchain activity to transition to renewable energy by 2030 and to reach net zero emissions by 2040. This requires that any greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere be balanced by a removal mechanism, which is the basis of carbon markets.
One vision for how this may work comes through M Carbon Dioxide , by artist Sven Eberwein. Produced in November 2020, before the hue and cry over blockchain’s environmental impact hit the mainstream, the artwork uses the NFT format to present how carbon markets could be brought on-chain.
M Carbon Dioxide shows a blue sphere and cloud formation—reminiscent of NASA’s famous “Blue Marble.” The image is strewn with black specks that slowly dissipate, representing the 1,000 tons of CO 2 purchased and retired as verified credit units on the Verra registry.
Courtesy of Sven Eberwein Businesses and individuals purchase carbon credits to compensate for their emissions, such as occur from air travel. A credit becomes available for a company to purchase when an organization proves it avoided emitting—or actually removed from the atmosphere—1 metric ton of carbon, through practices like reforestation, wind farm development, or carbon sequestration. Retiring credits means they are no longer available for use. It limits the offsets that people or businesses can buy.
Distrust of carbon markets stems partly from earlier questionable practices (like using the same carbon credit for multiple parties), but registry standards and oversight organizations like Verra Registry or CarbonPlan have instituted greater transparency. The UN climate conference in Glasgow formalized how countries would buy and sell UN-certified carbon credits from one another, as a means of measuring their pledges under the Paris climate agreement. Despite concerns about loopholes , a major achievement was managing the possible double spending problem, which is one of blockchain’s initial use purposes.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The offsets in M Carbon Dioxide were purchased directly from two projects: Cerro de Hula Wind Project in Honduras and Bull Run Forest Carbon Project in Belize. In the corner of the work are two QR codes that link to Verra Registry to show the proof of ownership of the carbon retired from both organizations in the name of M Carbon Dioxide.
This produces a bridge from the real world to the blockchain. It was a proof of concept but not yet scalable. Eberwein was advised on the accounting and legal side of this project by Toucan Bridge and Offsetra, and it became the model used by Toucan. In this way, artists’ projects can help stimulate new possibilities.
Eberwein was able to show how blockchain as a technology, and NFTs in particular, could be “productive instruments in fighting the climate crisis by bridging CO 2 offsets on-chain and utilizing them in new value-additive ways.” In this process, he connected with KlimaDAO, an organization that tokenizes third-party-verified carbon offsets, making use of blockchain’s transparency and immutability to ensure that those credits are permanently traced and won’t lead to double use. Eberwein was intrigued by the potential in how KlimaDAO seeks to accelerate the cost of carbon, in order to pressure businesses into investing in low-carbon technologies and carbon-removal projects.
KlimaDAO’s treasury represents semi-retired carbon credits. (Technically, the credits retain their economic value and act as financial backing for Klima, so they are not retired; but, since they can’t leave the KlimaDAO treasury and are removed from the marketplace, they operate as if retired.) The decrease in carbon offsets available to businesses drives up the price, incentivizing alternative fuel programs and practices.
Courtesy of Sven Eberwein Eberwein was among many artists concerned for the environment who was criticized for using Ethereum, given its PoW energy demands.
M Carbon Dioxide was carbon-neutral, due to the offsets assigned for the project, but he shifted to Polygon for CO2_Compound (2021). In this iteration of his continued attempts to discover how blockchain might impinge on fossil fuel markets, he made the artwork into an economic actor.
CO2 Compound appears like an eye, with the pupil representing the Klima token staked into the project, then valued at 4.14 tons of carbon offsets.
That token can’t be extracted, and so it is a commitment to KlimaDAO’s project to produce sustainable and verifiable carbon markets. Each Klima token is backed by a minimum of 1 ton of tokenized carbon offsets that are held in reserves by the treasury; the reserves in the treasury determine the maximum supply of Klima tokens at any given time. As the token increases in value, so does the amount of carbon tonnage that it represents, tracked by a website.
After three months, the work has compounded to 26 tons of carbon offset, which is a remarkable 525 percent return. As an NFT, the work was sold for 7.5 ether on December 6, 2021, through OceanDrop, an auction organized by the Open Earth Foundation funding marine life conservation. What is fascinating about KlimaDAO is the way it aims to subvert current carbon practices so that the value of carbon comes not from its emission but from its removal and sequestration. Eberwein’s work experiments with the potential of this new economic model to protect our environment.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg These artists communicate and challenge the impact of this emergent technology on our fragile ecosystem. Digital artists have a chance to iterate in their explorations of climate and energy issues, to risk and fail and try again, as they attempt to both visualize and enact a better set of environmental politics. It took one carpet-tile company 30 years to develop a carbon-negative product ; every advance revealed additional improvements to adopt. Mistakes are not a reason to quit, and fear of failure cannot stop efforts to find better ways of being in the world. Memo Atken is right when he warns, “ Rejection of technology is a rejection of humanity.
To break out of this false dichotomy, we must adapt a holistic approach—to embrace not only technology, but all of humanity, all of nature— including technology.” The flaws in current blockchain practices can’t be wished away, and only active exploration of the consequences can create alternatives. These artists are not just representing how blockchains work, but reimagining how they can work to defend our world.
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"Inside the Icelandic Facility Where Bitcoin Is Mined | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Laura Mallonee Photo Inside the Icelandic Facility Where Bitcoin Is Mined 1 / 13 Save this story Save Save this story Save Less than two miles from Iceland’s Reykjavik airport sits a nondescript metal building as monolithic and drab as a commercial poultry barn. There’s a deafening racket inside, too, but it doesn’t come from clucking chickens. Instead, tens of thousands of whirring GPUs perform the complex, exhaustive calculations needed to verify cryptocurrency transactions and add them to the public record, otherwise known as the blockchain.
Hundreds of thousands of fans blast cold air to keep the machines from overheating, aided by six giant ceiling turbines that spin with the collective force of 360 washing machines.
The facility, called Enigma and established by Genesis Mining in 2014, is easily the loudest environment that British photographer Lisa Barnard has ever documented. She visited two years ago while shooting her project Bitcoin.
"The biggest thing I remember was just the noise and the flashing lights and wiring," Barnard says. "It was like being inside a computer." Related Stories Photo Gallery Michael Hardy Photo Gallery Michael Hardy HEINOUS Lily Hay Newman The high-tech barn seems worlds away from the geysers, waterfalls, and lagoons that inspire 2.3 million tourists each year (not to mention a few Björk lyrics), but it’s as much a product of Iceland’s unique geology as any of those. The Nordic island country straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates meet, molding a volcanic terrain webbed by glacial rivers and studded with gemstone-aquamarine lakes. The abundant water and underground heat is harnessed by hydroelectric dams and geothermal power stations to produce cheap, green electricity that facilitates the energy-intensive process of confirming cryptocurrency transactions—called mining, since miners are rewarded for their efforts with newly minted and extremely volatile “coins.” The fact temperatures rarely top 57 degrees Fahrenheit also helps.
It wasn't long after Bitcoin 's creation, on January 3, 2009, that cryptocurrency companies began moving to Iceland. In 2016, large data centers accounted for nearly 1 percent of its GDP, with cryptocurrency mining operations making up 90 percent of those. They now use more electricity than all of Iceland’s homes combined, with electric bills at Enigma running more than $1 million per month. But however green the energy, miners still can’t escape a dilemma as old as picks and shovels: how to extract resources without marring the landscape. According to local experts cited by The Wall Street Journal , keeping up with demand for electricity requires building more dams and power stations that could alter Iceland’s unique, sensitive environment.
That tension intrigues Barnard. She became interested in cryptocurrencies while working on her new book The Canary and the Hammer , a visual exploration of gold. It piqued her interest in digital “gold” that isn’t controlled by a central bank, leading her from Bitcoin meet-ups in Japan, the first country to officially recognize cryptocurrencies, to data centers in Iceland, where they’re mined on an industrial scale. “I was interested in this idea of it being an equitable currency,” Barnard says, “and yet it has the potential to be very destructive as far as the land is concerned.” So, after photographing Enigma, she also ventured out to Svartsengi geothermal power station (which supplies electricity to crypto-miners and water to the Insta-famous Blue Lagoon) and other sites of thermal activity. Standing before ethereal, bubbling pools, she felt an almost palpable connection to the inner workings of the earth, “both terrifying and beautiful at the same time,” she says. The sulphur-smelling waters steamed and hissed, many decibels below the crypto-digital roar to which they’re weirdly—and maybe inextricably—linked.
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Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Contributor Instagram LinkedIn Pinterest Topics Photography Arbab Ali Ramin Skibba Gregory Barber Ramin Skibba Matt Simon Andy Greenberg Andy Greenberg Matt Simon Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"What is Bitcoin? The Complete WIRED Guide | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Klint Finley Business The WIRED Guide to Bitcoin Play/Pause Button Pause Illustrations by Radio Save this story Save Save this story Save Bitcoin is a digital currency. Like other currencies, you can use it to buy things from merchants that accept it, such as Overstock.com, or, as is more often the case, hold on to it in hopes that it will increase in value. Unlike traditional currencies, which rely on governments and central banks, no single entity controls bitcoin. Rather, it is supervised by a worldwide network of volunteers who maintain computers running specialized software. As long as people run bitcoin software, the currency will keep working, because everything needed to keep it working is stored in a distributed ledger called the blockchain.
And even though it's all digital, bitcoin is scarce.
Its most wild-eyed proponents believe bitcoin's decentralized, cryptographic approach to currency can yield a host of benefits: limiting central bankers’ ability to damage economies by printing too much money; eliminating credit-card fraud; bringing the unbanked masses into the modern economy; giving people in unstable economies a safe place to park their money; and making it cheap and easy to transfer funds. But bitcoin has yet to realize these goals, and critics argue it may never live up to the hype.
When you send or receive bitcoin, your bitcoin software, referred to as a “wallet,” records the transaction in the blockchain. The blockchain is maintained by, and distributed across, the roughly 200,000 computers running bitcoin software. If someone tries to alter the ledger to make it look like they have more bitcoin than they’re supposed to, the tampering will be apparent because it won't match the other copies of the blockchain.
People who commit the computing resources to processing bitcoin transactions are paid in bitcoin, but only if the computers they operate are first to complete complex cryptographic puzzles in a process called "mining.” New bitcoins are created automatically by the software and awarded to the winners of the race to solve these puzzles. As of February 2018, that award is 12.5 bitcoins. By design, only 21 million bitcoins will ever be created. Those who process transactions can also collect fees; the fees are optional and set by the person who initiates a transaction. The larger the fee, the faster the transaction will likely be completed. This system keeps bitcoin scarce while rewarding people for investing in the infrastructure required to keep a global payment-processing system running. But the mining process comes with a big catch: It uses an enormous amount of electricity.
Bitcoin is attracting more and more investors. In 2018, Goldman Sachs revealed that it plans to open a bitcoin trading unit, and the New York Stock Exchange is reportedly considering a bitcoin trading platform as well. But adoption of the cryptocurrency has been hobbled by a series of scandals, high-tech heists, and disputes over the software's design, all of which illustrate why financial regulations were created in the first place. The bitcoin community has solved some mind-boggling technological problems. But making bitcoin a true replacement for, or even adjunct to, the global financial system requires more than just great tech.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg On Halloween 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent an email to a crytography mailing list with a link to an academic paper about peer-to-peer currency. It didn't make much of a splash. Nakamoto was unknown in cryptography circles, and other cryptographers had proposed similar schemes before. Two months later, however, Nakamoto announced the first release of bitcoin software, proving it was more than just an idea. Anyone could download the software and start using it. And people did.
In the early days, bitcoin was used almost exclusively by cryptography geeks. A bitcoin sold for less than a penny. But the idea slowly caught on. Bitcoin emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis when some people—especially free-market libertarians—worried the Federal Reserve's attempts to increase the money supply would lead to runaway inflation.
Nakamoto disappeared from the internet before bitcoin attracted much mainstream attention. He handed control of the project to an early contributor named Gavin Andresen in December 2010 and quit posting to the public bitcoin forum. To this day, Nakamoto’s identity remains a mystery.
1 / 6 The value of a bitcoin first hit $1 shortly after this transition, in February 2011. Then the price jumped to $29.60 in June 2011 after a Gawker story about the now-defunct black-market site Silk Road, where users could use bitcoin to pay for illegal drugs. But the price fell again after Mt. Gox, the most popular site at the time for buying bitcoin with traditional currency and storing them online, was hacked and temporarily went offline.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The price fluctuated over the next few years, soaring after a financial crisis in Cyprus in 2013, and sinking after Mt. Gox went bankrupt in 2014. But the overall trajectory was up. By January 2017, bitcoin was trading at nearly $1,000. The price soared in 2017, reaching an all-time high of nearly $20,000 in December. The reasons for this rally are unclear, but it seems to have been driven by a mixture of wild speculation and regulatory changes (the US approved trading bitcoin futures on major exchanges in December). Prices dropped back below $10,000 in early 2018, but remain well above the early-2017 prices.
Bitcoin’s price surged last year despite discord among its adherents over the currency's future. Many prominent members of the bitcoin community, including Andresen, who handed control of the software to Dutch coder Wladimir van der Laan in 2014, believe bitcoin transactions are too slow and too expensive. Although transaction fees are optional, failing to include a high enough fee could mean your transaction won’t be processed for hours or days. In December 2017, transaction fees averaged $20 to $30, according to the site BitInfoCharts.
That makes bitcoin impractical for many daily transactions, such as buying lunch.
Developers have proposed technical solutions for this problem. But the plan favored by Andresen and company would require bitcoin users to switch to a new version of the software, and so far miners have been reluctant to do so. That's led to the creation of several alternate versions of the bitcoin software, known as "hard forks," each competing to lure both miners and users away from official version. Some, like Bitcoin Cash, have attracted miners and investors, but none is close to displacing the original. Meanwhile, many other "cryptocurrencies" have emerged, borrowing heavily from the core ideas behind bitcoin but with many differences (see The WIRED Guide to Blockchain ).
The future of bitcoin depends on three major questions. First, whether any of the hard forks or the hundreds of competing cryptocurrencies will supplant it, and, if so, when. Second, whether the sky-high valuations can last. And third, whether bitcoins will ever be used as currency for day-to-day transactions. The answer to the third question hinges in large part on the first two.
One thing holding bitcoin back as a currency is the expense and time lag involved in processing transactions. Emin Gun Sirer, a professor and cryptography researcher at Cornell University, estimates that the bitcoin network typically processes a little more than three transactions per second. By comparison, the Visa credit-card network processes around 3,674 transactions per second. Worse, bitcoin transaction confirmations can take hours or even days.
There were few places to spend bitcoin during its early years, before the black markets that made the currency famous emerged. The first time someone actually used bitcoin to buy something is widely considered to have been May 22, 2010. Programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin (worth around $41 at the time) to have two pizzas delivered to his house. Those 10,000 bitcoin are worth millions now. “I don’t feel bad about it,” Hanyecz told WIRED in 2011, when the coins would have sold for $272,329. “The pizza was really good.” In addition to the hard forks of bitcoin, there are now countless alternative cryptocurrencies, sometimes called “alt-coins,” that aim to solve some of bitcoin’s shortcomings.
Litecoin , for example, is designed to process transactions more quickly than bitcoin, while Monero focuses on creating a more private alternative. None trade for as much as bitcoin, but several sell for hundreds of dollars.
If one of the bitcoin variants or alternatives can solve its main problems, and win over users and miners, that currency would become much more suitable for day-to-day use. It's also possible that the developers behind the official version of bitcoin will find a way to make the network cheaper and faster while maintaining compatibility with old versions of the software. The maintainers of the original bitcoin software platform are working on a solution called the “Lightning Network” that would shift many transactions to “private channels,” to boost speed and reduce costs. Bitcoin wallets and exchanges are starting to adopt the system, but it's still too early to judge its success.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg And then there's the environmental impact. Critics argue that mining bitcoin is an enormous waste of electricity because they don't have any intrinsic value.
Even if the technical issues of cost and performance are solved, there's still the question of volatility. Businesses and consumers can exchange dollars for goods and services with the confidence that those dollars will be worth the same amount in three weeks when the rent is due. But bitcoin has proven far more volatile than most other assets, according to a study conducted by the bitcoin wallet company Coinbase. For example, On November 29, bitcoin surged from just under $10,000 to well over $11,000 before sinking back to about where it started the day.
The founders of Coinbase have argued that derivative markets could help users cope with the volatility by allowing participants to essentially buy insurance that pays out if the price of bitcoin drops. That might not reduce the volatility, but it might reduce the risk of accepting bitcoin as payment. In 2017, US regulators cleared the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board Options Futures Exchange, the world’s largest derivatives exchanges, to offer bitcoin futures. Yet again, it's too early to tell if it will make bitcoin more acceptable to retailers.
Bitcoin has come an enormous way since its origins as a paper by a pseudonymous author. But it still has a long way to go to fulfill its creator’s dream.
Bitcoin Is Soaring. Here's Why It's Not Ready for the Big Time A look at the chokepoints in bitcoin software and the high fees that deter widespread use, even as investors push up the price.
Bitcoin Is Splitting in Two. Now What? A deeper dive on why some bitcoin community leaders want to switch to new, more efficient, versions of the software, and their struggle to win over miners and users.
The Lightning Network Could Make Bitcoin Faster—and Cheaper The minds behind the Lightning Network hope to fix bitcoin’s biggest problems without requiring a hard fork.
The Hard Math Behind Bitcoin's Global Warming Problem A 2017 report estimated that bitcoin uses more electricity than the country of Serbia. Here we explain how bitcoin mining works, why it uses so much energy, and why that’s so hard to change.
- How To Be a Bitcoin Thought Leader Still confused? Just want to fake your way through a bitcoin conversation at a cocktail party? Our guide will have you dropping buzzwords with the best of 'em in no time.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg - Where Could Bitcoin Succeed as a Currency? In a Failed State Venezuela launched its own controversial digital currency called the "petro" in 2018. But its citizens are starting to adopt bitcoin instead. That makes sense because high inflation and widespread distrust in the government make Venezuela an ideal place for cryptocurrencies.
The Rise and Fall of Silk Road, part 1 and part 2 Bitcoin isn’t always, or even primarily, used for shady purposes. But the online, illegal drug marketplace Silk Road is what put it on the map.
The Inside Story of Mt. Gox, Bitcoin's $460 Million Disaster Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy caused the first major bitcoin crash and served as a hard reminder that banks are regulated and insured for a reason. This is the Mt. Gox story, from its beginnings as a planned Magic: The Gathering card-trading site to its emergence as the biggest bitcoin trading platform to its downfall.
‘I Forgot My PIN’: An Epic Tale of Losing $30,000 in Bitcoin Mark Frauenfelder forgot the PIN for his digital bitcoin wallet. The story of recovering his $30,000 worth of cryptocurrency illustrates both the perils of a decentralized network where no one can reset your passwords.
This guide was last updated on May 8, 2018.
Enjoyed this deep dive? Check out more WIRED Guides.
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WIRED may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
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"EOS Was the World’s Most Hyped Blockchain. Its Fans Want It Back | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Gian M. Volpicelli Business EOS Was the World’s Most Hyped Blockchain. Its Fans Want It Back Illustration: Jacqui VanLiew; Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save On a Wednesday morning in November, Yves La Rose, a member of the EOS blockchain community, addressed a virtual gathering of China-based users.
“EOS, as it stands, is a failure,” he said.
Built using open source technology created by Block.one, a Cayman Island-based company, EOS promised more efficiency than any other cryptocurrency network at the time. At one point, a running joke among crypto enthusiasts was that EOS stood for “Ethereum on Steroids.” Ahead of the launch of EOS in June 2018, Block.one had raised over $4 billion in the biggest initial coin offering of all time. (ICOs let startups rake in eye-popping sums in exchange for cryptocurrency tokens to be used on a not-yet-built blockchain platform.) From those early days, La Rose devoted himself to EOS. He had even helmed the EOS Nation “block producer,” a kind of digital umpire responsible for validating the transactions taking place on the blockchain.
Nearly four years later, EOS was in free fall. Its user base was shrinking, it supported just a handful of popular apps, key developers were leaving, and the value of its token, also called EOS, had plummeted from $10 in June 2018 to $4.40 in late 2021. In the virtual session last fall, La Rose said that he and everyone else in the community had become casualties of a venture that profited off their work and left them with nothing.
“Block.one knowingly misrepresented their capabilities,” the 39-year-old Canadian entrepreneur said in the meeting. “And this amounts to negligence and fraud.” La Rose is still a believer in EOS’s potential; his grievance is with Block.one, which he believes has driven the project into the ground. La Rose has a plan to save EOS: He launched an organization called the EOS Network Foundation (ENF) with the goal of nursing the blockchain back to life and, importantly, to hold Block.one accountable for the project’s decline.
He wanted Block.one to go away—and to give at least some of the money back.
Block.one had no intention of complying with his request. In May 2021, it announced that it would launch Bullish, a cryptocurrency exchange whose liquidity derived in large part from the proceeds of the EOS ICO. It registered Bullish in the Cayman Islands —with subsidiaries in the Caymans and in crypto-friendly jurisdictions including Delaware, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar—planning to take it public via a $9 billion merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called Far Peak Acquisition Corp by March 8. After two extensions, the deadline is currently set for July 8, 2022.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Bullish is emblematic of the fallout between Block.one and the EOS community. The legal documents underpinning the EOS ICO assert that Block.one can use the money as it pleases, while the ENF says the company has failed to live up to its public pledges.
In December 2017 , Block.one CEO Brendan Blumer promised to invest $1bn from the ICO revenue through an investment arm called EOS VC in order to grow the blockchain technology underpinning EOS and fostering the startups building applications for it. But La Rose says that the company devoted much of its funds to investment in unrelated ventures instead, and kicked EOS to the curb.
“There had always been plans for an exchange in the background,” says Tama Churchouse, who worked at Block.one in various senior roles from its inception until February 2021. Work on launching the exchange, Churchouse says, had started sometime in early 2019.
The ENF also argued that Block.one had allowed the output of code meant to improve EOS to decline since the start of 2021, and that it was bound to get worse following the departure of chief technical officer Daniel Larimer and other senior developers in January. In an interview with Cryptonomist shortly after leaving, Larimer complained that Block.one had become unable to “to build and promote technology that frees people.” (Larimer declined a request for an interview.) All that, the ENF said, showed Block.one’s lack of commitment.
And so in November 2021, shortly after La Rose’s speech, the ENF gave Block.one an ultimatum: Reinvest money in the EOS blockchain, and gift the intellectual property of EOS’s blockchain technology to the ENF. Otherwise, block producers would put a halt to a process called “vesting,” which granted Block.one 100 million EOS tokens staggered over 10 years. All it would take to stop Block.one from claiming the tokens, they said, was a minor tweak in the blockchain’s code.
In an email to WIRED, Block.one spokesperson Abby Kuhanez pointed to publicly available documents relating to Bullish, the terms of the ERC-20 token sale, the “extensive support” for the community using their technology, and a token sale audit report conducted in 2019 by law firm Clifford Chance and professional services company PWC. Kuhanez said that “a number” of the assertions in this story “appear to be recycled from claims made in litigation at Block.One,” but did not respond to requests to elaborate.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “Block.one is the negligent one, Block.one basically ruined everything for everybody. They're the bad actors,” La Rose says.
Former Block.one insiders paint a different picture. They describe a company paralyzed by legal concerns and unable to bring any project to completion—a fiasco, but for one metric: its billions in crypto profits.
The company, founded in 2016 by infusing Brendan Blumer’s Hong Kong real estate firm ii5 with cryptocurrency technologists and influencers, made its first pitch at the industry conference Consensus in New York in 2017.
The team then embarked on a global road show to peddle EOS tokens—Ethereum cryptocurrency that could later be converted into tokens to use on the then hypothetical EOS chain—in a 341-day online auction. Over the following years, the auction attracted scrutiny from regulators and academics. In August 2021, John Griffin, a professor of finance at the University of Texas, released a study alleging that the EOS ICO showed signs of a technique called “wash trading.” He alleged that 21 accounts appeared to have acted in concert, making large purchases of EOS tokens only to sell them in less than an hour, a practice that Griffin argues would inflate the price of the token for other buyers.
The owners of those accounts, Griffin says, concealed their actions by passing the coins between multiple wallets between each purchase and sale. In a blog post, Block.one said that there was no coordination , and it pointed to the 2019 audit, which found no evidence of collusion. But Griffin notes the audit only examined accounts owned by Block.one, and not those associated with individual officers at the company. In any case, unmasking the owners of the accounts would require the cooperation of the crypto exchanges they had used. “This is as far as I can go,” Griffin says. The US Department of Justice did not confirm or deny that an investigation is underway.
A former Block.one executive says that despite the aggressive EOS marketing campaign, fronted and stage-managed by cofounder Brock Pierce, a crypto investor, former child actor, and budding politician , Block.one did not expect to make so much money from the ICO. The former executive says that at the very start, the company’s chairman, Kokuei Yuan, had made it clear that Block.one was a “marketing organization selling a token: We need to put up the minimum software necessary and then get out.” Another person familiar with the company’s workings confirms that account. (Most of Block.one’s former employees asked to speak anonymously because of nondisclosure agreements or fear of reprisals.) Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The $4 billion bonanza focused minds. “We thought, maybe we should be doing more than just selling tokens, putting up the bare minimum software, and walking away,” the former executive says. “Maybe there's more to be done here.” Larimer’s team created a viable chain, even if some features promised ahead of the ICO were not delivered.
For example, the company backtracked on the ability to process millions of cryptocurrency transactions per second nine months into the token sale. But even after building the technology, the former executive says, Block.one’s leadership never developed a vision for it.
Block.one’s C-suite included chief strategy officer Andrew Lewis, a childhood friend of Blumer’s; Blumer’s sister Abby, who was in charge of communications; and the executive chair Kokuei Yuan, who also had a close relationship with Blumer, dating back to their first joint venture , Okay.com, in 2005. “Blumer really likes to be surrounded by people who will be very gentle with him and not challenge him and not make him do things that make him uncomfortable,” the former executive says. “But a CEO's job is to make decisions.” The former executive says that the company spent months deliberating where to open its US office until, in October 2018, it plumped for Blacksburg, Virginia—a town of just over 40,000 people with an unremarkable tech scene barring one resident: Larimer.
A former employee recounted their frustration at being asked to develop a business plan, putting hundreds of hours into it, only to see it abandoned without explanation. “They are only interested in appearing to be doing something,” the person says. Several Glassdoor reviews of the company echo this experience.
Another former employee from Block.one’s Hong Kong office—where Blumer, who renounced his US citizenship in 2020 , was based—says that Blumer is a gifted salesperson but does not seem to enjoy his role as CEO. “He was rarely in the office,” they say. “He would not sit there and understand what the issues were and how to fix them. He would quickly lose interest.” That attitude, the former employee says, ended up entrusting a lot of responsibility to the company’s legal team. “A lot of the stuff [Block.one worked on] was just ideas that came from Brendan [Blumer], so you needed someone to be the adult in the room and try and figure out how to execute them.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That resulted in an overly cautious approach to every single business decision—a foretold outcome, given the perilous regulatory landscape for crypto businesses. Between 2017 and 2019, the SEC was hell-bent on prosecuting companies organizing ICOs. A token sale can be construed as an issuance of unregistered securities when a company is too involved in running the blockchain it has raised money for. Block.one’s duty was to its shareholders, which include PayPal founder Peter Thiel and investor Mike Novogratz, rather than EOS token holders.
A Bloomberg report in May 2019 , quoting a Block.one letter to shareholders, revealed that early investors had received returns as high as 6,567 percent during a buyback, and that most of Block.one’s money had been reinvested in government bonds and bitcoins. As of July 2021, Bullish owned 141,951 bitcoins, worth around $6 billion, according to an investor relations presentation.
According to Pierce, who left the company in early 2018—shortly after comedian John Oliver eviscerated his techno-hippie antics on Last Week Tonight —Block.one’s “hands were tied” due to compliance and legal requirements. For example, Pierce blames the SEC for the failure of Voice, a $150 million plan to build a decentralized social network on top of the EOS blockchain Block.one had launched with great fanfare in May 2019. “The reason why Voice wasn't ultimately successful was that the SEC wouldn't allow it to launch a token,” Pierce says. As of 2022, Voice has pivoted to selling NFTs.
Block.one’s dedication to staving off any legal quandary failed, but it hardly mattered. In 2019, the SEC said Block.one had not done enough to stop Americans from participating in sales of the tokens—deemed to be unregistered securities—and triggered a case that took over a year to resolve. The resulting settlement stunned the industry, which had been watching intently given the wider implications for ICOs: a $24 million fine , tiny compared with the $4 billion ICO. “Fuck, man, their lawyers are good,” cryptocurrency investor Katherine Wu wrote at the time.
The company made no admission of wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
La Rose thinks that while the regulatory risk was real, Block.one might have used that as a cover for inaction. “Block.one uses the SEC card as a way to distance itself [from its commitments],” La Rose says. In particular, La Rose says that several of the companies in which EOS VC invested —such as the NFT platform Immutable and gaming companies Forte and Playable Worlds —ended up using other blockchains. More gallingly, Block.one invested in projects that could barely be construed as fostering the EOS system—including the bitcoin mining company Northern Data and LoopLand, a holiday resort in Puerto Rico, the US territory where Pierce has resided since 2018.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Pierce says that Block.one simply chose the wrong leadership for its VC initiative. “The general partners and the people that were brought on to oversee it were really more traders, and venture is a really hard business,” he says. “They just never ended up putting enough of the capital into the right organizations.” Michael Alexander, a Hong Kong-based investment banker who worked as EOS VC’s CEO between 2018 and 2020, did not reply to a request for comment.
Block.one’s EOS VC deployed its money through partnerships with other investors , including Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital firm, Asia-based investors Michael Cao and Winnie Liu, London-based fund SVK Crypto, and German firm FinLab. The former Hong Kong-based employee says this was a way to “outsource” the task to these partners, rather than spend time looking for companies using the technology that underpinned EOS, which according to the employee, Blumer regarded as “a distraction.” “In the crypto space, people using EOS are small companies,” they say. “Brendan wasn't really interested in doing these small VC deals.” Crunchbase data and Block.one’s own press releases show that Block.one injected around $675 million into the partnerships.
But the whereabouts of some of the funds are unclear: $50 million invested in a partnership with TomorrowBC —a company run by Derek Rundell, a managing director of Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures—has not been used as of 2022, barring a $750,000 investment in crypto-trading startup LogosBlock, according to PitchBook data. Rundell and Schmidt did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
Following the ENF’s ultimatum, on November 10, Blumer and Pierce flew to Canada to meet La Rose. In a blog post , La Rose says that he kept asking for a part of the ICO proceeds to be given to the ENF, but his requests were “swiftly rejected each time.” Just before the meeting, Block.one had transferred some 45 million EOS tokens (worth $216 million at the time) to Pierce, in exchange for his stake in Block.one. On Twitter, Pierce suggested rescuing EOS through the launch of an investment firm called Helios, which would be endowed with the newly acquired tokens. “I'm no longer a [Block.one] shareholder, which means I don't have any limitations,” Pierce told WIRED in November. “I'm free to do whatever I think is necessary for the ecosystem at this point. “ Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg However, his status soon became a problem during negotiations. Most of the tokens used to buy out Pierce were still in the process of being vested. “The network believed that those tokens are theirs, and Block.one believed they're theirs,” La Rose says.
Following weeks of futile negotiations, on December 7, EOS’s block producers enforced a script that stopped the vesting of Block.one’s tokens, including those that had been sold to Pierce, effectively blocking his buyout. Ahead of the decision, Pierce told WIRED that such a move would “have a very negative impact on trust” within the EOS ecosystem, and therefore he expected that it would be called off.
La Rose says Pierce did not take the eventual decision well. “Clearly he wasn't happy,” he says. “He was pissed off. He made death threats against me.” In an interview he did in late December with blockchain news website Bywire News, Pierce, donning a fedora in a Puerto Rican club while disco music blasted in the background , said he did not recall making threats, but apologized if he did.
“From Block.one’s side the divorce was quite clean,” La Rose says. “They now no longer need to worry about the network, which they didn't really care about and that was costing them time.” Larimer and other senior developers have now started working on EOS code again, under ENF. The foundation has announced grants for companies creating apps for the network.
The launch of Bullish, in La Rose’s opinion, is Block.one’s greatest coup. “They are essentially getting away with $9 billion,” he says. “And they did it in a legal way.” On February 10, a post on ENF’s Medium page announced that it had hired a law firm with the goal of “holding Block.one accountable for its past actions and broken promises.” An accompanying tweet by La Rose hammered the concept home. “Review of ALL possible legal recourse to seek $4.1B in damages underway,” it read. “Let's do this together! #4BillionDAO coming.” “We're victims,” La Rose says. “The community is reclaiming the chain for itself.” Additional reporting by Greg Barber You Might Also Like … 📧 Find the best bargains on quality gear with our Deals newsletter “ Someone is using photos of me to talk to men” First-gen social media users have nowhere to go The truth behind the biggest (and dumbest) battery myths We asked a Savile Row tailor to test all the “best” T-shirts you see in social media ads My kid wants to be an influencer.
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"Public Blockchains Are the New National Economies of the Metaverse | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Tascha Che Ideas Public Blockchains Are the New National Economies of the Metaverse Photo-Illustration: Sam Whitney; Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save When we speak of an economy, we usually refer to a country or a region where interrelated activities of production, consumption, and trade happen. When we speak of blockchains, we speak of decentralized computer networks. On the surface, these two seem unrelated. But with on-chain activities growing at warp speed, the ecosystems of layer 1 public blockchains (the foundational blockchain protocols where decentralized databases and computer programs are run) are starting to look more and more similar to national economies—except the nation in this case is not a physical territory but a decentralized digital network.
The trustless and programmable nature of public blockchains have made it possible to implement new “fiscal” and “monetary” policy tools in the blockchain economies, which in many cases have advantages over the traditional economic policy tools of national governments. In addition, the proof-of-stake mechanism adopted by second-generation public blockchains introduces a de facto “universal basic capital income” for their network “citizens.” This could be a major innovation in how economic systems distribute values among participants, with broader income-distribution implications for years to come as blockchain economies grow. (Disclosure: I hold cryptocurrency and have previously advised crypto funds.) Public blockchains allow anyone to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) on top, which users can interact with. Currently, decentralized finance (DeFi) applications and non-fungible token assets (NFTs) are the two main economic activities on layer 1 blockchains and associated layer 2 chains. (Layer 2 chains are secondary blockchain networks that rely on the underlying layer 1 for security, but typically offer faster and cheaper transactions.) Both activities have grown tremendously in the past couple of years. At the end of November 2021, gross total value locked from DeFi in the top 10 layer 1 blockchain platforms exceeded $250 billion, a year-over-year growth of 1,400 percent. And according to NFTGo.io, the market cap of NFT projects on Ethereum alone reached over $7 billion in November, increasing over 14,500 percent from a year before.
The oldest and largest smart contract blockchain is Ethereum, which started in 2014. But newer chains that boast cheaper transactions and faster settlements, such as Solana and Avalanche, are quickly gaining momentum. Unlike the first-generation blockchains such as Bitcoin that use proof of work (PoW) to protect network security, most newer layer 1 chains are proof-of-stake (PoS) systems. These require transaction validators to lock up—that is, “stake”—an amount of their holdings of the blockchain’s native tokens to prevent malicious attacks. Validators/stakers then get rewarded in the platform’s tokens for providing the transaction validation service.
For example, validators on the Avalanche blockchain are required to stake at least 2,000 AVAX tokens. That’s around $220,000 per validator (using end-2021 AVAX token price). The high staking cost makes it prohibitively expensive for an attacker to gain control of enough validators to compromise the chain’s security.
Almost every activity on a layer 1 chain needs to pay transaction fees to the platform in the chain’s native token. If you want to do anything in the Ethereum nation, you need the ETH token. If you want to enter the Solana nation, you need the SOL token.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg This enables an L1 platform to bootstrap its national economy over time through a flywheel between financial speculation around its native token and actual building of applications and activities in its ecosystem. When the native token price goes up, it attracts more monetary liquidity into the nation, which funds more applications built in its territory. That, in turn, expands use cases and grows the on-chain “gross domestic product,” which attracts more users and creates a bigger network effect. The demand for the native token increases as a result and the native token price goes up.
Such a system is similar to how traditional currencies work for physical nation-state economies. You need USD in almost every economic transaction in the United States. When the US GDP grows (values and numbers of transactions go up), the demand for USD increases, other things being equal. This is one of the reasons why, when an economy grows fast, its currency tends to appreciate against others, barring foreign exchange interventions from the national government.
This is consistent with the price movements of layer 1 chain tokens in recent periods. As blockchain platforms’ economies exploded with the growth of DeFi and NFT, prices of layer 1 native tokens have outperformed the overall crypto market. As of the end of 2021, eight of the top 15 crypto assets by market cap were PoS layer 1 tokens (counting Ethereum, which is moving to PoS). Yet five of them were not in the top-15 list two years ago.
The PoS layer 1 chains can then leverage their monetary flywheel to further grow their network by issuing new tokens. As the on-chain economy grows, demand for the blockchain nation’s native tokens builds, which allows the platform to issue more tokens as rewards to validators without impacting the token’s market price. Those rewards in turn attract more participants into the ecosystem, powering future growth. For example, Solana had grown its validator network by over 20 times in the past year and a half to over 1,300 active validator nodes as of end 2021.
No economy goes up in a straight line forever. Levels of activities always ebb and flow. In the real world, we call this business cycles—economies going through booms and busts. The governments of nation-states have long used fiscal policy (taxes and public spending) and monetary policy (interest rate and money supply) tools to try to smooth out recessions and booms. Blockchain nations also have fiscal policy (transaction fees) and monetary policy (staking yield, token issuance and burn) tools. And in many cases they may work better than the economic policy tools of governments.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg When an economy is overheating with excess demand, a national government typically tries to tighten its fiscal policy by raising tax rates and cutting public expenditures. And when the economy is in recession, it does the opposite.
In reality, though, such counter-cyclical fiscal policies are rarely executed well, due to limited time horizons and judgment errors of decisionmakers. In boom times, fiscal tightening is hard because the government has higher revenues available to spend. When the cookie jar is overflowing, few have the discipline or political fortitude to not eat more cookies. Plus, recency bias can trick the government into believing that if the jar is full today, it will be tomorrow, too, and under-preparing for the eventual downturn. By the time recession hits, the fiscal buffer is too small to meaningfully stimulate the economy without taking on additional debt.
In contrast, blockchain nations’ fiscal policies are preprogrammed in self-executing smart contracts and thus immune to human discretion. Take Ethereum. Think of the gas fee paid to the Ethereum platform on each transaction as a value-added tax or sales tax. The base fee is preprogrammed to adjust depending on the level of network congestion. When the network utilization rate goes over 50 percent (economic boom), the base fee increases by up to 12.5 percent. If the activity level goes under 50 percent (economic recession), the base fee decreases. The counter-cyclicality of the on-chain fiscal policy is enforced by code. No individuals or entities, no matter how powerful they are, can change it on a whim.
On the monetary front, traditional central banks try to adjust interest rates and money supply according to economic cycles to keep the prices of goods and services stable—lowering interest rate and expanding money supply in recessions and doing the opposite during booms. But again, these decisions depend on human discernment, which often has limited foresight. In addition, the impact of monetary policy tends to happen with significant friction and uncertain time lag as it needs to be transmitted through the banking system.
The monetary policy of blockchain economies, on the other hand, does not depend on human judgment and the impact is more direct. On Ethereum, the base fee collected for each transaction is “burned,” reducing money supply. This means that during an economic boom where there are more transactions, more ETH tokens are taken out of circulation, pushing up the value of ETH relative to on-chain products and services and helping to cool the economy. During a recession, the opposite happens, and the lower transaction costs help stimulate more activities. And since the transmission of this monetary policy does not depend on the actions of any financial intermediaries, its effect is likely more immediate.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The proof-of-stake mechanism itself also has profound economic implications. Aside from being a faster and more energy-efficient consensus mechanism compared to proof of work, proof of stake gives blockchain “citizens” sustaining motive to participate in the on-chain economy, efficiently distributes the economic output across the blockchain nation, and provides the base ingredient for an on-chain financial system.
The PoS validator rewards, or “staking yields,” gives users a tangible incentive to hold and stake the underlying layer 1 token beyond the speculative expectation of token price going up, as is the case with Bitcoin. In this respect, the staked layer 1 tokens resemble government bonds—a relatively stable, yield-generating financial instrument backed by the economic output of the nation itself.
The entry barrier to blockchain staking is low. Even if you only have 1 ETH, you can earn a consistent yield through delegated staking. Liquid staking services like Lido make it even easier. Normally, if you want to withdraw your staked tokens from layer 1 chains, there’s an unstaking period when you cannot move your tokens. Liquid staking services remove this lock-up period for a small fee. You can go in and out as you please and also use your staked tokens as collaterals in DeFi to get more liquidity.
In the long term, this increases the stickiness of a chain’s citizenship, boosts price stability of everything denominated in the layer 1 token, and lowers the transaction cost associated with excess price volatility for everyone.
The PoS staking mechanism is also a new way to distribute economic gains across the platform. Traditionally, the GDP of an economy is distributed to its participants in two forms: labor income (salaries, wages and benefits, about 60 percent of GDP in the US) and capital income (profits, dividends, interests, realized capital gains, about 40 percent of GDP). Labor income is the primary way for most people to get a slice of the national economic pie. But labor-replacing technology, globalization, and demographic shifts have shrunk the share of labor incomes across the globe in past decades. And with more progress in automation technologies coming, the trend is not expected to reverse itself anytime soon. As a result, income inequality is becoming a bigger and bigger issue in advanced and emerging market countries alike.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg While it may still take the governments of traditional nation-states many years to reform existing social transfer regimes and implement new policies such as universal basic income, the blockchain nations are in a sense already implementing basic incomes for citizens through PoS staking.
As discussed, the blockchain platforms’ revenues come from two sources: 1) fiscal revenues from transaction fees, and 2) monetary revenues from token issuance seigniorage, i.e. the monetary profit a token issuer gets that stems from the difference between market value of the token and its issuance cost. Part of these revenues are paid as staking yields to citizens, allowing everyone that participates in the platform to share the output of its economy as non-labor earnings. It’s a capital income for the masses.
And these yields are nothing to sneeze at. Currently the staking APY (annual percentage yield) ranges from 5 to 14 percent on different layer 1 chains. These are a lot more attractive than the saving rates offered by traditional banks, but more stable than yields in riskier DeFi products. Just like how US Treasuries provide benchmark interest rates for the financial market and serve as base-layer primitives for other financial products to build on top, layer 1 staking could become a foundational building block of a new on-chain financial system. DeFi products such as Anchor from the Terra blockchain are already using staking on major PoS chains on the backend to offer retail saving products for USD stablecoins.
The blockchain nations are still small. The DeFi total value locked (TVL) on Ethereum, the biggest layer 1 smart contract chain, was $150 billion as of end 2021. If we assume the Ethereum GDP is a third of its TVL as a back-of-envelope calculation, that puts the size of the Ethereum economy at par with Slovenia.
But combined with the advancement in AR/VR, metaverse use cases of public blockchains—such as in online gaming, decentralized communities, and tokenization of traditional assets—are expected to grow exponentially in years to come. It’s likely that we’re only seeing the beginning of the growth of blockchain national economies.
Physical nation-states are beginning to wake up to the potential of digital money. According to the BIS, over 80 percent of central banks in the world are either researching or launching their own CBDC (central bank digital currency). But actual user adoption of retail CBDCs has been limited so far. Perhaps it’s time for nation-state governments to take a page from blockchain nations’ token playbooks in considering how to design a competitive national currency of the future.
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"Binance Hackers Minted $569M in Crypto—Then It Got Complicated | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Lily Hay Newman Andy Greenberg Security Security News This Week: Binance Hackers Minted $569M in Crypto—Then It Got Complicated Photograph: Marco Bello/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save As A Swatting spree spreads across the US, in which false reports of active shooters send police charging into schools, WIRED investigated more than 90 of the incidents and found potential connections between many of them. “In speaking to a number of people who experienced it, I can tell you that the anxiety and fear—it was real to them for 15 minutes,” Amanda Klinger, director of programs and cofounder of the Educator’s School Safety Network , told WIRED. “There’s a period of time in these incidents where people are literally running for their lives, law enforcement is responding with their weapons, and people think it's the real thing.” Even after extensive sanctions meant to isolate Russia from the global economy amidst its ongoing war with Ukraine, investigators around the world are working to curb the ongoing influx of capital to Russian military and paramilitary groups.
Former Uber executive Joe Sullivan was convicted this week of obstructing a Federal Trade Commission investigation and failure to report a felony, a development that is being watched closely by the tech industry because it is likely the first time a corporate executive has faced criminal charges related to a data breach. The Biden administration's new executive order addressing privacy seems like more of a Band-Aid than a panacea , as it attempts to reassure Europeans that their data is safe when stored in the US, despite government surveillance.
Meanwhile, Meta released findings on more than 400 malicious Android and iOS apps that it says were harvesting Facebook credentials to take over users' accounts. And we took a look at the toll of living your life online, the potential erosion of privacy that comes with consistent social media posting , and the ways it can impact your sense of self.
Plus, there’s more. Each week, we highlight the news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click on the headlines below to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.
Another day, another massive hack in the cryptocurrency industry. But this one is strange.
Binance revealed Friday that unidentified hackers managed to exploit a flaw in the company's BNB Chain crypto token, allowing them to mint 2 million of the company’s decentralized tokens worth a total of $569 million. That money wasn’t actually stolen from Binance, in other words, but rather fabricated out of thin air thanks to a flaw in the security of Binance’s cryptocurrency. But the hack nonetheless seemed poised to flood the market with BNB and thus reduce its value for legitimate owners, while allowing the hackers to walk away with half a billion dollars.
Unfortunately for those hackers, even they didn’t seem prepared for their sudden windfall. Cryptocurrency-tracing firm Elliptic found that they quickly traded away some fraction of their tokens for a variety of other cryptocurrencies. That allowed them to obtain about $53 million in Ethereum-based tokens. But other cryptocurrencies that they traded their BNB for, like Tether and USDC, are more centrally controlled, allowing the funds to be frozen. Binance, meanwhile, managed to temporarily shut down its BNB blockchain to prevent the hackers’ newly mined currency from moving further. “So we have a very sophisticated exploit, managing to mint yourself $569 million,” says Elliptic research lead Thibaud Madelin. “But what followed was a complete shambles, to be honest.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the end, Elliptic believes the hackers kept hold of less than 10 percent of their loot—not bad for a day’s work but little more than a blip in the wild world of digital money.
A joint advisory from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, and the NSA warned that the network of an unnamed military agency or contractor had been breached by a so-called “advanced persistent threat” hacker group, an industry code phrase for state-sponsored hackers. According to the alert, the spies maintained their access inside the network for around 10 months, penetrating a Microsoft Exchange server where they installed a commonly used backdoor known as China Chopper. The hackers also used a tool called Impacket to move from machine to machine and another tool called CovalentStealer to siphon data from their targets. As is often the case with government alerts, the advisory didn't attribute the breach to any particular country's government, nor even a known hacker group. The eagle-eyed (or vulture-eyed) Register spotted that the advisory initially included a box at the top suggesting organizations “protect against Russian-state sponsored malicious cyber activity,” which was later deleted. But others, like cybersecurity firm AttackIQ, point to Chinese calling cards in the intrusion.
Since early this year, hackers have been distributing a tainted version of the Tor Browser that collects personal data about Chinese users including form data they submit, browsing history, location data, and computer name, according to security firm Kaspersky. The Tor Browser is meant to be an anonymity-focused tool that is often used in countries like China where users are seeking to circumvent government-imposed internet restrictions, tracking, and censorship. Kaspersky found that the attackers advertised the malicious app by including a link to download it in a video posted to a popular Chinese-language YouTube channel. The video has more than 64,000 views. The installer for the malicious browser includes a compromised version of Tor that siphons victim data and sends it to attackers.
Isabela Fernandes, executive director of the nonprofit Tor Project, told CyberScoop that there is now a patch available. “Basically this ‘poisoned’ Tor Browser modifies the update URL so it cannot be updated normally. What we did was to add a redirect so we are responding to the modified URL, this way people will update. Now their URL is a working update URL.” As part of its push to crack down on robocalling, the US Federal Communications Commission said this week that it is taking seven voice over IP services off of its trusted carriers list unless they add legally required robocall protections. The move would essentially block the services from being able to complete calls in the US. “Fines alone aren’t enough,” the FCC wrote in its announcement. “Providers that don’t follow our rules and make it easy to scam consumers will now face swift consequences.” You Might Also Like … 📨 Make the most of chatbots with our AI Unlocked newsletter Taylor Swift, Star Wars, Stranger Things , and Deadpool have one man in common Generative AI is playing a surprising role in Israel-Hamas disinformation The new era of social media looks as bad for privacy as the last one Johnny Cash’s Taylor Swift cover predicts the boring future of AI music Your internet browser does not belong to you 🔌 Charge right into summer with the best travel adapters , power banks , and USB hubs Senior Writer X Senior Writer X Topics security roundup Russia cryptocurrency FCC Andrew Couts Andy Greenberg Lily Hay Newman Andy Greenberg David Gilbert David Gilbert David Gilbert Justin Ling Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"A $50 Million Hack Just Showed That the DAO Was All Too Human | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Klint Finley Business A $50 Million Hack Just Showed That the DAO Was All Too Human Robert Hanson/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Sometime in the wee hours Friday, a thief made off with $50 million of virtual currency.
The victims are investors in a strange fund called the DAO , or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, who poured more than $150 million of a bitcoin-style currency called Ether into the project.
Code was supposed to eliminate the need to trust humans. But humans, it turns out, are tough to take out of the equation.
The people who created the DAO saw it as a decentralized investment fund. Instead of leaving decisions to a few partners, anyone who invested would have a say in which companies to fund. The more you contributed, the more weight your vote carried. And the distributed structure meant no one could run off with the money.
That was the plan, anyway.
The DAO is built on Ethereum , a system designed for building decentralized applications. Its creators hoped to prove you can build a more democratic financial institution, one without centralized control or human fallibility. Instead, the DAO led to a heist that raises philosophical questions about the viability of such systems. Code was supposed to eliminate the need to trust humans. But humans, it turns out, are tough to take out of the equation.
DAO developers and Ethereum enthusiasts are trying to figure out how they might reverse the theft. The good news is that time is on their side. The thief transferred the stolen funds into a clone of the DAO that likely includes code that, as in the original system, delays payouts for a few weeks.
Stephan Tual, the COO of Slock.it, the company that built the DAO, says the thief probably never expected to be able to spend the ether. Each unit of ether is unique and traceable. If the hacker tries to sell any of the stolen ether in a cryptocurrency market, the system will flag it.
The Biggest Crowdfunding Project Ever—the DAO—Is Kind of a Mess Why Wall Street Is Embracing the Blockchain—Its Biggest Threat The Schism Over Bitcoin Is How Bitcoin Is Supposed to Work "It's like stealing the Mona Lisa," he says. "Great, congratulations, but what do you do with it? You can't sell it, it's too big to be sold." The DAO is a piece of software known as a "smart contract"--essentially an agreement that enforces itself via code rather than courts. But like all software, smart contracts do exactly what their makers program them to do—and sometimes those programs have unintended consequences.
It's not clear yet exactly how the hack worked, says Andrew Miller, a PhD student at the University of Maryland who studies smart contracts and helped audit Ethereum's code last year. But he says the attacker probably exploited a programming mistake that's exceedingly common in smart contracts.
Let's say you have $50 in the bank and you want to withdraw that from an ATM. You insert your card, punch in your PIN number and then request that $50. Before the machine spits out the cash it will check your balance. Once it spits out the cash, it will debit $50 from that balance. Then the machine asks you if you'd like to process another transaction. You tap "yes" and try to take $50 again. But the ATM sees that your balance is now $0 and refuses. It asks you again if you want to process another transaction, so this time you say "no." Your session ends.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Now imagine that the ATM didn't record your new balance until you ended the session. You could keep requesting $50 again and again until you finally told the machine you didn't want to process any more transactions—or the machine ran out of money.
The DAO hacker was probably able to run a transaction that automatically repeated itself over and over again before the system checked the balance, Miller says. That would allow anyone to pull far more money out of the fund than they put in.
The programming language that Ethereum developers use to write smart contracts, Solidity, makes it really easy to make this sort of mistake, says Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell University computer scientist who co-authored a paper earlier this year pointing out a number of potential pitfalls in the DAO's design. Others have previously spotted places in the DAO code that would have made such a theft possible. Sirer says the DAO developers have tried to be vigilant about preventing such flaws, but because it's such an easy mistake to make, it's not surprising that instances of the bug escaped notice.
As bad as the bug was, Sirer still thinks that both the DAO and Ethereum are worthwhile experiments. The DAO helped raise awareness of the idea of smart contracts, which Sirer thinks will eventually become extremely important to how the world conducts transactions. The project has also called attention to some of the biggest technical challenges.
"This is a rite of passage for the project," he says.
The Ethereum team is now debating how, and whether, to refund the stolen funds. Ethereum works much like Bitcoin does: the system records each transaction in a global ledger that resides on every Ethereum user's computer. The Ethereum team could release a new version of the software that tweaks this ledger to essentially reverse all of the DAO heist transactions. If enough people installed this version, it would be like the hack never happened. That's exactly what many people in the community, including Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin and the Slock.it team would like to see happen.
'No one wants to see this fail.' "Fourteen percent of all ether is in the DAO," Tual says. "No one wants to see this fail." But others think that reversing the transactions could have a damaging effect on people's perceptions of ether an cryptocurrencies in general.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Alex Van de Sande, a user experience designer who has contributed to several Ethereum-related projects, and who put money into the DAO, says he believes other ways exist to retrieve the missing funds. Because the thief transferred the pilfered ether into a clone of the DAO, de Sande points out, it may well have the exact same security vulnerability as the original. Developers could just steal the ether back.
The idea behind Ethereum, much like Bitcoin, was to create a computer system that facilitated transactions using the immutable rules of mathematics. The code would eliminate the need to trust anyone. If people can simply reverse transactions they didn't mean to make, it proves that people, not mathematics are really in charge of the system, de Sande says. If the code did something people didn't mean it to do, then people will have to live the consequences.
The fact that a fork is being discussed at all proves that despite the Ethereum team's best efforts, machines will always be subject to the messy politics of the human world. But that also might end up saving the project. The heist has divided people and exposed the inevitability of human weakness. But it's also bringing people together to fix things. Humanity is making that possible, not mathematics.
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"Inside the Race to Build the World's Fastest Bitcoin Miner | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Robert McMillan Business Inside the Race to Build the World's Fastest Bitcoin Miner Avalon Asics CEO Yifu Guo.
Photo: Alec Liu Save this story Save Save this story Save There's more than one way to make money from the Bitcoin craze, which has seen the value of the digital currency increase more than six-fold over the past few months. You can do it the old-fashioned way: buying low and selling high. But for the sophisticated digital-currency investor, there's a whole other world of Bitcoin speculation: the Bitcoin mining rig.
Like the currency itself, this strangely lucrative game is heating up -- in a big way.
One mining rig -- available for preorder at a cost of about $1,800 in February -- is now selling for more than $22,000 on eBay. And it hasn't even shipped yet.
Over the past year, a handful of companies have raced to build a new generation of computers that are specifically designed to mint digital money, and many speculators across the Bitcoin world are dying to get their hands on the latest hardware. This week, one of these companies, Butterfly Labs, is finally shipping its first custom-designed machines, six months behind schedule.
If Bitcoins are the fiat currency alternative for techno libertarians, then Bitcoin miners are the digital mint operators who keep the whole thing running. Bitcoin transactions are not registered with any central bank or brokerage firm or website. They're logged by a peer-to-peer network of computers. These computers keep track of who's transferring Bitcoins to whom, and then -- every 10 minutes -- they enter a kind of cryptographer's lottery, with the winner getting paid 25 Bitcoins for their work. That's how new Bitcoins get into the network. It's also how the Bitcoin miners earn their keep.
For Bitcoin miners, the name of the game is cryptography. And the lottery ticket is a hash -- a number that represents a big bunch of data and is created via cryptographic algorithms. If one miner -- or a group of miners -- can take the transactions on the Bitcoin network and convert them into more cryptographic hashes faster than someone else, they have a better chance of winning that 25 Bitcoin payout. As Bitcoins have skyrocketed in value, the Bitcoin miners have been throwing more and more computing power onto the network.
When Bitcoins were first introduced, you could win the hashing lottery with a regular old personal computer. Now that's pretty much impossible. In fact, it now takes about 9 million times as much processing power to produce Bitcoins as it did in the beginning. So, for any Bitcoin miner to have a reasonable chance of winning, they have to seriously up their game.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg That's where the new mining gear comes into play.
In the past year, three companies, Butterfly Labs , Avalon Asics , and Asicminer led a race to produce a new generation of computers built with custom-designed chips (they're called ASICS: application-specific integrated circuits) that do nothing but create tickets for the Bitcoin mining lottery.
You plug one of these machines into your computer, run special mining software, and sit back and wait for the Bitcoins. But they're so powerful that they're making things harder for other miners. "The difficulty has been skyrocketing lately as these ASICS have been coming online," says Gavin Andresen, chief scientist with the Bitcoin foundation.
Last summer, Bitcoin miner Scott Novich bet on Butterfly Labs. It seemed like a reasonable bet at the time because Butterfly had already shipped specialized Bitcoin mining rigs that, when pooled with other miners, were cranking out an average of four to six Bitcoins per month for Novich, a graduate student at Rice University. Butterfly had the best reputation; it had shipped well regarded mining rigs in the past. And its miners -- which look like stretched out versions of the Roku media player -- simply looked cool.
So last July, Novich and a few friends shelled out an advance payment of about $1,200 for a Butterfly miner that the company said would be able to perform more than 60 billion hashes per second. His current mining rig performs 750 million hashes per second.
The Butterfly gear was supposed to ship by November. Today Novich is still waiting.
The problem was that Butterfly -- based out of Kansas City, Missouri -- banked on a cool design and a brand new chip manufacturing process and ended up getting in over its head. "We've hit quite a few snags along the way, says Butterfly Chief Operations Officer Josh Zerlan.
The company had to redo its initial chip designs, but the worst snag was in November, when the Butterfly got a hold of its first chip samples. They were basically too hot to work, Zerlan says. "The plastic packaging on the top of the chip just couldn't exhaust the heat fast enough, so it basically melted the package." Butterfly Labs ) Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg And so, with customers growing angrier by the day, Butterfly was soundly beaten in the great Bitcoin mining race by Avalon Asics. Avalon used a less-cutting-edge chip manufacturing process, and it didn't pay too much attention to aesthetics, but it managed to ship out its first boxy, 67 Gigahash units back in February.
To hear CEO Yifu Guo tell it, Avalon won because they bet everything on a network of friends, college buddies, and acquaintances in China -- who helped them build their first 300 systems in four months. After spending September and October last year working with "friends or people that were really smart" designing the systems, Guo flew to Shenzhen, China, where he spent another two months negotiating with the suppliers who would help him build his Bitcoin mining machines.
Guo called on his network to lend him cars, to introduce him to parts suppliers, even to ship packages. Avalon had sketched out the chip in the U.S., but it then paid (using Bitcoins, natch) a group of engineers at a Chinese computer company to build out the chip's design using specialized chip-making software that created specifications that the chip's manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, could actually use.
"Nothing happens in Asia if you don't know somebody. It doesn't matter how much money you have," Guo says. "That's really what it came down to." Those folks who've been lucky enough to get their hands on one of these early Avalon systems are cleaning up. Miner Jeff Garzik was the first person to take possession of a Avalon machine. Last year, he plunked down preorder money for a variety of custom ASIC rigs, including $1,300 for his Avalon system. "At the time, it was a very risky bet," he said in an email interview. "None of the ASIC vendors were shipping, and all were funding their efforts through a pre-order model, akin to Kickstarter. This meant any buyer was paying months in advance for hardware that did not exist, and not even a guarantee of a refund upon failure." But Garzik's Avalon bet paid off. Big time. He got his system the end of January.
Within 20 hours, it had earned him nearly 15 Bitcoins. Today it cranks out just under 4 Bitcoins per day. That's about $500 at current Bitcoin exchange rates. "The first mover advantage is enormous," Garzik said in an email interview.
Avalon expects to ship another 1,200 rigs within the next month.
Until this week, Butterfly customers like Novich had been left on the sidelines, watching the compute power on the Bitcoin network rise up, day by day, while they waited.
Butterfly's Zerlan says the experience has been "very painful" and some customers are extremely angry. But reviewers and first-in-line customers are finally getting their hands on Butterfly's systems. Zerlan says that customers will still be able to make money mining Bitcoins. It will just take more time.
But with each new computer that ships, and each new adventurer that gets into Bitcoin mining, the bar is getting higher. Butterfly has already taken thousands of orders for the new systems. And Asicminer, which is both selling its own custom-designed machines and mining the Bitcoins itself, has already brought new custom ASIC systems to play.
So a year from now, the 750 megahash mining rig that Scott Novich is running at home may not be worth the power it sucks up. It really depends on how much a Bitcoin is worth in 2014. And that's anyone's guess.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Kim Zetter Security Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold E-Gold founder Doug Jackson wanted to solve the world's economic woes, but got an electronic ankle bracelette for his trouble.
Save this story Save Save this story Save MELBOURNE, Florida – In a sparsely decorated office suite two floors above a neighborhood of strip malls and car dealerships, former oncologist Douglas Jackson is struggling to resuscitate a dying dream.
Jackson, 51, is the maverick founder of E-Gold, the first-of-its-kind digital currency that was once used by millions of people in more than a hundred countries. Today the currency is barely alive.
Stacks of cardboard evidence boxes in the office, marked "U.S. Secret Service," help explain why, as does the pager-sized black box strapped to Jackson's ankle: a tracking device that tells his probation officer whenever he leaves or enters his home.
"It's supposed to be jail," he says. "Only it's self-administered." Jackson, whose six-month house arrest ends this month, recently met with Wired.com for his first in-depth interview since pleading guilty last year to money laundering-related crimes, and to operating an unlicensed money transmitting service. His tale is one of countless upstarts and entrepreneurs who approached the internet with big dreams, only to be chastened by sobering realities. But his rise and fall also offers a unique glimpse at the web's frontier halcyon days, and the wilderness landscape that still covers much of the unregulated and un-policed web, where fraud artists prospect for riches alongside pioneers, and sometimes stake, and win, a claim on their territory.
Despite the shackle, Jackson's conviction isn't black and white. In a twist still unacknowledged by prosecutors, Jackson turned E-Gold for a time into one of law enforcement's most productive honey pots, providing information that helped lead to the arrest and conviction of some of the web’s most wanted credit card thieves and hackers. He’s now working with regulatory agencies to try to bring back E-Gold, steps he says he would have taken voluntarily years ago if authorities had given him a chance.
Following his story, the picture that emerges of Jackson is not a portrait of a calculating criminal. Rather it is one of a naive visionary who thought his dream was bigger than any financial regulations, who got in over his head, and who finally struggled, too late, to make up for his missteps.
"There was no indication at all that anyone had a problem with what he was doing," says Richard Timberlake, a former economics professor at the University of Georgia and author of several books on U.S. banking. Timberlake visited Jackson at his E-Gold office in 1997 and vouches for Jackson's innocent intentions. "He was always very honest and very forthright in what he was trying to do as a business. Even the Federal Reserve believed it was legitimate." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg — The story of the first digital currency backed entirely by gold and silver began in 1995, while Jackson was still treating cancer patients. A longtime student of economic history, Jackson was convinced that gold was a superior currency to paper money, despite the consensus among professional economists that a gold-standard prevented governments from responding quickly to monetary crises; when an economy faltered, treasuries couldn't easily manufacture gold bars to stimulate it.
The United States dropped its reliance on gold in 1971, but Jackson doubted the wisdom of this move. "Many a paper currency has spun out of orbit in a calamitous trajectory," he once wrote. "There has never been an instance of gold or silver being discarded as worthless." It was time, Jackson mused, for a radical rethink of money. Had he been born in another era, he could scarcely have acted on his beliefs. But the nascent internet changed everything. The international, 24-hour churn of e-commerce cried out for a monetary system that transcended borders and time zones. So in early 1996, Jackson began programming a back-end system for a new electronic currency, practicing medicine by day, and coding by night.
He hired a software engineer to create the user interface, and four months later launched E-Gold.
As Jackson envisioned it, E-Gold was a private, international currency that would circulate independent of government controls, and stand impervious to the market's highs and lows. Brimming with evangelical enthusiasm, Jackson proclaimed it a cure for the modern monetary system's ills and described it at one point as "an epochal change in human destiny" and "probably the greatest benefit to humanity that's ever been thought of." Though E-Gold would fail to change the world, libertarians and privacy-conscious netizens liked the service, which allowed them to open accounts anonymously. And international sellers appreciated the ease with which they could transact across borders Over the next few years, Jackson drained his retirement accounts, sold his medical practice and charged credit cards to raise more than $1 million to nurture the fledgling venture. Cynics might have considered him just another internet hustler looking to strike it rich, but those who knew him say he was a true believer. "He truly thinks that having a gold-backed currency is what's needed in the world," says James Clement, a libertarian attorney who met Jackson in 2003. "I don't think anyone would have stuck with it ... other than that he thinks it's extremely important and somebody has to do this." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Jackson drew his inspiration from economist Vera Smith's influential 1936 treatise The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Bank Alternative , which challenged the tenets of banking. "She wrote in the depths of the Depression, and poses some of the most compelling questions about central banking systems," Jackson says. "Central banks should attenuate monetary disorder and prevent fluctuations, but ironically they sometimes amplify it." His commitment started to pay off in 2000, when some 50,000 transactions suddenly passed through his system in just two months – more than the previous three and a half years combined. By that November, E-Gold, now with 20 employees, had processed 1 million transactions, and Jackson's business reputation was growing. He was invited to speak at the prestigious World Gold Council conference in Rome, the gold mining industry's leading event. In 2001, the growth continued, with customer accounts expanding from 134,000 to nearly 288,000, holding about $16 million in value.
Initially, Jackson stored the company's reserves of sovereign coins and ingots in safety deposit boxes in banks around town. When this proved inconvenient for auditing, the company bought an office safe to hold the gold and platinum. "The silver was just stacked around the office," Jackson says. Ultimately, he converted the sovereigns and ingots to bars and moved them to bank vaults in London and Dubai. At E-Gold's peak, the currency would be backed by 3.8 metric tons of gold, valued at more than $85 million.
Continued from page 1 Despite the sudden burst of success, the venture was plagued with setbacks. E-Gold's servers buckled under the growing traffic load, hanging transactions and frustrating users. Copycat entrepreneurs erected their own gold-backed systems – e-Bullion, GoldMoney and OSGold – and poached E-Gold customers. When Jackson finally scaled up his infrastructure in 2003, solving the performance problems, cyber scammers entered the scene, launching a sortie of phishing attacks against users, tricking thousands of them into disclosing their E-Gold passwords, then draining the accounts.
Eventually Jackson deployed an anti-phishing remedy, and business rebounded in September 2004. A year later, customer accounts numbered about 3.5 million in 165 countries, with 1,000 new accounts opening every day. Millions of dollars were zipping through E-Gold's system 24-hours-a-day, bouncing between the U.S. and Europe, South America and Asia. E-Gold collected 1 percent of every transaction, with a cap at 50 cents.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg E-Gold was now second only to PayPal in the online payment industry. At last, Jackson says, he felt relief.
"We had been stuck year-in and year-out on whatever crisis-du-jour required our immediate attention," he says. Now "we felt like we'd finally achieved a turning point." But E-Gold's increasing popularity with customers drew less-welcome attention as well.
The federal government began to take notice in 2003, when the Secret Service launched an undercover operation against a website called Shadowcrew – a legendary forum for "carders" who trafficked in stolen credit and debit card numbers. Cyber crooks in Eastern Europe were stealing millions of card numbers in phishing and skimming scams, then passing the data to accomplices around the world. The low-end cashers coded the numbers onto blank cards, then siphoned money from ATMs and transmitted the bulk of proceeds back to the former Soviet bloc.
When authorities monitored the criminals' communications, they discovered that E-Gold was among the carders' preferred money-transfer methods, because the system allowed users to open accounts and transfer funds anonymously anywhere in the world.
When the Shadowcrew investigation wrapped in October 2004 with the shuttering of the site – and the arrest of more than a dozen members – the Justice Department turned its sights on E-Gold. Its goal was to force the service to comply with regulations governing money-transmitting services like Western Union and Travelex. Federal regulations required those businesses to register with the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) , to be licensed in states that required it, to diligently authenticate the identity of customers and to file suspicious activity reports on shady-looking customers. But E-Gold wasn't doing this.
Jackson believed E-Gold was exempt from regulation because it was a payment system not a money transmitter. And although it did transfer money, customers could park balances in their accounts, as with a bank.
But Jackson insisted E-Gold wasn't a bank, either. It was something new – something the world and the U.S. government hadn't seen before. He wasn't alone in this view. Many internet-based payment services, including PayPal during its early years, believed they were exempt from regulation. They mostly flew under the radar of prosecutors until something brought them into the spotlight.
Jackson says he got the first inkling of the rampant, organized crime in his system when he read a June 2005 New York Times story about the growth of the carding forums.
"To my horror ... E-Gold is mentioned in this ghastly, horrible way of it being, you know, the bitch of criminals," he says.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg He concedes he knew that Ponzi schemers and other scammers sometimes used his system , but he'd always responded to government subpoenas for information about suspicious customer accounts. So he contacted the Secret Service to ask why the agency hadn't sought his help to track the crooks in the Times story. The agency, which was already secretly targeting E-Gold, ignored him. (The Secret Service didn't respond to interview inquiries for this story.) The hammer dropped on E-Gold around 5 p.m. on a mild day in mid-December 2005. A herd of Chevy Suburbans wheeled up to Jackson's house and expelled more than a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents. Simultaneously across town, the Justice Department's "Operation Goldwire" unfolded with more agents raiding the offices of Gold and Silver Reserve, the company that operates E-Gold. A third group descended on a co-location facility in Orlando where E-Gold Limited, a holding company for E-Gold's assets, racked its database servers.
The feds carted away more than 100 boxes of electronic records and paper files, including birth certificates, photos and a deed to the Jackson family burial plot. The gold and silver reserves remained safe overseas, but the government froze the company's domestic bank accounts. Jackson's venture was dissolving around him.
Jackson wasn't sure what the feds hoped to find in all those records; once E-Gold got its systems back online he turned to his database for answers.
Continued from page 2 He scoured the system for suspicious transactions using key words like "cvv," dumps" and "cob," and the names of carders he'd read in the Times.
He quickly discovered the disturbing truth about what his libertarian dream had become. "I found out there was quite a bit of stuff going on which law enforcement knew about, but wasn't asking us about," he says. "I found, holy smokes, there is a continuing pattern of these so-called carders. There's, like, a ring that I can distinguish." One user named "Segvec" received more than half a million dollars from four others, including a Ukrainian named "Maksik" who sent a rapid stream of cash totaling $300,000. In the "memo" field of the transactions – where the sender can state a reason for the payment – Maksik noted that $17,000 was "for beer." Another three transactions totaling $89,000 sent over a week's time were supposedly for Sony Vaio computers.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg A New York account-holder named "Potluck" had a pattern of buying $6,000 in postal money orders twice a month, then exchanging them for e-Gold to send to Ukraine. Over a year, he'd transmitted about $150,000.
Jackson had uncovered a constellation of shady accounts doing business with one another. He watched in amazement as the criminal activity expanded before his eyes, and balances in several accounts ballooned, with no sign that the account holder intended to move it out. Segvec alone amassed more than $700,000 in digital gold.
"They weren't just using us as a good vehicle to trade their data, they were parking value in our system," Jackson says. E-Gold had unwittingly become banker to the underworld.
Because users could sign up for E-Gold with aliases, there was no easy way for Jackson to determine the real identity of many of his suspects. But the criminals became vulnerable the moment they converted their virtual currency to local cash. This required them to do business with an E-Gold money exchanger – the online equivalent of currency exchangers at international airports – who'd ask for valid ID and contact information. Sometimes the criminals wanted their cash loaded to a debit card and mailed to a drop address, or wired to a traditional bank account; exchangers would have this data, too.
Jackson reached out to about a dozen exchangers in Europe and elsewhere with the account names he was tracking. Some criminals had provided the exchangers with fake credentials, but a surprising number had given their real names or addresses. Jackson soon had the identities of some of the most wanted figures in the underground.
One money exchanger in Northern Ireland revealed that "Segvec" routinely had packages sent to a Tokyo remailer, who forwarded them to a "Stephen Ceres" in Miami. The same exchanger also sold "Stephen Ceres" a Card One debit card with a daily load limit of $9,500. Jackson obtained a list of transactions on the card that linked it to a slew of ATM withdrawals in Miami suburbs. A storm of withdrawals during one five-minute period yielded the cardholder $8,000 in cash.
Jackson, who had been snubbed by the Secret Service and FBI, took the information he uncovered to the U.S. Postal Inspector Service, providing investigators with names, addresses and transaction histories. The postal inspectors passed the information to overseas allies, the FBI, and eventually to the Secret Service as well.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It was a devil's bargain. Once the feds got a taste of what Jackson could provide, the postal agents began peppering him with requests for more data on other accounts, promising Jackson they'd follow up with a formal court order or subpoena later. He cooperated fully, despite the fact that it violated his user agreement with customers. "We never did get any legal cover whatsoever," he says ruefully. "We never got our trap-and-trace. We never got our pen register." In March 2006, inspectors asked him for information on a carder named "Jilsi," whom Jackson traced to a money exchanger in the United Kingdom. The exchanger gave him a real name – Renu Subramaniam – a 2-year-old confirmed phone number and the time and location of deposits Subramaniam had made to two London banks. Jackson passed the information to inspectors who told him that the phone number, if correct, would be "the break in the case we have been waiting for, for quite a long time." It wasn't long before carders were being taken down. In May 2007, Markus Kellerer, aka Matrix 001, was arrested in Germany. In July 2007, Subramaniam, who had been an administrator on a carding site called DarkMarket, was arrested in Britain. That same month, authorities in Florida arrested Julio Lopez, aka Blinky, who was connected to a ring of Cuban carders. And last year in Miami, authorities arrested Albert Gonzalez, aka Segvec, allegedly one of the masterminds behind the hack of TJX and other businesses. Jackson had provided authorities with information on all of them.
An FBI agent who was involved in the arrest of a number of carders, but asked not to be identified because he wasn't authorized to speak, acknowledged that information Jackson provided was "instrumental in helping track people down." A year after he began his probe, Jackson began blocking the accounts responsible for the suspicious activity, preventing suspected crooks from getting their loot. E-Gold was on its way to becoming clean, relatively speaking.
As far as the feds were concerned, however, it was too late. A few months later, in April 2007, the Justice Department wrapped up its four-year-long investigation by indicting Jackson and his colleagues on federal charges of money laundering, conspiracy and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "Douglas Jackson and his associates operated a sophisticated and widespread international money remitting business, unsupervised and unregulated by any entity in the world, which allowed for anonymous transfers of value at a click of a mouse," said U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor for the District of Columbia in a press release. "Not surprisingly, criminals of every stripe gravitated to E-Gold as a place to move their money with impunity. As alleged in the indictment, the defendants in this case knowingly allowed them to do so and profited from their crimes." Clement, the attorney, disputes the government's depiction of Jackson. "They automatically assume that E-Gold somehow made it easy for these people involved in money laundering, or [sought criminals] as clients," says Clement. "But that's completely the opposite of Doug's attitude toward any kind of illegal behavior. It would be crazy for somebody to seek out that kind of business." Jackson, who'd hocked his future to start E-Gold, now faced the potential of a federal prison term. He was frustrated and confused.
"It never crossed my mind that anyone could seriously want people like us in prison," he says. "But I guess my bigger fear was that we would go bankrupt, and there would be a train wreck of people that had trusted value to us who couldn't get their money." Timberlake, the economics professor, is convinced that Jackson's radical dream, his goal of upsetting the economic status quo and overturning the government's monopoly on money, is what really got E-Gold targeted.
"No matter how innocent a person is you can always find a law that government agents can use to convict him of something," Timberlake says, "And this is a perfect example of it. Any time anybody tries to produce money, the federal government is going to be on their tail." Continued from page 3 After a year-and-a-half of court wrangling and negotiations, Jackson pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting service and conspiracy to commit money laundering. In November he was sentenced to 36 months of supervised released – including six months of house arrest and electronic monitoring, and 300 hours of community service. In addition to forfeiting about $1.2 million to the government, his two companies – Gold and Silver Reserve and E-Gold Limited – were fined $300,000, to be paid in $10,000 monthly installments beginning last month.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The plea agreement is conditional on Jackson revamping his business to comply with regulations governing money-transmitting services – a goal that, Jackson concedes, faces many hurdles. To begin the process of compliance, he suspended the creation of new accounts. Existing customers are now required to submit a government-issued photo ID and proof of residence to authenticate their name, address and other details, and are limited to $1,000 to $3,000 a month in transactions until they pass muster. Customers in high-risk countries – such as Nigeria, Russia and Ukraine – are suspended from making any transactions at all for now. Their money is locked indefinitely in E-Gold's servers.
Jackson, who always considered himself one of the good guys, acknowledges today that he might have done a better job of policing his system from the start. "In hindsight there's any number of things that would have been a smarter or better way of approaching things," he says.
Back in his Melbourne office, the blinds are drawn against the harsh sun, and a wall calendar serves as the room's sole decor. A belt and freshly dry-cleaned dress shirt, still swathed in plastic wrap, hang from a metal shelf. A one-pound plastic jug of protein powder on Jackson's desk serves as a reminder of the weight he's lost since his legal troubles began. When asked what toll the trouble has taken on his family – Jackson and his wife are currently living in different states – there's a long silence before he clears his throat.
"It's been a source of distress," he says finally. "Ten years ago I was an affluent physician." Although E-Gold was occasionally profitable, Jackson only drew a salary, like his employees. The two upscale homes he once owned with his wife are long gone. Now his wife and 12-year-old son occupy half a duplex in Pennsylvania near her family, and Jackson lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Melbourne with his 17-year-old son, while the latter finishes high school, and Jackson and his staff attempt to rebuild the business.
Jackson has finally registered E-Gold with FinCEN, and has begun applying to states for money transmitting licenses. The company is also blocking people who appear on the Treasury Department's list of Specially Designated Nationals and plans to follow bank procedures for verifying customer income and sources of transmitted funds. There are other plans in works to clean up the system as well.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg There's a daunting hill to climb before E-Gold will be operational again, and it remains to be seen whether there will be a market for a scrubbed-down, government-compliant E-Gold. But Jackson seems relieved to be headed in this direction.
"One of the biggest results of this is that we're getting to the place we wanted to be anyway, which is to have some sort of an explicit set of standards to build against," he says.
He maintains that he would have done what authorities now want him to do, if they'd just worked with him to devise a plan, instead of treating him like a criminal.
Now, after all of E-Gold ups and down, Jackson hasn't lost his optimism for the venture, or his knack for florid prose. As he wrote on his blog last year, he looks forward to transforming E-Gold from a marginal player to a respected institution – one, he says, that will serve to "advance the material welfare of mankind." (Photos by Chris Livingston) See Also: Confessions of a Cyber Mule E-Gold Gets Tough on Crime I Was a Cybercrook for the FBI E-Gold Founder Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering E-Gold Founder Calls Indictment a Farce Wired 10.01: In Gold We Trust Cybercrime Supersite 'DarkMarket' Was FBI Sting, Documents Confirm X X Topics carding Crime cumbajohny segvec Threat Level Andy Greenberg Andy Greenberg Andrew Couts Lily Hay Newman David Gilbert David Gilbert David Gilbert Justin Ling Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Julian Dibbell In Gold We Trust Save this story Save Save this story Save From gun-wielding libertarians to radical Muslims, an unlikely global cabal is plotting financial revolution. And they're putting their money where the Web is.
Thirty miles south of Florida's Cape Canaveral lies the town of Melbourne, home to the Action Gun pistol range, where, on a balmy Thursday afternoon, James Ray stands calmly firing round after Glock 9-mm round at a photocopied image of Adolf Hitler. Ray supplied the target himself. He purchased it on the Web site of one of his favorite nonprofit organizations (Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership), and its ideological content is not what you'd call subtle: Against the background of a standard ring target, the Führer stands in full Sieg heil mode, his arm up high and his sternum right in the bull's-eye, above a caption that reads ALL IN FAVOR OF GUN CONTROL RAISE YOUR RIGHT HAND. By the time Ray has had enough of the Glock, the target is nicely perforated. Then he picks up his .44 Magnum hand cannon and blows Adolf pretty much to bits.
Yes, Jim Ray is a gun freak. But as it happens, the purpose of today's visit to the pistol range is not to huff powder fumes or celebrate the Second Amendment. He's here to show that there's a type of money you can believe in without also having to believe in the authority of the state. He's here to offer a glimpse of a world in which wealth resides ultimately not in flimsy pieces of government-issue paper but in rock-solid slabs of $279-an-ounce metal. He's here, in short, to demonstrate the vanguard of monetary technology: a 5,000-year-old form of cash called gold.
Or in this case, e-gold, the world's first 100 percent precious metal-backed Internet currency, with which Ray pays for his outings at the gun range and a lot more besides. The private currency was launched five years ago and is now operated by two separate but tightly linked companies: e-gold Ltd., incorporated in the Caribbean island state of Nevis as a holding company for the system's assets, and Gold & Silver Reserve, headquartered in Melbourne, which takes care of everything else. Both are closely held and managed by e-gold chair Douglas Jackson. In addition, Jackson has forged a partnership with Islamic entrepreneurs to launch e-dinar, which is foreign owned.
Jim Ray works for G&SR as "lead evangelist." He draws his monthly salary in e-gold; each gram sitting in his Web-based account gives him title to a gram of real gold held in vaults in London and the United Arab Emirates. Sometimes he trades his e-gold for e-silver, e-platinum, or e-palladium - the other, far less popular, metal-backed currencies offered in the e-gold system. More often, he trades it for US dollars through G&SR's OmniPay exchange service or one of the couple dozen independent exchange providers who make their living selling e-gold for dollars, marks, yen, and other national currencies at the standard 4 to 6 percent markup over the spot price of gold. But otherwise, he spends the stuff like cash, giving it straight to whoever will take it.
And people do. Ray's .44, his Hitler target, the bullets in his Glock - all were paid for with instant, online transfers to the sellers' e-gold accounts. And when he settles up today at the Action Gun cash register, he'll have this afternoon's $18 shooting fee charged to his tab, which he'll pay in e-gold when he gets back to his desktop. He'll point, he'll click, he'll type in some account numbers and a password and, in the blink of a clock cycle, approximately 2 of the 1.7 million grams of solid gold in the system's reserves - a gleaming hoard of 141 brick-sized ingots - will change owners.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "It's the only foreign currency without a nationality," says e-gold's Jackson. On an average day, his company's clients make 8,600 transactions, trading roughly $1.6 million worth of e-gold for goods, services, and cash worldwide. Those numbers are more than double what they were 18 months ago, and so are most other statistics. As of November, there were 287,965 accounts in the system, up from 134,150 at the beginning of 2001, and the amount of emetal in those accounts, worth more than $16 million, was close to twice what it had been the previous November. In a sector littered with the corpses of failed online currencies and other exotic emoney systems - Beenz, Flooz, DigiCash, CyberCash, CyberCent - e-gold is quietly thriving.
Ray calls it "the little payment system that could" - the operative word, of course, being little.
The company's financials ($5.47 million in revenue; 114,000 funded accounts) are Popsicle-stand caliber compared with the figures posted by emoney media darling PayPal, with its $80 million to $100 million in revenue and its 10 million customers. But with fewer than two dozen employees and a marketing budget close to zero, Jackson's corporate structure runs lean and, as of the summer of 2000, profitable. The company finally got its first competitors in 2001 - GoldMoney, E-Bullion, 3PGold, OSGold - attracted to the gold-backed digital currency space by low barriers to entry and the smell of black ink.
The product's appeal? "Fundamentals," says Ray. For online consumers, especially those making international purchases, e-gold offers an ease of use and a degree of anonymity that credit cards can't match. And for some merchants, of course, the only selling point e-gold needs is that there are people who want to spend it. After a German customer inquired about e-gold, Vince Lee, president of TealPoint Software, added the payment option. "It's not a big part of our business," admits Lee, whose company is probably the largest of the couple hundred mostly mom-and-pop operations that take e-gold online. "But in this climate, you can't really afford to turn any customers away." Ray argues, though, that the advantages for merchants go further. A transaction fee of 1 percent, capped at 50 cents per spend, comes in well under the 2 to 5 percent fees charged by credit card companies. And as for that bane of online businesses, the credit card chargeback, e-gold is a silver bullet. Unlike almost any other form of online payment, e-gold clears instantly and finally, with no chance for the spender to cancel after the fact. Or as Ray puts it, "When you get paid, you stay paid." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Still, Ray knows better than to pretend that these are the only reasons most e-gold users have bought into the system. Or even, perhaps, the main ones. For most consumers, the ability to reverse online credit card charges is decidedly a feature rather than a bug. And if you're going to pay a nickel for every dollar you turn into e-gold - as the going rate of exchange requires - you're probably not doing it because you want to help some online merchant save the same nickel in transaction fees. More likely, you're doing it at least in part for the one thing e-gold offers that no other digital payment system before it ever has. You're doing it for the gold.
Which is to say, you're doing it for any of the complex cultural, psychological, and above all political reasons that make gold, in Ray's words, "the most emotional spot on the periodic table - never mind plutonium." As a onetime Libertarian candidate for the Florida House of Representatives, Ray is well aware, for instance, that a large percentage of e-gold's early adopters come from the ranks of the laissez-faire radicals for whom gold has long been an icon of economic freedom from government. Others are goldbug investors, desperately bullish on the metal despite years of declining prices. Still others come to e-gold via e-dinar, looking to honor Islamic financial commandments and subvert the Western economic system.
__Finding bits of 141 bars of gold circulating on the Net is a little like a coelacanth, a financial fossil come to life. Don't be fooled. E-gold is hotter than plutonium. __ But all the same, Ray insists gold's philosophical baggage doesn't stand in the way of its being a technically superior currency. It frustrates and baffles him, for example, that the only advocacy groups currently taking e-gold donations on their Web sites are outfits like his cherished Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership or the cyber libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I would love," he says, "to go up to some offensive antifreedom group like Handgun Control Inc. and say, 'Look, you morons: You're taking plastic. They're taking a percentage out. Take e-gold and sell it for a profit. It's better money! Even if you're not a libertarian, it's better money.'" Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Ray sighs, as if summoning the patience to wait for civilization to catch up with him. "Gold," he says, "has always been better money." There are those who would beg to differ - among them, the most influential economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, who 78 years ago declared the gold standard a "barbarous relic," unfit for the complex monetary demands of modern economies. In Keynes' now widely held view, the problem with pegging currencies to fixed amounts of gold was that it limited government's ability to adjust the money supply, which among other things made economic crashes much more brutal than they had to be. The onset of the Depression drove the point home, and central banks spent the next 40 years gradually weaning themselves off gold. Finally, in 1971, President Richard Nixon pulled the plug on the world's last metallic national currency: the gold-backed dollar. Ever since, the major currencies have all floated anchorless, backed only by "the full faith and credit" of their issuing governments.
Encountering 141 solid bars' worth of gold-backed currency circulating on the Internet, therefore, is a little like hauling a wriggling, gasping coelacanth up from the bottom of the sea: It's a financial fossil come to life, calmly going about its existence despite decades of expert consensus that it couldn't be anything but dead.
Don't be fooled, though. The convergence of gold and the Net - of the oldest of low tech and the newest of the high - isn't nearly the freak encounter it appears. When Douglas Jackson first conceived of e-gold in 1995, he had barely heard of the Internet. Likewise, when longtime gold-market analyst James Turk founded GoldMoney last February - Jackson's most serious competition - he was making good on a concept he'd started thinking about in 1979, back when he still doubted that the technological infrastructure to support it would exist in his lifetime. But both men knew as soon as they encountered the Net that their currency belonged there - and not least because classic gold money and the core mechanisms of the Internet are in fact strikingly analogous technologies.
The international gold standard was one of the technical wonders of the highly globalized late-Victorian era - a sophisticated, elegant mechanism for transmitting value from one end of the civilized world to the other. National monies existed, of course, but in effect were just local network protocols running on top of the internetwork layer that connected them all. Or as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell has put it, "Currencies were just names for particular weights of gold." The dollar, for instance, was fixed by statute at 23.22 grains (about one-twentieth of an ounce), the pound sterling at 113.0016 grains, and so on. Local payments were made in local units, but all cross-border deals ultimately were settled through international bank-to-bank shipments of the universal currency - bullion.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Today, in a world just now returning to Gilded Age levels of economic interdependence after a century of hot and cold global warfare, the closest thing we have to a universal money is the US dollar. But as with most proprietary standards, many argue, the dollar introduces costly inefficiencies into the system - from the distorting influence of US monetary policies on non-US markets to the simple fact that final clearance of dollar payments still takes place only during East Coast banking hours.
Clearly, says Turk, if the Internet is going to become the engine of global commerce it's cracked up to be, it needs a currency it can call its own - a currency as nonproprietary and international as the Internet itself. "And gold seems to be the logical candidate," he says, "because after all, that's gold's traditional role. It's international money." But if gold does good things for the Internet, says Jackson, the Internet does even better things for gold. E-gold isn't your great-grandfather's gold standard. It's new and improved, Jackson argues, fortified by the rigor of free-market discipline and the openness of digital networks. And if you think that's no big deal, well, Jackson - a 45-year-old former oncologist and entirely self-taught economist - would like you to know that his invention represents "an epochal change in human destiny" and "probably the greatest benefit to humanity that's ever been thought of." How so? Invulnerable to government manipulation and subject to the kinds of market forces only a worldwide, 24/7, open-ended network can bring to bear, e-gold promises not simply better money but the best: a money supply kept so straight and narrow that it has room for neither bubbles nor crashes. And "this," as Jackson is fond of claiming, "fixes something that's been screwed up since before the pharaohs." After millennia in which the boom and bust of the business cycle has washed ceaselessly over human affairs - playing havoc with the lives of rich and poor and even now blackening capitalism's good name - e-gold has arrived to still the waters. E-gold is here to bring capitalism to a kind of perfection.
Not that it's a foregone conclusion. Some of Jackson's closest business colleagues, after all, like to think e-gold might actually bring capitalism to its knees.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It's a hot high noon in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Faint, muggy breezes are blowing in off the Persian Gulf; and in the shopping malls, Mercedes dealerships, and air-conditioned Starbucks of this deliriously prosperous city-state, loudspeakers are discreetly broadcasting the muezzins' call to prayer.
The call can also be heard, if you listen hard enough, inside a 12-foot-square, steel-and-concrete-walled storage vault located in Dubai International Airport's heavily guarded cargo-holding facilities. But if you're inside the vault, your mind is probably on other things. Like, for instance, the $7.5 million worth of precious metal piled up around you: five flat bars of chrome-bright palladium; two large plastic jars full of powdery platinum sponge; 160 fat, tarnished loaves of silver; and - on a single shelf, laid out one next to the other like babies in a maternity ward - 58 slender, radiant bricks of 99.9 percent pure gold, about 400 troy ounces each and altogether worth more than $6.5 million.
These assets represent nearly half of the e-gold system's physical reserves, and there are, arguably, sound business reasons for storing them in this part of the world. Dubai, sometimes called the Switzerland of the Middle East, offers the financial sophistication of a major commercial hub, the low overhead of a mostly immigrant labor pool, and the high security of a politely authoritarian mini-monarchy.
But the truth is, the gold is here because Allah commanded it. Or at any rate, because the passionate believers behind e-dinar - the network's Muslim-friendly frontend - believe He did. When Douglas Jackson and the e-dinar principals began the negotiations that culminated in e-dinar's September 2000 launch, Jackson was told up front that a proper Islamic currency requires a proper Islamic country as its base. Obligingly, he moved some of the company's existing assets from ScotiaBank in Canada to Dubai's Transguard repository (the rest remains with J. P. Morgan Chase in London) and even rewrote his governance contract to give e-dinar a limited veto over bullion transfers out of the vault. In return, e-dinar agreed, in effect, to help market the e-gold system to the world's 1.1 billion Muslims.
The pitch? Late one night in the lobby of one of Dubai's five-star hotels, a 46-year-old Muslim named Abdalhasib Castiñeira lays it out, sipping chamomile tea as he outlines a brief theology of money and calmly prophesies the downfall of the worldwide capitalist imperium.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg A gaunt, neatly bearded Spaniard, Castiñeira is marketing director of the Islamic Mint, a private institution dedicated to reviving as international currency the coinage described in the Koran - the gold dinar and silver dirham. He has placed on the table before him two small gold coins inscribed with Arabic scripture. The Islamic Mint makes them and they represent, says Castiñeira, the Islamic virtues of fair trade and honest value. Give someone a piece of gold, the argument goes, and you give him a real asset whose worth has endured throughout millennia. "Whereas this," he says, pulling a crisp US hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet, "is just a promise." Put your faith in it, and you submit to a system ultimately controlled by governments and corporations, a system that when it collapses - "all empires fall sooner or later," he says - will take the dollar down with it.
"But if you hold this," he says, picking up one of the gold coins and weighing it thoughtfully in his palm, "you are free." The coin in Castiñeira's hand contains 4.25 grams of gold, just as the dinar did in the time of the Prophet. Likewise, and by no coincidence, the e-dinar's primary unit of account is also 4.25 grams of gold. Officially, the Islamic Mint and e-dinar are separate organizations, but they're actually the off- and online divisions of a single project, joined by ideological and personal ties.
E-dinar's British COO, Yahya Cattanach, and his family share a communal condo with Castiñeira in the comfortable Jumeirah district of Dubai. The company's Spanish president, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, is also the president of the Islamic Mint. And finally, uniting all three men - as well as e-dinar's Swiss CEO, Malaysian CFO, and German CTO - is one crucial biographical datum: All are high-placed members of the Murabitun movement, a modern, Western offshoot of Sufi Islam and possibly the only religious sect in history whose defining article of faith is a financial theory.
There aren't too many Murabitun in the world; they number probably in the thousands. But they are avid proselytizers, supported in part by Dubai's royal Maktoum family, and they've established significant communities in Germany, England, South Africa, Indonesia, and Spain (though none is quite so impressive, perhaps, as the Murabitun outpost in Chiapas, Mexico, a community of 600 local Indians converted in the midst of the Zapatista uprising). Scattered though they are, community leaders see one another often, convening regularly in the small Scottish town of Achnagairn, home to the movement's founder and patriarch, the 71-year-old Sheikh Abdalqadir As-Sufi.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg For most of his life, the sheikh went by the proper Scots name Ian Dallas. In the 1960s, he worked as an actor and promoter, making the scene in London and Paris and hanging with Allen Ginsberg, the Beatles, and other hippie icons. Increasingly disillusioned with the counterculture, Dallas wound up in Morocco, where he met the Sufi spiritual leader Sheikh Muhammad ibn al-Habib and became a Muslim. Sheikh Muhammad had a vision: The modern revival of Islam, he believed, would come from, as he put it, "the people who pee standing" - from Westerners. Ian Dallas, now Abdalqadir, was anointed to take the lead. "Go to your land and see what will happen," Sheikh Muhammad told him, and he went.
Back in London, Sheikh Abdalqadir slowly gathered acolytes from among the drifting spiritual seekers of the day. Murabitun legend has it that pop star Cat Stevens (later Yusuf Islam) got his first exposure to Islam from Sheikh Abdalqadir, when both of them used to hang out at T. Rex singer Marc Bolan's house. Others became hardcore followers, donning djellabas and turbans and helping the sheikh shape Murabitun belief into a curiously worldly mysticism - a radical Islam tinged with elements of classic European anarchism, moderate feminism, refined anti-Semitism, and dense Heideggerian phenomenology.
It wasn't until the mid-1980s, however, that the members of the Murabitun truly began to set themselves apart from the run of post-hippie spiritual movements. Sheikh Abdalqadir came to believe that if there was anything a group of Western Muslims was best positioned to contribute to the world, it was an Islamic cleansing of the global financial system. And so he set his closest followers - in particular Umar Vadillo - the task of studying classic Islamic texts on money, with a view to drawing out their modern implications. The result, published in 1991, was the "Fatwa Concerning the Islamic Prohibition of Using Paper-Money as a Medium of Exchange." __"You want to be radical? You don't need to blow up the bank, just burn your bank account. For that you need an alternative. What is the alternative? E-dinar." __ Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the wake of fatwas sentencing Salman Rushdie to death and launching Osama bin Laden's terrorist jihad, Vadillo's sounds almost comically wonky. But make no mistake: This is an extreme document. The Bible condemns the financial practice of usury, certainly, and Islam does so even more firmly, prohibiting as haram, or unlawful, not only excessive but any interest charges on debt - a stricture that generally requires orthodox Muslims to leap through awkward theological hoops just to keep their money in a bank. But what Vadillo objects to, and in no uncertain terms, is modern money itself. "After examining all the aspects of paper money," he writes, "in the Light of the Qur'an and the Sunna, we declare that the use of paper money in any form of exchange is usury and therefore haram." Naturally, you can't comply with the fatwa merely by paying with plastic instead of paper. Paper money is a usurious cheat, Vadillo argues, largely because it has become "nothing but a pure symbol with no reality attached except the imposition of law." And since that same unreality undergirds the entire monetary system, the only honest way to escape its taint is to strive for the entire system's destruction. The fatwa, in short, is a call to financial jihad, and the struggle, Vadillo predicts, will be an unconventional one. Muslim information warriors will hack into banking networks and "transfer money at random." They will create dummy companies and "absorb debt that will never be paid back." They will "raid" the diamond and gold markets, which, according to Sheikh Abdalqadir's way of thinking, represent the hoarded wealth of the world's great usurers, the Jews.
But these are tactics for a war that has yet to come, and may not ever. For now, and before all else, there's one thing Muslims everywhere need to do to hasten the end of the paper-currency regime and with it the demise of capitalism, the liberation of Islam, and the restoration ( insh'allah) of the caliphate: They must work together to create a righteous alternative. They must bring back gold and silver as a standard medium of exchange.
What was Douglas Jackson thinking when he hooked up with these guys? If he could have looked into the future, would he have guessed that, at the start of 2002, the world's attention would be riveted on pan-Islamic radicalism and its links to, among other things, obscure international money networks? And if so, would he still have steered his own obscure international money network into so close a partnership with the Murabitun? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Probably. So far, Jackson's only second thoughts about the e-dinar deal have been to wonder just how much appeal the Murabitun's financial extremism really holds for the average Muslim. "The jury's still out," he says somewhat ruefully, noting that in a year of operations the funds held in e-dinar accounts have barely added up to a single bar of gold. For this and similarly mundane reasons, Jackson was already looking to loosen e-dinar's connection to the e-gold system months before the World Trade Center collapsed, and he insists the political mood since then hasn't added any urgency to the task.
And why should it? In the weeks since September 11, investigators have painted a pretty clear picture of the kind of networks they think al Qaeda & Co. are moving their money around in, and it doesn't include anything as Net-savvy as online payment systems.
And even if it did turn out that al Qaeda funds have passed through e-dinar, one thing's for sure: The Murabitun wouldn't be thrilled to hear it. For years they have publicly proclaimed their contempt for terrorists of every stripe, and in the wake of the September attacks, their stance has only hardened. Shortly after 9-11, Sheikh Abdalqadir issued a declaration excoriating Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. The attacks themselves he condemned as horrific and, more to the point, futile. "Bombing a building which houses a magical wealth system, which has no physical reality but remains simply electronic impulses in the digital archives of computers, far from attacking or weakening the system, strengthens it," wrote the sheikh. "A true study of the Qur'an and the Sunna shows us that capitalism will not be abolished on the battlefield but in the marketplace where it is practiced." "Look, we are against terrorism more than Bush is," Vadillo explains via email. "You want to be radical? You don't need to blow up the bank, just burn your bank account. And for that you are going to need an alternative. What is the alternative? E-dinar." That's not to say Jackson shouldn't be worried about tainted money coursing through the e-gold system - or that he isn't. But what troubles him most are the Ponzi schemes: Hundreds of online pyramid scams have made e-gold (because of its convenience and because it offers bilked users no way to cancel charges) their payment system of choice.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It gives some sense of how much these operations have contributed to e-gold's bottom line to know that, to this day, the single largest holding in the e-gold system - $1.1 million in gold, 8 percent of total reserves - sits unclaimed in an account belonging to an alleged Ponzi that shut down a year ago. As for more recent activity, Eric Gaither of Gaithman's, one of the leading independent gold-currency exchanges, guesses that "at least 50 to 60 percent of e-gold" transactions are headed into or out of what he and others sometimes euphemistically call HYIPs (high-yield investment programs) or simply games. Other reputable exchange providers put the figure between 30 and 90 percent. "Frankly," says Steve Foerster, former CTO of G&SR and currently COO of Dominica-based gold currency 3PGold, "without online games right now there would be no gold economy." For his part, Jackson vigorously denies HYIPs account for anything approaching a substantial portion of e-gold traffic. "These are piddly-ass little things," he says. "When you actually run one of these things down, they're pathetic." Still, he concedes, they're a PR liability, and he and his staff have been working hard to squeeze them out of the system. They've instituted "know your customer" rules to identify suspected swindlers, and they've cooperated amicably with law enforcement. When SEC staffers came to G&SR's offices last May to review the accounts of one of the biggest e-gold schemes ever - the self-styled "Christian-based humanitarian organization," E-Biz Ventures, shut down after allegedly inflicting losses of $8.5 million on investors - they were welcomed with coffee, bagels, and a conference room of their own. J. Chris Condren, the attorney charged with recovering E-Biz investors' money, has only good things to say about e-gold. "They've answered every question we've asked them, they've responded to every subpoena, every request for information." Still, Jackson sometimes seems almost baffled that anyone could care who uses e-gold and why. It's all the same for him, for instance, that most users haven't a clue about the profound macroeconomic consequences he sees in e-gold. "They could be doing this for the dumbest reasons, we don't care," he says. "All we need is a growing circulation." For Jackson, the only thing that really seems to matter is what happens when the circulation gets big enough for e-gold to matter. Will he be proved right or not? Will e-gold bring about an epochal change in human destiny or won't it? And if it does, will anybody still care that once upon a time e-gold was a currency beloved of gun freaks, Sufi anarchists, and Ponzi schemers? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "You're going to have to make a personal judgment," says Jackson. "Am I some sort of dipshit visionary, you know, that's got some idea, but what I'm really doing is just sort of facilitating all kinds of sleazy stuff? Or in fact is this vision one that is achievable?" So which is it? Take your time. And if you really want to get a handle on the question, try the following experiment. Go out and find a 400-troy-ounce gold bar, like the ones stored in the e-gold vault in Dubai, and pick it up. You'll learn something interesting about gold: It's heavy.
Maybe you think you knew this already. Maybe you know gold has a specific gravity of 19.3, and that this means it's 19.3 times heavier than water. Maybe you also know gold is heavier than any element known to humans prior to the 18th-century discovery of platinum, and almost twice as heavy as lead. But until you've held 400 ounces of it in your hand, you've probably never grasped just what sort of heavy this stuff really is. Relative to its modest size, the 27.5 pounds in a standard gold bar is so much weight it's nearly impossible to accept that gravity alone accounts for the force you feel as you lift it. You're tempted to attribute some additional, almost metaphysical, power to the metal - as if the gold brick in your hand weren't just undeniably real but a gleaming avatar of reality itself.
And whether or not Douglas Jackson actually thinks of gold that way, he sure tends to act like he does. Beneath the scaffolding of what he calls his "unassailable economic logic" lies the true foundation of his vision: the self-assurance of a man convinced he's discovered something as genuine as it gets in a world ruled by fiction and cheats.
This is why, despite Jackson's efforts to position his system as a serious financial player - a rival to the major currencies of the world - little e-dinar remains Jackson's closest corporate partner. Maybe Jackson wants to fix capitalism and maybe the Murabitun want to finish it, but both, at bottom, pursue a truth that isn't so much economic as it is spiritual. Both see in gold a purity that transcends the machinations of the merely mortal.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Which at least answers part of Jackson's question: Is he some sort of dipshit visionary? Well, no more or less, really, than Sheikh Abdalqadir As-Sufi, the Scottish redeemer of the Muslim world. As for whether Jackson's vision is in fact achievable - let's just say the odds of e-gold effecting an epochal change in human destiny are probably not much better than e-dinar's odds of bringing back the caliphate.
But both may be better than you think. Last June, Mahathir Mohammed, the irascible, authoritarian prime minister of financially beleaguered, mostly Muslim Malaysia, called for the formation of an "Islamic trading bloc." Like the Euro Zone, the bloc would have its own currency, yet with a twist: The "Islamic dinar," as Mahathir proposes calling it, would be backed not by anybody's faith and credit but by gold. As it happens, Mahathir seems to have gotten the idea for the gold dinar from none other than Jackson's associates among the Murabitun. If the proposal flies then there is a more than negligible chance that e-gold could become the base-money system for an economic community stretching from Indonesia to Morocco.
"I want to jump on that," Jackson says of the opportunity. Already Vadillo and the sheikh have met with Mahathir to make the pitch, and Jackson hopes to fly to Malaysia soon to drive it home.
Of course, convincing a major world leader to put the monetary fate of a billion people in the hands of a retired oncologist from Melbourne, Florida, is not going to be easy work. But Jackson doesn't seem to mind the challenge. "That's going to be an especially fun project over the next few months," he says. "I'm gonna have a lot of frequent-flier miles." Topics magazine-10.01 Tammy Rabideau Angela Watercutter Rob Reddick Louryn Strampe Matt Simon Brendan Nystedt Steven Levy Rob Reddick Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Steven Levy Business E-Money (That's What I Want) Save this story Save Save this story Save The killer application for electronic networks isn't video-on-demand. It's going to hit you where it really matters - in your wallet. It's not only going to revolutionize the Net, it will change the global economy.
Clouds gather over Amsterdam as I ride into the city center after a day at the headquarters of DigiCash, a company whose mission is to change the world through the introduction of anonymous digital money technology. I have been inundated with talk of smart cards and automated toll takers and tamper-proof observer chips and virtual coinage for anonymous network ftps. I have made photocopies using a digital wallet and would have bought a soda from a DigiCash vending machine, but it was out of order.
My fellow passenger and tour guide is David Chaum, the bearded and ponytailed founder of DigiCash, and the inventor of cryptographic protocols that could catapult our currency system into the 21st century. They may, in the process, shatter the Orwellian predictions of a Big Brother dystopia, replacing them with a world in which the ease of electronic transactions is combined with the elegant anonymity of paying in cash.
He points out the plaza where the Nazis rounded up the Jews for deportation to concentration camps.
This is not idle conversation, but a topic rooted in the Chaum Weltanschauung - state repression extended to the maximum. David Chaum has devoted his life, or at least his life's work, to creating cryptographic technology that liberates individuals from the spooky shadows of those who gather digital profiles. In the process, he has become the central figure in the evolution of electronic money, advocating a form of it that fits neatly into a privacy paradigm, whereby the details of people's lives are shielded from the prying eyes of the state, the corporation, and various unsavory elements.
Fifteen years ago, David Chaum seemed a Don Quixote in Birkenstocks, a stray computer scientist talking of a technology that appeared more rooted in science fiction than high finance. Today, still bearded, but wearing a well-tailored suit, he stands in the thick of a movement that seems unstoppable - the digitization of money. His passion now is to explain that the change need not be oppressive. He travels among bankers and financiers, he runs a company, he proselytizes. And he hopes somebody listens, because the wild card in the era of digital money is anonymity, and David Chaum thinks we're in trouble without it.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Dollar Bills or Bill Dollars The next great leap of the digital age is, quite literally, going to hit you in the wallet. Those dollar bills you fold up and stash away are headed, with inexorable certainty, toward cryptographically sealed digital streams, stored on a microchip-loaded "smart card" (a plastic card with a microchip), a palm-sized "electronic wallet" (a calculator-sized reader and loader for those cards), or the hard disk of your computer, wired for buying sprees at the virtual mall.
Of course, real money - the trillions of dollars handled each day by banks, other financial institutions, and government clearinghouses - is already digital. No physical tokens are exchanged: all transactions are conducted using streams of bits. But digitizing the final mile of electronic money, where the coin and dollar bill go the way of the vinyl LP, will make all the difference in the world. It will not only change the physical way you spend your money, it will alter the way you view your own economic being. And depending on the manner in which it is implemented, digital money might allow others to view your financial status with a decidedly discomfiting intimacy.
Is e-money really going to happen? Inevitably. Hard currency has been a useful item for a few millennia or so, but now it has simply worn out its welcome. A recent paper by several cryptographers at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, New Mexico, begins by enumerating what all e-money advocates identify as the fatal flaws of cold hard cash: "The advent of high-quality color copiers threatens the security of paper money. The demands of guarding it make paper money expensive. The hassles of handling it (such as vending machines) make paper money undesirable. The use of credit cards and ATM cards is becoming increasingly popular, but those systems lack adequate privacy or security against fraud, resulting in a demand for efficient electronic-money systems to prevent fraud and also to protect user privacy." "Cash is a nightmare," says Donald Gleason, president of the Smart Card Enterprise unit of Electronic Payment Services Inc. "It costs money handlers in the US alone approximately US$60 billion a year to move the stuff, a line item ripe for drastic pruning. The solution is to cram our currency in burn bags and strike some matches. This won't happen all at once, and paper money will probably never go away (hey, they couldn't even get rid of the penny), but bills and coinage will increasingly be replaced by some sort of electronic equivalent." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg The coming of e-money would seem to demand that the governments of the world get together and implement a scheme to make the shift in an orderly fashion. But that's not happening. The US, in particular, is promulgating public cluelessness. When I called a spokesperson for the Federal Reserve to ask about electronic cash, he laughed at me. It was as if I were inquiring about exchange rates with UFOs. I insisted he look into it, and he finally called me several days later with the official word: the Federal Reserve is doing nothing in that area.
Outside the Fed, there are people in government interested in the issue - isolated visionaries in the Department of the Treasury and Congress, in the Office of Technology Assessment - but while they ponder it, plenty of other institutions are devising schemes that will knock our currency preconceptions for a loop. The timetables are short, and as the players look around and see what their potential competitors are doing, those timetables get even shorter, particularly in the race to be first to deliver a plan that offers transactions on computer nets.
For starters, there is CyberCash Inc., sort of an all-star team of pre-digital cash technologies. Headed by Bill Melton, the creator of the Verifone system that handles credit-card transactions between merchants and banks, the principals include Jim Bidzos, president of the cryptography provider, RSA Data Security Inc., Steve Crocker, vice president of Trusted Information Systems Inc. (another prominent crypto-firm), and Dan Lynch is chair and founder of Interop Co. (which produces the largest Internet trade show worldwide). "We will provide cyberspace with financial communications that will be safe and secure and convenient," says Bruce Wilson, CyberCash's chief operating officer. In the first quarter of 1995, CyberCash will offer a network equivalent of debit-card transactions, then expand to credit cards. The next step: cash-like components that support peer-to-peer payments.
Visa has gathered a consortium of financial institutions to design "Electronic Purse," specifications for low-cost purchases at gas stations, convenience stores, grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, and school cafeterias, in addition to such routine items like calls from pay phones, road and bridge tolls, and videogames.
Citibank has been running a prepaid card test in a Long Island facility. There is the aforementioned Smart Card Enterprise of the Electronic Payment Services company, which wants to piggyback spending money on its network of ATMs.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg There is the NetCheque project, a debit-card system, developed by the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. And there is the Information Networking Institute, part of Carnegie Mellon University, whose NetBill is also based on the debit-card model.
Many transit companies envision fare tickets as coinage to buy newspapers and sundries. The phone companies issue phone cards with similar pretensions.
In Denmark, Danmont has distributed over 100,000 cards with money for spending on such things as parking meters and laundromats. Similar systems exist in Portugal and Singapore.
Mondex, a consortium led by two British banks, will roll out its digital-cash system, involving an estimated 40,000 cardholders, to the public in Swindon, England, next year. Its creators envision the system spreading worldwide, as people slip their smart cards into special phones and wallets to conduct cash-like, tamper-proof transactions, even across borders. "It will become ubiquitous - it's the cheapest way of moving money around," says Dave Birch, spokesperson for the project's consultants, Hyperion. "There's the state of Ohio which has in the works a smart-card system for replacing welfare checks with electric money. At Mankato State University in Mankato, Minnesota, students are issued "MavCards," to be used not just for MCI long-distance calls and dining-hall meals but for cash services like photocopying, vending, and laundry.
Finally and inevitably there's Microsoft. For months, it had been quietly organizing a digital money group, presumably to put its own stamp on the emerging phenomena of digital transactions. But things went into overdrive in October, when it laid out $1.5 billion worth of stock to snatch up Intuit, Inc. a financial software company which was determinately moving towards automating money. Along with the buyout, Scott Cook, Intuit's president, became Microsoft's executive vice president of electronic commerce - reporting directly to chairman Gates, begging the question, will dollar bills be replaced by Bill dollars? As a result of this mad rush, the road to digital cash is not so much a smooth transitional path but a multi-lane cloverleaf with infuriating turnoffs, circles, and dead ends. "A lot of people assume there's going to be a single form of digital money," says Microsoft's chief technical wizard, Nathan Myhrvold. "Today we have a zillion different ways of doing financial transactions. There's cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, wiring money, traveler's checks ... each of these has a particular point. We're going to see that much diversity in digital money." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Kawika Daguio, a Washington, DC, representative for the American Bankers Association, is familiar with the issue and says, "We may be in a situation analogous to the 1860s - in those days, before our current Federal Reserve system, bank checks backed by different institutions weren't as widely accepted - they circulated and were usually discounted. Chartered banks also printed private-bank notes. Now, we see that some institutions are interested in printing their own versions of electronic money and following their own rules." Sholom Rosen, a vice president at Citibank, puts it more succinctly: "There are going to be winners and losers, but everybody is going to play." Michael Nash, Visa's senior vice president in charge of the cash-products division, recalls the excitement among executives last June when they witnessed a test of the credit-card consortium's smart-card experiment at a retreat in Cancun, Mexico: "We had senior banking executives lining 70-deep to try this out!" Considering all these schemes in the aggregate, it is possible to envision the way money will work in the future. But we must distinguish between forms of electronic commerce - including credit cards and bill paying - and electronic cash, in which money is in a fungible, universally accepted, securely backed format and can be passed, peer to peer, through many parties while retaining its value. You know, money.
First of all, imagine that all the uses of credit cards and debit cards are seamlessly integrated into electronic format. Now start to think about real money. Cash will reside in credit-card-sized plastic smart cards which can be stored in palm-sized "electronic wallets." The days of nervously accessing the ATM machine at 2 a.m., looking over your shoulder for muggers, are over. You'll download money from the safety of your electronic cottage. You will use these cards in telephones (including those in the home), as well as electronic wallets, disgorging them whenever you spend money, checking the cards on the spot to confirm that the merchant took only the amount you planned to spend. The sum will be automatically debited from your stash into the merchant's. Cash will be a number, a digitized certificate you'll probably never see.
Commerce on the Net will reproduce the process in cyberspace: you will download money from your bank, put it in a virtual wallet, and spend it online. You will also be able to receive money from your employer, someone who buys something from you, or a friendly soul who lends you a virtual sawbuck until payday.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Exactly what goes on inside smart cards, wallets, and computers won't be apparent. But the protocols chosen by the lords of e-money are all-important. Depending on how they work, the various systems of electronic money will prove to be boons or disasters, bastions of individual privacy or violators of individual freedom. At the worst, a faulty or crackable system of electronic money could lead to an economic Chernobyl. Imagine the dark side: cryptocash hackers who figure out how to spoof an e-money system. A desktop mint! The resulting flood of bad digits would make the hyperinflationary Weimar Republic - where people carted wheelbarrows full of marks to pay for groceries - look like a stable monetary system.
A privately circulated paper written by Kawika Daguio sketches out some of the problems in the form of questions: Who is going to create the monetary value? In other words, who will back up the money, assuring trust. Will it be government? Banks? Visa? The New York City Transit Authority? "A dollar bill is a piece of paper - what's the difference between that and another piece of paper?" asks Sholom Rosen of Citibank. "It is the ability to present that piece of paper and get assurance of a return. It's not backed. There was a time when it was backed, but those times are gone. What gives it value? The banking system. The paper is the liability of the banking system. The supply of money is grown and disappears in the banking system." Yet others seem to think that, if universally trusted, a digital currency system can, in effect, float on its own momentum. "If you have money on the network, you can make private money on the network," says Eric Hughes, a co-founder of the privacy champions, the Cypherpunks. He is now exploring the possibility of setting up a cyberspace bank. "It's easiest not to turn the money into paper if you don't have to." What security features will be included? How will these systems protect against fraud? Can they be hacked or counterfeited? What will be the trade-offs between ease-of-use and security? "People get sticky fingers," says Rosen. "The most honest guy in the world will find some cash and stick it in his pocket. When outsiders hear about digital-cash schemes, the first thing they say is, 'I'm going to break in.' " Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Of course, smart cards have to be tamper-proof so people can't reverse engineer them and double-spend. The prime protection is cryptography. "The bits in a container have to move from one to the other," explains Rosen. "When you're done, you have to have less in one container and more in the other. Also, your transaction can't be intercepted. Crypto can secure the transition. How strong the crypto is depends on who's going to try to break in - if it's the Mafia or a national government, they'll have plenty of resources." David Chaum thinks, for instance, that some canny dark-side entrepreneurs can crack the Mondex system now being tested in England. Though its mathematical protocols are strong, he says, too much depends on the tamper-proofing of the cards. "One device can say, 'OK, I'm transferring $100,000 to you,' and the other one says, 'Oh, fine, I believe you.' So if you break either one of those open (defeating the tamper-proof technology) and tell it you've got a zillion dollars, the whole system just dies." (Mondex insists its scheme cannot be cracked, but will not provide further details. "Suffice it to say we're betting the shop on it," says Dave Birch.) Will they work so the value will be restored if they're lost? Everybody seems to agree that smart cards holding digital cash should provide an option to punch in a Personal Identification Number before buying something; but there is also a consensus that most people won't use that option. "The consumer won't bother with that," says Visa's Michael Nash. "The key here is that we imagine this as expanding what you do with credit cards. We do not think the electronic purse is appropriate for people buying jewelry or automobiles." In many systems - Mondex is a good example - losing your stored-value smart card is like losing a wad of bills. Don't carry more than you can afford to lose.
Who's going to regulate electronic money? At the moment, all the players are proceeding as if no one is. They extrapolate a regulatory system growing out of the current one, while they are aware that as the digital economy becomes pervasive there may be calls for new limits and regulation. As for now, the rush is to get everything in place, and no traffic cops seem to be slowing anybody down.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Who's going to pay for it? "I don't believe that it's sound policy to charge somebody royalties for engaging in the virtual world's equivalent of putting your hand in your pocket, pulling out a bill, and handing it to somebody," says Kawika Daguio. He is particularly perturbed by the claims of Online Resources & Communications Corporation, a company in Virginia that insists that it holds a patent (US # 5,220,501) giving it "exclusive rights to process real-time electronic transactions of consumers who use any in-home terminal to purchase goods and services, pay bills, and bank through a debit network, including the automated teller machine networks." Online Resources further claims that "the patent covers all in-home terminals, including telephones, computers." (The patent may be challenged by banks and ATM processors.) On the other hand, Microsoft's Myhrvold, perhaps anticipating a licensing revenue that would make DOS look like a drop in the bucket, challenges Daguio's assertion, claiming that we already pay the equivalent of such a fee. "Of course you do," he says. "Explicitly or implicitly there's a fee involved. Even in a pure-cash transaction, you pay for those costs. Cash is an expensive thing to move around. You have to hire guards from Brinks with guns and all that bullshit. That's all included in the price of things you buy." The bottom line is that nothing is free, especially when it comes to money. You will pay for e-money, either in transaction fees or, as in the CyberCash model, by allowing others to earn interest on your electronic cash - even as it sits in your virtual wallet.
In short, the various systems have implicitly or explicitly postulated tentative answers to some of these questions, and the answers to others, such as the regulatory structure, will have to evolve as the idea catches on. But one question remains open: the dichotomy between privacy and traceability.
Hard cash, of course, is anonymous - you can spend your printed bills with the assurance that no one can trace your expenditures or compile a dossier on your lifetime spending records. But electronic cash has no such assurances. Its computer-mediated nature makes traceability the course of least resistance. This gives rise to a provocative question: Can digital cash become anonymous, as real-world money is? And if so, should it be? Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg And these questions lead us back to Amsterdam - headquarters of DigiCash, the company formed by David Chaum.
Digital Money Man In the world of digital cash, David Chaum is the marked penny that keeps reappearing. His ideas circulate as freely as cash itself. He is indisputably the pioneer of the field, the one who shifted it from the ether of science fiction to the solid footing of mathematical truth. But the man himself is the center of controversy. All of those involved in the daring attempt to shred dollar bills into arcane mathematical formulae know of Chaum, and almost all admire his work. But when they talk of their dealings with him, they immediately go off the record. It turns out that at one point they considered licensing Chaum's patents or at least recruiting Chaum's participation in their projects. These processes seemed to end in fruitless standoffs, sometimes acrimonious ones. Then, inevitably, more negotiations. Chaum cannot be ignored even by those who disparage him off the record.
Why are all these people so worked up about David Chaum? I get a hint the day after my ride with Chaum through Amsterdam. We have made plans to meet at a coffeehouse off the Keizersgracht.
Our plan is to spend the entire day talking about digital money and his work. But before the tape recorder goes on, Chaum takes pains to make one thing clear to me: he is not, as some people derisively call him, some sort of privacy nut. He is by no means a paranoiac, but merely someone who has made some remarkable discoveries that people should know about before they make irrevocable choices about the traceability of their finances.
Fine, I say, and begin the interview. Tape recorder on. "How old are you?" I ask. "I don't tell that to people," he says.
At heart, David Chaum is driven by ideals. Indisputably the brains behind making digital cash work, he holds the key patents in the field, particularly in the area of anonymous, untraceable cash. He is therefore in a position to become a very rich and powerful person. Yet he avoids the path of least resistance and largest revenues - cashing in by licensing his schemes - because he is passionate about the potential of anonymous cash and wants the news of its viability spread far and wide.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg He says that if, after knowing that the possibility of private, digital-monetary transactions exists, people opt to spend their money with the same traceability as credit cards, he will accept the decision. But he doesn't think that will happen. His guess is that once people are aware of the issues, they will agree that traceable routes are the evil of all money.
From a very early age, David Chaum had an interest in the hardware of privacy. "What's important to realize is that there is a strong driving force for me," he says. "My interest in computer security and encryption came from my fascination with security technologies in general - things like locks and burglar alarms and safes," he says. (As a graduate student, he devised two new designs for locks and came close to selling both to major manufacturers.) And, of course, he was very much fascinated with computers. In high school and college, he did typical hacker sorts of things: password cracking, dumpster diving, and such. But he was also picking up some serious background in mathematics. And late in his college career, he came to cryptography, a discovery that in retrospect seems inevitable.
Chaum's first major papers, published in 1979 when he was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, are indicative of his strong focus in his work: devising cryptographic means of assuring privacy. His ideas build upon the concept of public-key cryptography, the technique devised by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the mid-'70s that established cryptography as a mass technology. Specifically what excited Chaum was the use of digital signatures - a way of establishing the authenticity of a message sender. "I got interested in those particular techniques because I wanted to make [anonymous] voting protocols," he says. "Then I realized that you could use them more generally as sort of untraceable communication protocols." The trail led to anonymous, untraceable digital cash.
Dining with the Cryptographer For Chaum, the politics and the technology reinforce each other. He believes that as far as privacy is concerned, society stands at a crossroads. Proceeding in our current direction, we will arrive at a place where Orwell's worst prophecies are fulfilled. He delineated the problem in an essay called "Numbers Can Be a Better Form of Cash Than Paper." "We are fast approaching a moment of crucial and perhaps irreversible decision, not merely between two kinds of technological systems, but between two kinds of society," says the article, published in 1991. "Current developments in applying technology are rendering hollow both the remaining safeguards on privacy and the right to access and correct personal data. If these developments continue, their enormous surveillance potential will leave individuals' lives vulnerable to an unprecedented concentration of scrutiny and authority." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In the early 1980s, Chaum conducted a quest for the seemingly impossible answer to a problem that many people didn't consider problematic in the first place: how can the domain of electronic life be extended without further compromising our privacy? Or - more daring - can we do this and increase privacy? In the process, he figured out how cryptography could produce an electronic version of the dollar bill.
In order to appreciate this, you have to consider the apparent obstacles to such a task. The most immediate concern of anyone attempting to produce a digital form of currency is copying. As anyone who has copied a program from a disk to a hard drive knows, it is totally trivial to produce an exact duplicate of anything in the digital medium. What's to stop me from taking my one Digi-Buck and making a million, or a billion, copies? If I can do this, my laptop, and every other computer, becomes a mint, and infinite hyperinflation makes this form of currency worthless.
The answer to the problem of digital duplication lies in using digital signatures to verify the authenticity of bills. Only one serial number would be assigned to a given "bill" - the number itself would be the bill - and when the unique number was presented to a merchant or a bank, it could be scanned to see if the virtual bill was authentic and had not been previously spent. This would be fairly easy to do if every electronic unit of currency was traced through the system at every point - but that would bring about exactly the kind of surveillance nightmare that gives Chaum the chills. How could you do this and unconditionally protect one's anonymity? Chaum began his solution by coming up with something called a "blind signature," a process by which a bank, or any other authorizing agency, can authenticate a number so that it can act as a unit of currency - yet the bank itself does not know who has the bill, and therefore cannot trace it. This way, when the bank issues you a stream of numbers designed to be accepted as cash, you have a way of changing the numbers while maintaining the bank's imprimatur.
One of Chaum's most dramatic break-throughs occurred when he managed to come up with a proof - though for a different application - that this sort of anonymity could be provided unconditionally, with all the assurance of mathematical proof that no one could violate it. The idea came when he was driving his Volkswagen van from Berkeley to his home in Santa Barbara, where he taught computer science at the University of California in the early '80s. "I was just turning this idea over and over in my head, and I went through all kinds of solutions. I kept riding through it, and finally by the time I got there I knew exactly how to do it in an elegant way." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg He presented his theory with a vivid example: a scenario of three cryptographers awaiting the check after finishing their meal at a restaurant. The waiter appears. Your dinner, he tells the cryptographers, has been prepaid. The question is, by whom? Has one of the diners decided to anonymously treat his colleagues - or has the National Security Agency paid for the meal? The dilemma was whether this information could be gleaned without compromising the anonymity of the cryptographer who might have paid for the dinner.
The answer was fairly simple. It involved coin tosses hidden from certain parties. For example, A and B could flip a quarter behind a menu so C couldn't see it - and then each write down the result and pass it to him. The key stipulation would be that if one of them was the culprit who paid for the meal, that person would write down the opposite result of the coin toss. Thus if C received contradictory reports of the coin toss - one heads, one tails - he would know that one of his fellow diners paid for the meal. But without further collusion, he would have no way of knowing which one. By a collection of coin tosses and combined messages, any number of diners could play this game. The idea could scale to a currency system.
"It was really important, because it meant that untraceability could be unconditional," he says. Meaning mathematically bulletproof. "It doesn't matter how much computer power the NSA has to break codes - they can't figure it out, and you can prove that." Chaum's subsequent work, as well as the patents he successfully applied for, continued to build upon those ideas, addressing problems like preventing double-spending while preserving anonymity. In a particularly clever mathematical twist, he came up with a scheme whereby one's anonymity would always be preserved, with a single exception: when someone attempted to double-spend a unit that he or she had already spent somewhere else. At that point the second bit of information would allow a trace to be revealed. In other words, only cheaters would be identified - indeed, they would be providing evidence to law enforcement of their attempt to commit fraud.
This was exciting work, but Chaum received little encouragement for pursuing it. "For many years, it was very difficult for me to have to work on this sort of subject within the field, because people were not at all receptive to it," Chaum says. For several years in the early 1980s, Chaum attempted to personally contact the leading lights in privacy policy and share his ideas with them.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "The uniform reaction was negative," he says. "And I couldn't understand this. It made it all the harder for me to keep pushing on this, because my academic advisors were saying, 'Oh, that's political, that's social - you're out of line.' Even the department head at Berkeley said, 'Don't work on this, because you can never tell the effects of a new idea on society.' I acknowledged him in my dissertation, saying it was the rethinking and finally the rejection of this principle that caused me to do this work." Eventually, Chaum decided that the best way to spread the ideas would be to start his own company. By then he was living in Amsterdam. On a visit with his Dutch girlfriend, he had fortuitously met up with some academics at CWI, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, the nationally funded Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam, where he subsequently formed the cryptography research group. So, in 1990, he launched DigiCash b.v., a subsidiary of the US company DigiCash Inc., with his own capital and a contract from the Dutch government to build and test technology to support anonymous toll payments on highways. Chaum developed a prototype by which smart cards holding a certain amount of verified cash value could be slipped into a gadget affixed to the windshield, and high-speed scanning devices would subtract the tolls as the cars whizzed by. The cards could also be used to pay for public transportation and eventually other items. Of course, the payments would be anonymous. After completing that contract (the system has not yet been implemented), Chaum kept his company active in smart-card applications; some of the projects focused on cash systems that would be used in a building or complex of buildings. The DigiCash headquarters, along with several businesses and agencies around the Netherlands, use the system currently. But to date, the company's operations have been relatively small-scale, even as the world has now come around to seeing the significance of the ideas Chaum hatched in isolation. DigiCash remains independent, without a close alliance with a large partner in banking or financial services. Chaum feels that in time such partners, at least licensees of DigiCash technology, will emerge; if so, his paradigm will be a crucial factor in maintaining privacy in the age of e-money. This is an idea Chaum believes is worth holding out for.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Some people interpret this as stubbornness, or at the least poor business practice. "People wanted to buy David's patents but he asked for too much - he wanted control," says a former DigiCash employee. "The real problem is that privacy isn't what the banks want, it isn't what the stores want. They want something easy to use, fast, and very cheap." (Still, this source guesses that Chaum "has hung on for so long that he will probably succeed.") Frustrated by not being able to use Chaum's patents, some companies have devised their own schemes for anonymity, which may or may not infringe on Chaum's. More recently, Stefan Brands, formerly at CWI, has come up with an alternative scheme that has drawn considerable interest. Brands contends the system absolutely does not infringe Chaum's patents; Chaum's carefully worded response is, "He's not convinced me that it doesn't." The topic of patents is touchy; Chaum bridles at any talk that equates him with the robber-baron set. In his mind, the revenues are secondary to the potential effect on society. "It's my mission to do this, because I had this vision that stuff like this might be possible, and felt it was my responsibility to do it. No one was working on this for the good half-dozen years I was; they all thought I was nuts. They gave me a hard time. We couldn't license, really, without the patents; the whole purpose of them is to get this stuff out there." Hidden Values Does anonymity really matter when it comes to electronic money? Some people dismiss its significance - or argue that anonymity is a bad thing.
"Speaking for myself, it would be dangerous and unsound public policy to allow fully untraceable, unlimited value digital currency to be produced," says Kawika Daguio of the American Bankers Association. "It opens up opportunities for abuse that aren't available to criminals now. In the physical world, money is bulky. In the physical world, it is possible to follow people, so a kidnapper can potentially be caught if the currency is marked, if the money was being observed on location, or if the serial numbers were recorded. Fully anonymous cash might allow opportunities for counterfeiting and fraud." Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft concurs. "There's a role for untraceable transactions. But it's not a panacea. Some people get very worked up about it. But there's been a very steady trend away from untraceable cash. There are cases where explicit traceability is a good thing. Like in my business expenses. I want them to trace it! All these things are there for a reason. They're not there as part of a plan by nefarious Big Brother. Look, I understand Chaum's concern to a certain degree. There's a lot of concern for privacy today. But I do worry about the idea of saving people from themselves. Just because I sign up for a traceable form of money doesn't mean I want my next-door neighbor to see my transactions." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Chaum says he has never argued for total untraceability, but sort of a constrained anonymity. "My work has been trying to establish a whole space of possibilities, bounded by pure perfect anonymity on one side and a perfect identification on the other side." Chaum is not the only person working this turf: building on his ideas, researchers at Sandia Labs have been working on a scheme that attempts to balance anonymity with law enforcement's need to trace criminal transactions. Sort of an anonymous, digital-cash Clipper Chip. "I was concerned about some of the effects electronic cash could have on criminal activity," says Ernie Brickell, a Sandia cryptographer. "It could make it very easy for people to undertake kidnappings and extortion. It might be possible for a person to do a kidnapping and ask for money to be exchanged in a way in which there was no physical exchange - you would have no idea what country the person was in. There was also the potential that new types of criminal activity would emerge. So we looked at whether it would be possible to develop electronic cash schemes in which people could have much of the privacy that Chaum talks about, but with hooks in it, so that if law enforcement had the need to look into a transaction, it could." Yet it is not at all clear that even this sort of limited anonymity will gain, er, currency. Users of electronic cash - the general public - will probably never be polled on whether they prefer it to be anonymous. Brickell admits that anonymity will be a hard sell. "There's going to be so much information about individuals floating around, that we want to protect privacy as much as we can," he says. "But some of the bankers feel that an anonymous system is never going to make it, or even be something that they can get behind." In fact, says Niels Ferguson, a cryptographer who works for DigiCash, "the people who decide actually often have an interest in not protecting people's privacy because they are among the potential benefactors of gathering the information." But what of the Nathan Myhvolds, who seem to argue that they want traceability? Ferguson sighs. "Oh, the number of times I've had to argue with people that they need privacy! They'll say, 'I don't care if you know where I spend my money.' I usually tell them, 'What if I hire a private investigator to follow you around all day? Would you get mad?' And the answer always is, 'Yes, of course I would get mad.' And then my argument is, 'If we have no privacy in our transaction systems, I can see every payment - every cup of coffee you drink, every Mars bar you get, every glass of Coke you drink, every door you open, every telephone call - you make. If I can see those, I don't need a private investigator. I can just sit behind my terminal and follow you around all day.' And then people start to realize that, yes, privacy is in fact something important. Any one part of the information is probably unimportant. But the collection of the information, that is important." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Which is exactly why certain officials are licking their chops at the prospect of traceable cash. These include, of course, law-enforcement agencies, who are more than eager to see hard cash phased out. What would the drug dealers do? The money launderers? The underground economy? They will argue that granting anonymity to digital cash would provide a bonanza for kidnappers, muggers ... criminals of every stripe. But consider a world where all money is electronic and traceable, and you have the most potent crime-fighting weapon in history.
The institution with the most to gain is the Internal Revenue Service. The computer age has been very good to the IRS, which now has access to any number of databases that yield reality checks on any given citizen's tax returns. Traceable cash would accelerate this process, and the tax-collection agency can't wait to take advantage of it. In a recent speech - presented on April 15, no less! - Coleta Brueck, the project manager for the IRS's Document Processing System, described some of the IRS's plans. These include the so-called "Golden Eagle" return, in which the government automatically gathers all relevant aspects of a person's finances, sorts them into appropriate categories and then tallies the tax due. "One-stop service," as Brueck puts it. This information would be fed to other government agencies, as well as states and municipalities, which would draw upon it for their own purposes. She vows "absolutely" that this will happen, assuming that Americans will be grateful to be relieved of the burden of filing any taxes. The government will simply take its due.
"If I know what you've made during the year, if I know what your withholding is, if I know what your spending pattern is, I should be able to generate for you a tax return," she says. "I am an excellent advocate of return-free filing. We know everything about you that we need to know. Your employer tells us everything about you that we need to know. Your activity records on your credit cards tell us everything about you that we need to know. Through interface with Social Security, with the DMV, with your banking institutions, we really have a lot of information, so why ... at the end of the year or on April 15, do we ask the Post Office to encumber itself with massive numbers of people out there, with picking up pieces of paper that you are required to file? ... I don't know why. We could literally file a return for you. This is the future we'd like to go to." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg It isn't the future that David Chaum would like to go to, though, and in hopes of preventing that degree of openness in an individual's affairs, he continues doggedly in his crusade for privacy.
Megabucks on the Net Cyberspace is destined to be the first battleground of the digital money wars. While it will take years, perhaps decades, for e-money to replace hard currency in the physical world, the virtual world not only can't accommodate the current system, but is desperate for immediate implementation of the digital equivalent. Everyone agrees that the Internet is the staging ground for the first true boom in electronic commerce, but it's a transactional wasteland. You can't buy anything without a credit card. You can't even collect on a $2 bet with a friend.
It is here that the difference between electronic money and electronic cash will become most apparent. The network equivalent of some of the current forms of electronic commerce - traceable credit cards and debit cards - are already well under way. One of the prime movers in this initiative is the CommerceNet consortium, which intends to deliver an infrastructure for, among other transactions, encrypted credit-card payments through the Net. These will work exactly like regular credit-card transactions, except that the actual account numbers will be scrambled so eavesdroppers, known as packet sniffers, can't intercept them and make illegal charges. Sort of the electronic equivalent of crumpling up the carbons.
Of course, these transactions are officially traceable - "When you buy something, the seller is identified to the buyer," says Cathy Medich, executive director of CommerceNet.
While this is undoubtedly useful, the open structure of the Net begs for a more cash-like system. Why should only those businesses pre-approved as official merchants be able to sell things? Why can't people transfer money to one another? "If I owe you $25 and say, 'I'm good for it, I have a credit card in my wallet,' what can you do?" asks Bruce Wilson, chief operating officer of CyberCash. "You can't do anything. You're not a merchant. That's the situation in the online world, with virtual storefronts and countless potential entrepreneurs who can't process credit cards. There are millions of college students who want space on a server to sell things. Poets who want to sell a limerick of the day. Weather servers with satellite images. They need a cash-like methodology. For those people, anonymity is not an issue. It's simply the problem of doing peer-to-peer payments. You to me, you to a relative. That's why we have a requirement for cash. So if Wired magazine has an archive of articles on a server, and a researcher is sitting somewhere at 2 a.m. searching the Net, he can say, 'Oh, here's five articles by this expert Steven Levy.' And he can download those articles. For a dollar, a dollar-fifty, two-fifty an article. He's happy to have it!" Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg CyberCash, of course, is planning to offer a system that will do network cash, but is reserving judgment on the degree of anonymity it will use. "If the marketplace is looking for anonymity, our service will not be used if it is not offering it to a sufficient degree," says Bruce Wilson. "If it never becomes an issue, it will not need to be there. For our cash services, we plan a middle-of-the-road approach." Meanwhile, there is "e-cash," offered by David Chaum's DigiCash. Anonymity is at the center of e-cash, which works with Windows, Mac, and Unix clients. I played with a beta version in Amsterdam and found it easy to use - as simple as reaching in a pocket and buying something but leaving no digital trace. This ease is indicative of all e-money schemes, really: mundane on the surface but either repressive or subversive underneath. A simple example: if Chaum's scheme could be used for downloading the thousands of documents available on the World Wide Web, then anyone could start a cottage business by selling files for low prices - say 10 cents, 25 cents apiece. (Chaum says that the cost for a transaction would eventually be infinitesimal, maybe one-tenth of a cent.) Eventually, as bandwidth increases, information in all sorts of formats - like audio and video - could be offered for cash. And no trail would follow the buyers - the sellers could not automatically stick your buying preferences on a mailing list. The government could never track your reading preferences. Or, to be honest, your lack of tax payments. Whereas in the alternative, everything might be traced.
E-cash rolled out on an experimental basis early this fall (http://www.digicash.com/). Each user, upon enrollment, gets $100 in token CyberBucks. This can be e-mailed to friends and acquaintances or spent in coins, simply by tapping a mouse.
How anticlimactic - clicking on "OK" to fork over funds! But unseen to the user, something miraculous is going on. Computer cycles are furiously crunching cryptography that represents the very best of David Chaum's dream. Secure money, accurately accounted for, unconditionally untraceable. It is a proof of concept that the future need not be one where purchases are tied to spenders.
At press time, DigiCash counted 15 businesses and organizations around the globe, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, getting ready to set up "shops" that will sell info for e-cash. Presumably, these new virtual storefronts will raise the sophistication level of the system from its initial state, which is, considering that e-cash is the vanguard of a new financial system, rather casual. Of the first few places to spend CyberBucks, one was the DigiCash store (where you could buy a reprint of a Chaum article, "Achieving Electronic Privacy," Scientific American, 1992, for $2.84 in digital cash). Another was something called Big Mac's Monty Python Archive Shop, offering homegrown transcriptions of Monty Python movies and routines for various increments of CyberBucks. A disclaimer cheerfully admitted a direct approach to the copyright question: it read, "I basically just stole these texts." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg In a sense, that sophomoric admission gets to the heart of e-money. If anonymity becomes a standard in cyberspace cash systems, we have to accept its potential abuse - as in copyright violations, fraud, and money laundering. Innovative new crypto schemes have the potential for mitigating these abuses, but the fact of anonymity guarantees that some skullduggery will be easier to pull off. On the other hand, the lack of anonymity means that every move you make, and every file you take, will be traceable. That opens the door to surveillance like we've never seen.
"You have to let your readers know how important this is," Chaum tells me when discussing online anonymous cash. "The choice can only be made once." He thinks that if an economic system that tracks all transactions comes to cyberspace, the result would be much worse than the situation in the physical world. "Cyberspace doesn't have all the physical constraints," he says. "There are no walls ... it's a different, scary, weird place, and with identification it's a panopticon nightmare. Right? Everything you do could be known to anyone else, could be recorded forever. It's antithetical to the basic principle underlying the mechanisms of democracy." David Chaum believes, as he wrote in an article in 1992, that "in one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people's lives; in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates." How Anonymous Electronic Money Works Smart cards 1.
Alice wants to fill her empty smart card with untraceable e-money taken from her bank. She inserts her card into an ATM-like slot in a machine at home or on the street. The gold computer chip on the card sends a random key to the bank in a digital "envelope." The bank signs the envelope with its signature, ensuring that the "money" inside can be trusted. Think of the envelope as having carbon-paper innards. The signature outside will transfer to the note inside without the bank knowing the destination of the money. The bank then sends the envelope back to Alice's smart card, which strips away the envelope,leaving a complex numerical code. Alice now has anonymous cash.
2.
Alice can venture into the world and spend her e-money anyway she wants - as bus fare, at a mall store, in parking meters, or even to lend money to a friend, slipping the card into her friend's "digital wallet." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg 3.
The recipient of anonymous e-money copies the math-money from Alice's smart-card chip and then has its computer add its own account ID number to it. This aggregate number (the money) is sent to the bank. (For added security, the bank might send an acknowledgment back to the recipient, but it's not essential.) The bank then credits the recipient - bus company, store, city, or friend - with the specific amount of money. However the bank cannot trace the money to Alice.
Network The entire process can run on a network as well. Instead of the calculations hap-pening on a gold microchip inlaid on a credit card, the transactions take place on the motherboard chip of any computer logged on the Net.
1.
Alice's computer communicates with the bank, loading up with anonymous money.
2.
She can send her e-money anywhere an e-mail message can go, and just as fast - to a mail-order outfit, a bill-collection agency, her mortgage company, or some kids publishing a brash electronic magazine.
3.
Recipients then e-mail the money to their bank accounts, where the amount is ready to be made into e-money again.
Both smart card and networks meld into one system. Computers' slot readers will enable them to spend money from smart cards, or fill up smart cards with money earned on the Net.
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Close Alert Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Meet The Clever Robot That's Ready to Take On Your Shopping Addiction About Released on 03/01/2018 [Host] This is the result of your online shopping addiction.
It's a picker robot.
Its job is to sort through goods in an order fulfillment center.
A task that's traditionally been difficult for machines.
But that's changing.
Thanks in large part to a mix of AI and some good old fashioned human hand-holding.
I guarantee you take for granted how many things you can pick up.
What comes so naturally to you is difficult for a lot of robots.
But not these picker robots at a startup called Kindred.
They're able to grab a variety of items and hold them for a barcode scanner and file them in the right cubby hole.
The big opportunity in e-commerce is that there are millions and millions of different types of objects.
Packaging keeps changing, some are soft and squishy, some are hard, some are heavy, some are soft.
And there's no way you can program that.
The challenge for us is constantly learning all these new objects fast enough to respond to our customers.
[Host] But fear not.
The robots still need our help learning how to tackle these new objects.
The team at Kindred lets the robot try and grasp objects on its own.
This is known as reinforcement learning.
Meaning, it gets a digital thumbs-up whenever it does something right.
And adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Humans also refine the robot's skills by remotely piloting the machine.
[Man] The human controller guides the arm and the gripper to pick up the objects, and we use all that data from the gripper from the servers from the arm to feed our algorithms.
So the next time they see the same shape, we know how to pick it up.
[Host] This approach provides a flexibility that's essential in a job like order fulfillment.
Not only does the robot need to know how to manipulate a galaxy of different objects, it has to adapt on the fly to novel products.
So let's say that coats come into season for a retailer like Gap.
Which is, in fact, testing Kindred's robot.
The machine needs to know how to deal with that new shape.
[George] As winter arrives and we get new objects we can start learning of those new objects, and then when summer comes back, we might see objects we've used before and we can switch back to those algorithms to pick up those objects.
Or we might see a whole new class of objects.
I don't know, maybe sombreros become popular one summer and now we need to learn how to pick up sombreros.
[Host] Adaptability is crucial for e-commerce robots.
Or any robot for that matter.
We can't just program the machines to manipulate each and every one of the dizzying number of objects in our world.
They'll have to think on their own.
And when that doesn't work, we have to be prepared to step in and help until they get the hang of things.
Yes, that'll make us babysitters.
But better to babysit than let the machines get carried away with things.
High-Speed Robots Part 2: Kiva Robots in the Workplace & in our E-commerce Economy Science of Food | Make Your Own Soft Serve With Dry Ice–And Sweet, Sweet Science Watch the Little Robot That Taught the Big Robot Something New Why Massaging Your Kale Makes It Taste Better Why the Toilet Needs an Upgrade Robot Love: How Design Studio Elastic Built WIRED's November Cover How The Rock Face Swapped with Vine Star Sione in 'Central Intelligence' The Garment District - Sound Patterns of Pittsburgh - Station to Station Is SpongeBob Ready to Move from a Pineapple to the Real World? The Ultimate Valentine’s Day Gift Guide for Women | Sponsored Content Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"This Robot Hand Taught Itself How to Grab Stuff Like a Human | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Matt Simon Science This Robot Hand Taught Itself How to Grab Stuff Like a Human OpenAI Save this story Save Save this story Save Company Open AI End User Research Technology Machine learning Neural Network Robotics Elon Musk is kinda worried about AI. (“AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that,” as he put it in 2017.) So he helped found a research nonprofit, OpenAI , to help cut a path to “safe” artificial general intelligence, as opposed to machines that pop our civilization like a pimple. Yes, Musk’s very public fears may distract from other more real problems in AI.
But OpenAI just took a big step toward robots that better integrate into our world by not, well, breaking everything they pick up.
OpenAI researchers have built a system in which a simulated robotic hand learns to manipulate a block through trial and error, then seamlessly transfers that knowledge to a robotic hand in the real world. Incredibly, the system ends up “inventing” characteristic grasps that humans already commonly use to handle objects. Not in a quest to pop us like pimples—to be clear.
Video by OpenAI The researchers’ trick is a technique called reinforcement learning. In a simulation, a hand, powered by a neural network, is free to experiment with different ways to grasp and fiddle with a block. “It's just doing random things and failing miserably all the time,” says OpenAI engineer Matthias Plappert. “Then what we do is we give it a reward whenever it does something that slightly moves it toward the goal it actually wants to achieve, which is rotating the block.” The idea is to spin the block to show certain sides, each marked with an uppercase letter, without dropping it.
If the system does something random that brings the block slightly closer to the right position, a reward tells the hand to keep doing that sort of thing. Conversely, if it does something dumb, it’s punished, and learns to not do that sort of thing. (Think of it like a score: -20 for something very bad like dropping the object.) “Over time with a lot of experience it gradually becomes more and more versatile at rotating the block in hand,” says Plappert.
The trick with this new system is that the researchers have essentially built many different worlds within the digital world. “So for each simulation we randomize certain aspects,” says Plappert. Maybe the mass of the block is a bit different, for example, or gravity is slightly different. “Maybe it can't move its fingers as quickly as it normally could.” As if it’s living in a simulated multiverse, the robot finds itself practicing in lots of different “realities” that are slightly different from one another.
This prepares it for the leap into the real world. “Because it sees so many of these simulated worlds during its training, what we were able to show here is that the actual physical world is just yet one more randomization from the perspective of the learning system,” says Plappert. If it only trains in a single simulated world, once it transfers to the real world, random variables will confuse the hell out of it.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg For instance: Typically in the lab these researchers would position the robot hand palm-up, completely flat. Sitting in the hand, a block wouldn’t slide off. (Cameras positioned around the hand track LEDs at the tip of each finger, and also the position of the block itself.) But if the researchers tilted the hand slightly, gravity could potentially pull the block off the hand.
The system could compensate for this, though, because of “gravity randomization,” which comes in the form of not just tweaking the strength of gravity in simulation, but the direction it’s pulling. “Our model that is trained with lots of randomizations, including the gravity randomization, adapted to this environment pretty well,” says OpenAI engineer Lilian Weng. “Another one without this gravity randomization just dropped the cube all the time because the angle was different.” The tilted palm was confused because in the real world, the gravitational force wasn’t perpendicular to the plane of the palm. But the hand that trained with gravity randomization could learn how to correct for this anomaly.
To keep its grip on the block, the robot has five fingers and 24 degrees of freedom, making it very dexterous. (Hence its name, the Shadow Dexterous Hand. It’s actually made by a company in the UK.
) Keep in mind that it’s learning to use those fingers from scratch, through trial and error in simulation. And it actually learns to grip the block like we would with our own fingers, essentially inventing human grasps.
Interestingly, the robot goes about something called a finger pivot a bit differently. Humans would typically pinch the block with the thumb and either the middle or ring finger, and pivot the block with flicks of the index finger. The robot hand, though, learns to grip with the thumb and little finger instead. “We believe the reason for this is simply in the Shadow Hand, the little finger is actually more dextrous because it has an extra degree of freedom” in the palm, says Plappert. “In effect this means that the little finger has a much bigger area it can easily reach.” For a robot learning to manipulate objects, this is simply the more efficient way to go about things.
It’s an aritificial intelligence figuring out how to do a complex task that would take ungodly amounts of time for a human to precisely program piece by piece. “In some sense, that's what reinforcement learning is about, AI on its own discovering things that normally would take an enormous amount of human expertise to design controllers for,” says Pieter Abbeel, a roboticist at UC Berkeley. “This is a wonderful example of that happening.” Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Now, this isn’t the first time researchers have trained a robot in simulation so a physical robot could adopt that knowledge. The challenge is, there’s a massive disconnect between simulation and the real world. There are just too many variables to account for in this great big complicated physical universe. “In the past, when people built simulators, they tried to build very accurate simulators and rely on the accuracy to make it work,” says Abbeel. “And if they can't make it accurate enough, then the system wouldn't work. This idea gets around that.” Sure, you could try to apply this kind of reinforcement learning on a robot in the real world and skip the simulation. But because this robot first trains in a purely digital world, it can pack in a lot of practice—the equivalent of 100 years of experience when you consider all the parallel “realities” the researchers factored in, all running quickly on very powerful computers. That kind of learning will grow all the more important as robots assume more responsibilities.
Responsibilities that don’t including exterminating the human race. OpenAI will make sure of that.
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"Elon Musk’s Weed-Toking Goodwill Tour Isn't Enough to Save Tesla | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Alex Davies Transportation Elon Musk’s Blunt-Toking Goodwill Tour Won't Fix Tesla's Real Problems Bill Pugliano/Getty Images Save this story Save Save this story Save The thing to remember about Elon Musk smoking a blunt with Joe Rogan is not that he took just one hit, or that he didn’t seem to know what a blunt was, or that he whiffed on an opportunity to show off just how useful his “not a flamethrower” can be. It’s that it came 130 minutes into his two-and-a-half-hour interview with Rogan, for the former Fear Factor host’s podcast, livestreamed on YouTube.
Two hours in which Musk got to play the most popular version of himself: the far-out thinking engineer who doesn’t conform to the status quo. Two hours in which he whoa’d Rogan with cogent breakdowns of the threat and promise of artificial intelligence , his plan to obliterate traffic with underground tunnels , and his enlightened fear of chimpanzees. Musk talked about his idea for an electric, supersonic airplane, complete with a physics lesson on how it would accomplish vertical takeoff and landing. He used math to argue that we’re all living in a simulation. He did it while remaining relatable, likeable, and interesting. And while the interview had its boring moments, it was, overall, a lot of fun.
That’s because it starred Musk at his best. As the guy who appeared on The Simpsons , turning Homer’s silly musings into world-bettering inventions. The Elon who met Stephen Colbert’s accusation of being a supervillain with a sheepish chuckle.
The one who earned a cameo in Iron Man 2.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg Cool Elon.
Not the version who claimed that the British man involved in the rescue of the Thai cave boys is a pedophile. Not the Musk who sparked shareholder lawsuits and a reported SEC investigation by announcing he might take Tesla private, then recanted a few weeks later.
Not the Musk who called a reporter a “fucking asshole” while doubling down on the pedophile claim. That’s the Musk who has seen Tesla’s stock price drop 17 percent since the beginning of the year. So for everyone who doesn’t freak out when someone takes a puff or two, the Rogan interview promised to be a reassuring appearance.
Except that Friday morning, Tesla shares dropped 10 percent in response to news that that human relations chief Gabrielle Toledano, who has been on a leave of absence, won’t rejoin the company , and chief accounting officer Dave Morton had resigned September 4—from a job he started August 6. ( CNBC reports Morton was frustrated that Tesla’s leadership was ignoring his advice on the question of going private.) He was the third high-ranking finance executive to leave the company this year.
Tesla finally hit its target of making 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week in June, and Musk, true to form, immediately said they’d hit 6,000 a week this quarter. He has also said this is the quarter Tesla starts—at long last—to turn a profit. We won’t have a better idea of how Tesla is doing on production until early October, or of its financial state until early November, but these departures are just the latest evidence that the automaker is struggling.
Musk’s behavior of late hasn’t helped, of course. But the return of Fun Elon (and the emergence of Blunt Smokin’ Elon) doesn't address the real, knotty problems facing the automaker—those that could send Tesla's future up in smoke.
Kelly Slater's artificial surf pool is really making waves This Bugatti goes 18 mph (and is made of Lego ) How to use Twitter: critical tips for new users PHOTO ESSAY: A world without electricity Everything you want to know about quantum computing Hungry for even more deep dives on your next favorite topic? Sign up for the Backchannel newsletter Senior Associate Editor Facebook X Instagram Topics Elon Musk Electric Vehicles Tesla marijuana Gregory Barber Kari McMahon Ramin Skibba Angela Watercutter Jennifer M. Wood Reece Rogers Amit Katwala Will Knight Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"The Engineering Behind Elon Musk's Bid to Save Thailand's Cave Boys | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Wendy Dent Transportation The Engineering Behind Elon Musk's Bid to Save Thailand's Cave Boys Musk was eager to play a role in the rescue. And for that, he faced accusations that he inserted himself in the situation to promote himself.
Krit Promsakla Na Sakolnakorn/AP Images Save this story Save Save this story Save Around 6 pm Tuesday at Tham Luang in Thailand, the last of the 13 survivors who had spent 18 days trapped in a cave emerged to safety. A rescue team had spent the past three days getting the boys out after five days of desperate planning and calculations since their discovery.
As the boys’ oxygen supply dwindled, doubts in the rescuers’ ability to save them mounted. The boys weren’t trained scuba divers, and they were facing a voyage on which a pro Thai Navy SEAL died, while placing oxygen tank supplies along the route.
Then Elon Musk entered the fray, apparently at the humble request of a Twitter follower: X content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
What followed was a curious few days where two rescue operations played out simultaneously. The first was the official one in Thailand that ultimately proved successful, and the second was run by Musk—an unsolicited effort that Thai authorities ultimately called “not practical for our mission” but one that captivated the internet and reinforced the most flattering image of Musk: as a brilliant engineer with a nose for unexpected solutions to pressing problems, delivered in record time.
In his inimitable fashion, Musk started tossing out fresh ideas for ways to free the boys, chatting with his followers. It inspired a wealth of budding engineers to brainstorm and send hand-drawn designs his way too.
"Boring Co has advanced ground penetrating radar & is pretty good at digging holes. Don’t know if pump rate is limited by electric power or pumps are too small. If so, could dropship fully charged Powerpacks and pumps." Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg X content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
For a mogul who has spent recent months fighting with the press and a few investors , it was a chance to put those skills and an ample bank account to use for an unambiguously great cause, with no frustrating quibbling over production rates or financial figures.
So, never one to keep a single project in mind, Musk started down two paths. For the first, he tapped Wing Inflatables.
The SpaceX contractor is based in Arcata, California, 350 miles north of San Francisco. “We manufacture inflatable recovery parts for SpaceX,” says CEO Andrew Branagh. “So we have a relationship. When Elon had an idea, he asked our engineering team to get a hold of us." So they hopped on a conference call. “Elon Musk was on the call,” Branagh says. “He was very visionary. I was impressed. They were open to our ideas." The result of the collaborative brainstorm was a red kevlar pouch of sorts, designed to carry the boys. The "inflatable tube with airlocks," as Musk called it, could be pulled along, stretcher style, by a trained diver, freeing the boys from needing to learn how to dive or use scuba gear.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg "They are like a bell chamber," Branagh says. Just as a church bell tower contains or releases sound by closing or opening a series of vents, the inflatable tube with airlocks uses air pressure to control the buoyancy, necessary for moving through a cave complex where you occasionally have to drop down to keep moving forward. When you turn parts of the pods one way, it allows them to float. "When you turn them another way, they sink." (To keep the boys calm during a long, claustrophobic voyage, Branagh suggested valium.) They moved fast and worked hard. "We started with a concept at 8 am and had a prototype in the pool being tested the same day,” Branagh says. “Then the team stayed until 1 in the morning and built more units.” Enough units to get all 12 boys, plus their coach, out of the cave and into the daylight. The following afternoon, Musk’s jet touched down in Arcata to pick up the potential life savers. “A third of the factory went to the plane to wish it luck,” Branagh says.
The pouches that went into the jet, however, never appeared in the public light, and it’s not clear where they ended up. Musk never mentioned them on Twitter. While Branagh and his team were racing to put them together, Musk was hedging his bets with another design approach.
Made from an oxygen tube designed for a SpaceX Falcon rocket, the bullet-shaped capsule followed the same principle as the pouch the Wing team devised, an air pressure–controlled vehicle of sorts for the boys to lay inside while the pro divers guided them to safety. Musk called it a "kid-sized submarine” and said it was 12.2 inches in diameter, skinny enough to fit through the narrowest “choke hold” of the passage. He called it Wild Boar, in honor of the boys’ soccer team.
"Good for rescuing vulnerable patients in dangerous environments," he tweeted, "particularly if water, toxic gas or dangerous bacteria/viruses present, as patient would remain dry & at [standard] air pressure entire time." And because Musk is always thinking on a few tracks at once, he noted, “with some mods this could also work as an escape pod in space." As the engineering process sped along, Musk updated the public with a steady stream of tweets. The aluminum capsules could use a thin layer of neoprene insulation, he said, and their buoyancy would be controlled by strapping diving weight belts around them.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg X content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Musk also considered one follower’s suggestion to add a music player to the setup. "Yeah, that sounds cool,” he replied. “Music makes things better. Calms the mind. Adding padded wall pockets for a hand radio & phone/music player." But by the time Musk’s team had tested its design in a Los Angeles pool, on Saturday, the rescue operation was already underway in Thailand, and Musk’s help wasn’t needed. “Will continue testing in LA in case needed later or for somewhere else in future." Still, Musk put the design on his plane and made the trip over the Pacific. When he arrived, it was day three of the rescue. Eight boys were already out safe, thanks to the low-tech diving method, and the remaining four boys and their coach would soon be free. He dropped off the mini-sub in one of the caves in the long complex. "Leaving this here in case it may be useful,” he tweeted. “Thailand is so beautiful.” It’s unclear whether the design could have been helpful had it arrived earlier, and whether the hastily assembled capsule would have met the demands of the diving and medical experts on the scene. Representatives for SpaceX and Musk declined to answer questions about various details of the process, including the team’s communications with local authorities. Whatever the answers, Musk was eager to play a role in the rescue. And for that, he faced accusations that he inserted himself in the situation to promote himself.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg “Musk has a long track record of promising to solve huge problems and then either missing deadlines or falling short,” Adam Clark Estes wrote in Gizmodo.
“Along the way, he’s also built up a cult of personality that leads fans to compare him to comic book superheroes. So even if Musk isn’t really serious about his ridiculous, buzz-building projects, plenty of people still think he is.” Musk again took to Twitter to parry the critique: “This reaction has shaken my opinion of many people. We were asked to create a backup option & worked hard to do so. Checked with dive team many times to confirm it was worthwhile. Now it’s there for anyone who needs it in future. Something’s messed up if this is not a good thing.” By Wednesday afternoon, he’d moved on to a new problem that needs fixing. “Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fixing the water in any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels,” he tweeted. “No kidding.” Laser-shooting planes uncover the horror of WWI We have no idea how bad the US tick problem is The Pentagon's dream team of tech-savvy soldiers PHOTO ESSAY: The annual super-celebration in Superman's real-world home It’s time you learned about quantum computing Get even more of our inside scoops with our weekly Backchannel newsletter Topics Elon Musk SpaceX Ramin Skibba Will Knight Andy Greenberg Kari McMahon Justin Ling Amit Katwala Amit Katwala Brendan I. Koerner Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Why Artificial Intelligence Researchers Should Be More Paranoid | WIRED"
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Close Alert Search Backchannel Business Culture Gear Ideas Science Security Merch Podcasts Video Artificial Intelligence Climate Games Newsletters Magazine Events Wired Insider Jobs Coupons Tom Simonite Business Why Artificial Intelligence Researchers Should Be More Paranoid Play/Pause Button Pause A new report highlights risks of artificial intelligence, such as malicious self-driving cars and robots programmed to be assassins.
Ben Bours Save this story Save Save this story Save Life has gotten more convenient since 2012, when breakthroughs in machine learning triggered the ongoing frenzy of investment in artificial intelligence. Speech recognition works most of the time , for example, and you can unlock the new iPhone with your face.
People with the skills to build things such systems have reaped great benefits—they’ve become the most prized of tech workers.
But a new report on the downsides of progress in AI warns they need to pay more attention to the heavy moral burdens created by their work.
The 99-page document unspools an unpleasant and sometimes lurid laundry list of malicious uses of artificial-intelligence technology. It calls for urgent and active discussion of how AI technology could be misused. Example scenarios given include cleaning robots being repurposed to assassinate politicians, or criminals launching automated and highly personalized phishing campaigns.
One proposed defense against such scenarios: AI researchers becoming more paranoid, and less open. The report says people and companies working on AI need to think about building safeguards against criminals or attackers into their technology—and even to withhold certain ideas or tools from public release.
The new report has more than two dozen authors, from institutions including the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the Elon Musk-funded institute OpenAI, digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, computer-security company Endgame, and think tank Center for a New American Security.
Ethics has become a major topic of discussion in machine learning over the past year. The discussion has been triggered in part by government use of algorithms to make decisions that affect citizens , such as criminal defendants, and incidents where machine-learning systems display biases.
Microsoft and IBM recently had to reeducate facial-analysis services they sell to businesses, because they were significantly less accurate at identifying the gender of people with darker skin.
Tuesday’s report is concerned with the more visceral harms that could result from AI software becoming much more capable and pervasive, for example in autonomous cars, or software that can automate complicated office tasks. It warns that such systems could be easily modified to criminal or even lethal ends.
A compromised autonomous vehicle could be used to deliver explosives or intentionally crash, for example. Work on creating software capable of hacking other software, for example as sponsored by the Pentagon , might help criminals deploy more powerful and adaptable malware.
What to do about that? The report’s main recommendation is that people and companies developing AI technology discuss safety and security more actively and openly—including with policymakers. It also asks AI researchers to adopt a more paranoid mindset and consider how enemies or attackers might repurpose their technologies before releasing them.
Business What Sam Altman’s Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI Steven Levy Business Sam Altman’s Sudden Exit Sends Shockwaves Through OpenAI and Beyond Will Knight Gear Humanity’s Most Obnoxious Vehicle Gets an Electric (and Nearly Silent) Makeover Boone Ashworth Security The Startup That Transformed the Hack-for-Hire Industry Andy Greenberg If taken up, that recommendation would stifle the unusual openness that has become a hallmark of AI research. Competition for talent has driven typically secretive companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to openly publish research, and release internal tools as open source.
Shahar Avin, a lead author on the new report, and researcher at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, says the field’s innocent attitude is an outdated legacy from decades of AI over-promising but under-delivering. “People in AI have been promising the moon and coming up short repeatedly,” he says. “This time it’s different, you can no longer close your eyes.” Tuesday’s report acknowledges that drawing a line between what should and shouldn’t be released is difficult. But it claims that the computer security, biotechnology, and defense communities have shown that it is possible to develop and enforce norms around responsible disclosure of dangerous ideas and tools.
Avin argues that in some cases, the AI community is close to the line. He points to research by Google on how to synthesize highly realistic voices.
In light of how Russian operatives attempted to manipulate the 2016 presidential election , research that could aid production of fake news should come with discussion of tools that might defend against it, he says. That might include methods to detect or watermark synthetic audio or video, Avin says. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Internet companies, including Reddit, are already battling porn videos manipulated to star celebrities created using open-source machine-learning software known as Deepfakes.
Some people working on AI are already trying to open their eyes—and those of future AI experts—to the potential for harmful use of what they’re building. Ion Stoica, a professor at University of California Berkeley who was not involved in the report, says he’s collaborating more actively with colleagues in computer security, and thinking about public policy. He was lead author of a recent survey of technical challenges in AI that identified security and safety as major topics for research and concern.
Stoica says Berkeley is also trying to expose undergraduate and grad students flocking to AI and machine-learning courses to that message. He’s optimistic that a field previously focused primarily on discovery can adopt best practices seen among those who build business and consumer tech products, bridges, and aircraft. “We are trying to turn machine learning into more of an engineering discipline,” Stoica says. “There is a gap, but I think that gap is narrowing.” A 2016 contest in Las Vegas in which software bots attacked one another’s code showed that hackers don’t have to be human any more.
Russia, China, and the United States all say artificial intelligence is vital to the future of their military power.
Fake celebrity porn videos made with help from machine learning software are spreading online, and the law can’t do much about it.
Senior Editor X Will Knight Susan D'Agostino Christopher Beam Will Knight Will Knight Vittoria Elliott Amanda Hoover Facebook X Pinterest YouTube Instagram Tiktok More From WIRED Subscribe Newsletters Mattresses Reviews FAQ Wired Staff Coupons Black Friday Editorial Standards Archive Contact Advertise Contact Us Customer Care Jobs Press Center RSS Accessibility Help Condé Nast Store Do Not Sell My Personal Info © 2023 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.
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"Ingredients for robotics research"
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"https://openai.com/research/ingredients-for-robotics-research"
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"Close Search Skip to main content Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Search Navigation quick links Log in Try ChatGPT Menu Mobile Navigation Close Site Navigation Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Safety Company About Blog Careers Residency Charter Security Customer stories Quick Links Log in Try ChatGPT Search Ben Barry Research Ingredients for robotics research February 26, 2018 More resources View Gym environments View Baselines Read paper Robotics , Environments , Open source , Reinforcement learning , Milestone , Publication , Release Ingredients for robots research 01:56 This release includes four environments using the Fetch research platform and four environments using the ShadowHand robot. The manipulation tasks contained in these environments are significantly more difficult than the MuJoCo continuous control environments currently available in Gym, all of which are now easily solvable using recently released algorithms like PPO.
Furthermore, our newly released environments use models of real robots and require the agent to solve realistic tasks.
Environments Fetch FetchReach-v0 : Fetch has to move its end-effector to the desired goal position.
FetchReach-v0 : Fetch has to hit a puck across a long table such that it slides and comes to rest on the desired goal.
FetchReach-v0 : Fetch has to move a box by pushing it until it reaches a desired goal position.
FetchReach-v0 : Fetch has to pick up a box from a table using its gripper and move it to a desired goal above the table.
ShadowHand HandReach-v0 : ShadowHand has to reach with its thumb and a selected finger until they meet at a desired goal position above the palm.
HandReach-v0 : ShadowHand has to manipulate a block until it achieves a desired goal position and rotation.
HandReach-v0 : ShadowHand has to manipulate an egg until it achieves a desired goal position and rotation.
HandReach-v0 : ShadowHand has to manipulate a pen until it achieves a desired goal position and rotation.
This release ships with eight robotics environments for Gym that use the MuJoCo physics simulator. The environments are: Goals All of the new tasks have the concept of a “goal”, for example the desired position of the puck in the slide task or the desired orientation of a block in the hand block manipulation task. All environments by default use a sparse reward of -1 if the desired goal was not yet achieved and 0 if it was achieved (within some tolerance). This is in contrast to the shaped rewards used in the old set of Gym continuous control problems, for example Walker2d-v2 with its shaped reward.
We also include a variant with dense rewards for each environment. However, we believe that sparse rewards are more realistic in robotics applications and we encourage everyone to use the sparse reward variant instead.
Hindsight Experience Replay Alongside these new robotics environments, we’re also releasing code for Hindsight Experience Replay (or HER for short), a reinforcement learning algorithm that can learn from failure. Our results show that HER can learn successful policies on most of the new robotics problems from only sparse rewards. Below, we also show some potential directions for future research that could further improve the performance of the HER algorithm on these tasks.
Understanding HER To understand what HER does, let’s look at in the context of FetchSlide , a task where we need to learn to slide a puck across the table and hit a target. Our first attempt very likely will not be a successful one. Unless we get very lucky, the next few attempts will also likely not succeed. Typical reinforcement learning algorithms would not learn anything from this experience since they just obtain a constant reward (in this case: -1 ) that does not contain any learning signal.
The key insight that HER formalizes is what humans do intuitively: Even though we have not succeeded at a specific goal, we have at least achieved a different one. So why not just pretend that we wanted to achieve this goal to begin with, instead of the one that we set out to achieve originally? By doing this substitution, the reinforcement learning algorithm can obtain a learning signal since it has achieved some goal; even if it wasn’t the one that we meant to achieve originally. If we repeat this process, we will eventually learn how to achieve arbitrary goals, including the goals that we really want to achieve.
This approach lets us learn how to slide a puck across the table even though our reward is fully sparse and even though we may have never actually hit the desired goal early on. We call this technique Hindsight Experience Replay since it replays experience (a technique often used in off-policy RL algorithms like DQN and DDPG ) with goals which are chosen in hindsight, after the episode has finished. HER can therefore be combined with any off-policy RL algorithm (for example, HER can be combined with DDPG, which we write as “DDPG + HER”).
Results We’ve found HER to work extremely well in goal-based environments with sparse rewards. We compare DDPG + HER and vanilla DDPG on the new tasks. This comparison includes the sparse and the dense reward versions of each environment.
Median test success rate (line) with interquartile range (shaded area) for four different configurations on HandManipulateBlockRotateXYZ-v0. Data is plotted over training epochs and summarized over five different random seeds per configuration.
DDPG + HER with sparse rewards significantly outperforms all other configurations and manages to learn a successful policy on this challenging task only from sparse rewards. Interestingly, DDPG + HER with dense reward is able to learn but achieves worse performance. Vanilla DDPG mostly fails to learn in both cases. We find this trend to be generally true across most environments and we include full results in our accompanying technical report.
Requests for Research: HER edition Though HER is a promising way towards learning complex goal-based tasks with sparse rewards like the robotics environments that we propose here, there is still a lot of room for improvement. Similar to our recently published Requests for Research 2.0 , we have a few ideas on ways to improve HER specifically, and reinforcement learning in general.
Automatic hindsight goal creation.
We currently have a hard-coded strategy for selecting hindsight goals that we want to substitute. It would be interesting if this strategy could be learned instead.
Unbiased HER.
The goal substitution changes the distribution of experience in an unprincipled way. This bias can in theory lead to instabilities, although we do not find this to happen in practice. Still, it would be nice to derive an unbiased version of HER, for example by utilizing importance sampling.
HER + HRL.
It would be interesting to further combine HER with a recent idea in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL). Instead of applying HER just to goals, it could also be applied to actions generated by a higher-level policy. For example, if the higher level asked the lower level to achieve goal A but instead goal B was achieved, we could assume that the higher level asked us to achieve goal B originally.
Richer value functions.
It would be interesting to extend recent research and condition the value function on additional inputs like discount factor or success threshold and (maybe?) also substitute them in hindsight.
Faster information propagation.
Most off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms use target networks to stabilize training. However, since changes need time to propagate, this will limit the speed of training and we have noticed in our experiments that it is often the most important factor determining the speed of DDPG+HER learning. It would be interesting to investigate other means of stabilizing training that do not incur such a slowdown.
HER + multi-step returns.
The experience used in HER is extremely off-policy since we substitute goals. This makes it hard to use it with multi-step returns.
However, multi-step returns are desirable since they allow much faster propagation of information about the returns.
On-policy HER.
Currently, HER can only be used with off-policy algorithms since we substitute goals, making the experience extremely off-policy. However, recent state of the art algorithms like PPO exhibit very attractive stability traits. It would be interesting to investigate whether HER can be combined with such on-policy algorithms, for example by importance sampling.
There are already some preliminary results in this direction.
RL with very frequent actions.
Current RL algorithms are very sensitive to the frequency of taking actions which is why frame skip technique is usually used on Atari. In continuous control domains, the performance goes to zero as the frequency of taking actions goes to infinity, which is caused by two factors: inconsistent exploration and the necessity to bootstrap more times to propagate information about returns backward in time. How to design a sample-efficient RL algorithm which can retain its performance even when the frequency of taking actions goes to infinity? Combine HER with recent advances in RL.
There is a vast body of recent research that improves different aspects of RL. As a start, HER could be combined with Prioritized Experience Replay , distributional RL , entropy-regularized RL , or reverse curriculum generation.
You can find additional additional information and references on these proposals and on the on the new Gym environments in our accompanying technical report.
Using goal-based environments Introducing the notion of a “goal” requires a few backwards-compatible changes to the existing Gym API : All goal-based environments use a gym.spaces.Dict observation space. Environments are expected to include a desired goal, which the agent should attempt to achieve ( desired_goal ), the goal that it has currently achieved instead ( achieved_goal ), and the actual observation ( observation ), e.g. the state of the robot.
We expose the reward function of an environment and thus allow to re-compute a reward with changed goals. This allows for HER-style algorithms, which substitute goals.
Here is a simple example that interacts with the one of the new goal-based environments and performs goal substitution: The new goal-based environments can be used with existing Gym-compatible reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Baselines.
Use gym.wrappers.FlattenDictWrapper to flatten the dict-based observation space into an array: Authors Matthias Plappert Marcin Andrychowicz Alex Ray Bob McGrew Bowen Baker Glenn Powell Jonas Schneider Josh Tobin Maciek Chociej Peter Welinder Vikash Kumar Wojciech Zaremba Research Overview Index GPT-4 DALL·E 3 API Overview Data privacy Pricing Docs ChatGPT Overview Enterprise Try ChatGPT Company About Blog Careers Charter Security Customer stories Safety OpenAI © 2015 – 2023 Terms & policies Privacy policy Brand guidelines Social Twitter YouTube GitHub SoundCloud LinkedIn Back to top
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"Google DeepMind and UCLH collaborate on AI-based radiotherapy treatment | Google | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/30/google-deepmind-ucl-ai-radiotherapy-treatment-"
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"Google’s AI research arm is partnering with the hospital to improve the scans available for radiotherapists by using machine learning US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness The DeepMind project will use anonymised scans from up to 700 former patients.
Photograph: Juice/REX/Shutterstock The DeepMind project will use anonymised scans from up to 700 former patients.
Photograph: Juice/REX/Shutterstock Google Google DeepMind and UCLH collaborate on AI-based radiotherapy treatment Google’s AI research arm is partnering with the hospital to improve the scans available for radiotherapists by using machine learning Tue 30 Aug 2016 11.00 EDT Google DeepMindhas announced it is working on a project to improve treatment on head and neck cancers, its third major collaboration with the NHS.
The London-based AI research arm of the online search firm is partnering with University College London Hospital in an attempt to improve the scans available for radiotherapists by using machine learning. The project will use anonymised scans from up to 700 former patients.
Radiotherapy works by bombarding cancerous cells with radiation to kill them, while minimising damage to the healthy cells around them.
Clinicians target the treatment through a process called “segmentation”: literally drawing around different parts of the patient’s anatomy on scans, letting the radiotherapy machines know which tissue to target and which tissue to leave.
The process is particularly painstaking and slow for head and neck cancers, taking about four hours of a clinician’s time. DeepMind believes its machine-learning techniques can reduce that time to one hour.
“Our collaboration will see us carefully analyse anonymised scans from up to 700 former patients at UCLH,” the company said in a blogpost, “to determine the potential for machine learning to make radiotherapy planning more efficient.
“Clinicians will remain responsible for deciding radiotherapy treatment plans, but it is hoped that the segmentation process could be reduced from up to four hours to around an hour.” Dr Yen-Ching Chang, clinical lead for radiotherapy at UCLH, said: “Developing machine learning which can automatically differentiate between cancerous and healthy tissue on radiotherapy scans will assist clinicians in planning radiotherapy treatment. This has the potential to free up clinicians to spend even more time on patient care, education and research, all of which would be to the benefit of our patients and the populations we serve.” The DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, who has led the company’s health efforts, added: “This real-world application of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is exactly why we set up DeepMind. We’re incredibly excited to be working with the radiotherapy team at UCLH to explore how AI can help to reduce the time it takes to plan radiotherapy treatment for head and neck cancer patients. We hope this work could lead to real benefits for cancer patients across the country and for the clinicians who treat them.” The collaboration comes after February’s announcement that DeepMind is working with the Royal Free hospital to monitor patients’ kidney functions to help catch and treat acute kidney failure in inpatients, and July’s announcement of a research project in conjunction with Moorfields Eye Hospital, to examine the possibility of using machine learning to identify eye conditions in retinal scans.
As with the other NHS collaborations, the project will raise questions over DeepMind’s data sharing agreements with the health service. DeepMind said: “As with all our work with the NHS, we will treat the patient data we are using in this project with the utmost care and respect. All scans will be anonymised in line with the UCLH Information Governance policy before they are shared with DeepMind.” UCLH added more information in an FAQ published about the project: “UCLH will rigorously ensure that no personally identifiable data is included in the database of scans provided to DeepMind Health for this project. During the course of the project DeepMind Health must take rigorous measures to protect the security of the data, and may not disclose it to anyone other than the researchers and engineers working on the project.
“Data contributing to this study can only be used for research that explores the use of machine learning to identify and differentiate between healthy and cancerous cells in radiotherapy images.” “DeepMind Health must securely destroy all copies of anonymised data received through the agreement,” the hospital added.
Explore more on these topics Google Cancer research Artificial intelligence (AI) Medical research DeepMind news More on this story More on this story AI firm DeepMind puts database of the building blocks of life online 22 Jul 2021 Demis Hassabis: the deep mind Dominic Cummings turned to as the pandemic hit 27 May 2021 DeepMind AI cracks 50-year-old problem of protein folding 30 Nov 2020 Google’s DeepMind makes AI program that can learn like a human 14 Mar 2017 … … Google's DeepMind plans bitcoin-style health record tracking for hospitals 9 Mar 2017 AI can win at poker: but as computers get smarter, who keeps tabs on their ethics? 5 Feb 2017 … … Whatever happened to the DeepMind AI ethics board Google promised? 26 Jan 2017 The Guardian view on AI in the NHS: not the revolution you are looking for 6 Jan 2017 … … No one can read what’s on the cards for artificial intelligence 29 Jan 2017 … … Labour calls for closer scrutiny of tech firms and their algorithms 18 Dec 2016 … … Most viewed Most viewed US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"Raising HAL: introducing our new AI and data blog | Science | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2016/feb/25/raising-hal-introducing-our-new-ai-and-data-blog"
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"Raising HAL is a new blog by science writer Martin Robbins, with a focus on artificial intelligence, and the data and algorithms that make up the fabric of our new online reality US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness Still from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal, the thinking computer Photograph: Ronald Grant Still from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal, the thinking computer Photograph: Ronald Grant Raising HAL Science Raising HAL: introducing our new AI and data blog Raising HAL is a new blog by science writer Martin Robbins, with a focus on artificial intelligence, and the data and algorithms that make up the fabric of our new online reality Thu 25 Feb 2016 06.34 EST There’s an old book on my shelf, and nearly eight years ago I wrote my first ever blog post about it. It’s called March of the Machines, and the back jacket confidently predicts that, “within 5 years robots will exist with the brain power of cats,” and, “in 10-50 years robots will exist that are more intelligent than humans.” The book was published in 1997, and nineteen years later the claims of “Britain’s leading prophet of the Robot Age,” seem oddly relevant. This was before Google or Facebook with their vast server fields and billion-dollar AI teams, before the rise of deep learning and the fall of Moore’s Law, before the Internet was anything like the economic and cultural force it is today. A digital eternity has passed – almost six hundred billion ticks of the UNIX clock – and yet here we still are; the same prophets predicting the same milestones in the same timeframes.
I started my old blog, The Lay Scientist, in a golden age of scepticism that’s not so much fizzled out as been assimilated into wider media. In 2010 when I moved it to the Guardian to help launch the Science blog network , writers like Ben Goldacre were still an anomaly. A few years later a small horde of smart sassy debunkers – not least my outstanding colleagues here – stand ready to shoot nonsense down at a moment’s notice.
It’s all a bit too fast for me. It’s still true that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its boots”, but even the truth is shuffling through Terminal 5 before I’ve stopped punching my alarm clock. I was never that interested in repeating what everyone else is doing, and frankly I’m not needed anymore, so it’s time to refocus.
Rutger Hauer as the all-too-mortal Batty in Blade Runner Where better to go than back to the start? There is a vast and growing gap between the increasingly data- and algorithm-driven environment we live in and the ability of most science and tech writers to keep up with it. The result is low quality coverage of artificial intelligence, characterised by PR hype, tech hysteria, moral panic and the vacant regurgitation of buzzwords.
The job of journalists is to speak truth to power. Power is increasingly tied to data, and the forces – human or artificial – that control, analyse, manipulate and present it on our behalf. We also need to explain, and frankly there hasn’t been enough explanation - what actually is deep learning? How does a neural net really work? How are these algorithms used in the real world, how good are they and what are the real dangers? So my blog here is re-launching as Raising HAL, and I’ll do my best to shed a little bit of light on all of the above. I won’t always be right, but I’ll try to at least ask the right questions. And I definitely won’t create a sentient machine that enslaves your entire family to clean its solar panels, so there’s that.
@mjrobbins Explore more on these topics Science Raising HAL Artificial intelligence (AI) Consciousness blogposts Most viewed Most viewed US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"Has a rampaging AI algorithm really killed thousands in Pakistan? | Science | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2016/feb/18/has-a-rampaging-ai-algorithm-really-killed-thousands-in-pakistan"
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"A killer machine-learning algorithm guiding the U.S. drone program has killed thousands of innocent people according to some reports. What’s the truth? US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness A US Predator unmanned drone armed with a missile stands on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport.
Photograph: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images A US Predator unmanned drone armed with a missile stands on the tarmac of Kandahar military airport.
Photograph: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images The Lay Scientist Science Has a rampaging AI algorithm really killed thousands in Pakistan? A killer machine-learning algorithm guiding the U.S. drone program has killed thousands of innocent people according to some reports. What’s the truth? Thu 18 Feb 2016 10.10 EST A killer AI has gone on a rampage through Pakistan, slaughtering perhaps thousands of people. At least that’s the impression you’d get if you read this report from Ars Technica (based on NSA documents leaked by The Intercept ), which claims that a machine learning algorithm guiding U.S. drones – unfortunately named ‘SKYNET’ – could have wrongly targeted numerous innocent civilians.
Let’s start with the facts. For the last decade or so, the United States has used unmanned drones to attack militants in Pakistan. The number of kills is unknown, but estimates start at over a thousand and range up to maybe four thousand. A key problem for the intelligence services is finding the right people to kill, since the militants are mixed in with the general population and not just sitting in camp together waiting to be bombed.
One thing they have is data, which apparently includes metadata from 55 million mobile phone users in Pakistan. For each user they could see which cell towers were pinged, how they moved, who they called, who called them, how long they spent on calls, when phones were switched off, and any of several dozen other statistics. That opened up a possible route for machine learning, neatly summarised on slide 2 of this deck.
If we know that some of these 55 million people are couriers, can an algorithm find patterns in their behaviour and spot others who act in a similar way? The courier-detection problem, as defined by the NSA.
What exactly is a ‘courier’ anyway? This is important to understanding some of the errors that The Intercept and Ars Technica made. Courier isn’t a synonym for ‘terrorist’ as such - it means a specific kind of agent. Terrorist groups are justifiably nervous about using digital communications, and so a lot of messages are still delivered by hand , by couriers. Bin Laden made extensive use of couriers to pass information around, and it was through one of them – Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti (an alias) - that he was eventually found.
That’s who the AI was being trained to detect – not the bin Ladens but the al-Kuwaitis. Not the targets so much as the people who might lead agents to them. Ars Technica implies that somehow the output of this courier detection method was used directly to “generate the final kill list” for drone strikes, but there’s zero evidence I can see that this was ever the case, and it would make almost no sense given what the algorithm was actually looking for - you don’t blow up your leads.
How did it work? The NSA tried several classification algorithms, and chose what’s known as a random forest approach. It’s actually pretty simple to describe. You have 55 million records, each with 80 different variables or ‘features’ in them. A random forest algorithm splits this data up into lots of random overlapping bundles of records and features. So you might end up with e.g.: Batch 1: ‘average call length’ and ‘number of cell towers visited’ for a million randomly selected people.
Batch 2: ‘daily incoming voice minutes’ and ‘daily outgoing minutes’ for another million randomly selected people.
[…lots more batches...] Batch N: ‘number of cell towers visited’ and ‘daily outgoing minutes’ and ‘age of person’ for another million randomly selected people.
And so on. The next step is to train a decision tree on each bundle of data. A decision tree is, very crudely speaking, an algorithm that takes a record with a number of variables and goes through a series of yes/no questions to reach an answer. So for example, ‘ if this variable is > x 1 and that variable is not > x 2 and ‘ a third variable’ is > x 3 …’ (...and so on for perhaps dozens of steps...) ‘… then this record is a courier.
’ The exact values for all the ‘x’s used are learned by training the algorithm on some test data where the outcomes are known, and you can think of them collectively as a model of the real world.
Having created all those trees, you then bring them together to create your metaphorical forest. You run every single tree on each record, and combine the results from all of them to get some probability that the record is a courier. Very broadly speaking, the more the trees agree, the higher the probability is. Obviously this is a really simplified explanation, but hopefully it’s enough to show that we’re not talking about a mysterious black box here.
How well did the algorithm do? Both The Intercept and Ars Technica leapt on the fact that the person with the highest probability of being a courier that they found in the data was Ahmad Zaidan, a bureau chief for Al-Jazeera in Islamabad. Cue snorts of derision from Ars Technica: “As The Intercept reported, Zaidan frequently travels to regions with known terrorist activity in order to interview insurgents and report the news. But rather than questioning the machine learning that produced such a bizarre result, the NSA engineers behind the algorithm instead trumpeted Zaidan as an example of a SKYNET success in their in-house presentation, including a slide that labelled Zaidan as a ‘MEMBER OF AL-QA’IDA.’” If you knew nothing about machine learning, or you ignored the goals the algorithm was actually set, it might seem like a bad result. Actually it isn’t. Let’s ignore the NSA’s prior beliefs about the man. The algorithm was trained to look for ‘couriers’, people who carry messages to and from Al Qaida members. As a journalist, Zaidan was so well connected with Al Qaida members that he interviewed Bin Laden on at least two occasions. This was a man who regularly travelled to, spoke with and carried messages from Al Qaida members.
If the purpose of the algorithm had been narrowly to ‘detect terrorists’ or ‘identify suicide bombers’ then The Intercept might have a point. But it wasn’t. It was trained to find people tightly linked to Al Qaida who might be carrying useful intelligence. Its identification of Zaidan – regardless of whether he was acting as a journalist or not – was entirely correct within the context of those goals.
(As an aside, obviously I’m not making any moral statement here about the validity of intelligence agencies tracking journalists and intercepting their communications. I’m talking simply about the performance of the algorithm in carrying out the objectives it was set.) So the one case that The Intercept and Ars Technica highlight as a failure of the algorithm is actually a pretty striking success story. Zaidan is exactly the kind of person the NSA would expect and want the algorithm to highlight. Of course it’s just one example thought, so how well did the algorithm perform over the rest of the data? The answer is: actually pretty well. The challenge here is pretty enormous because while the NSA has data on millions of people, only a tiny handful of them are confirmed couriers. With so little information, it’s pretty hard to create a balanced set of data to train an algorithm on – an AI could just classify everyone as innocent and still claim to be over 99.99% accurate. A machine learning algorithm’s basic job is to build a model of the world it sees, and when you have so few examples to learn from it can be a very cloudy view.
NSA preliminary results on machine learning In the end though they were able to train a model with a false positive rate – the number of people wrongly classed as terrorists - of just 0.008%. That’s a pretty good achievement, but given the size of Pakistan’s population it still means about 15,000 people being wrongly classified as couriers. If you were basing a kill list on that, it would be pretty bloody awful.
Here’s where The Intercept and Ars Technica really go off the deep end. The last slide of the deck (from June 2012) clearly states that these are preliminary results. The title paraphrases the conclusion to every other research study ever: “We’re on the right track, but much remains to be done.” This was an experiment in courier detection and a work in progress, and yet the two publications not only pretend that it was a deployed system, but also imply that the algorithm was used to generate a kill list for drone strokes. You can’t prove a negative of course, but there’s zero evidence here to substantiate the story.
In reality of course you would combine the results from this kind of analysis with other intelligence, which is exactly what the NSA do – another slide shows that ‘courier machine learning models’ are just one small component of a much larger suite of data analytics used to identify targets, as you’d expect. And of course data analytics will in turn be just one part of a broader intelligence processing effort. Nobody is being killed because of a flaky algorithm. The NSA couldn’t be that stupid and still actually be capable of finding Pakistan on a map.
Machine learning as part of a suite of data analytics It’s a shame, because there’s a lot to pick apart in this story, from ethical questions about bulk data gathering and tracking journalists to technical ones. Realistically, how well can you evaluate an algorithm when the original data contains so many people whose classification is unknown? And is ‘courier’ a clear cut category to begin with, or an ever-changing ‘fuzzy’ set? Finally, it’s a great example of why often the most important thing in artificial intelligence isn’t the fancy algorithms you use but having a really well-defined and well-understood question to start with. It’s only when you fully understand the question that you can truly evaluate the results, as Ars Technica and The Intercept have neatly demonstrated.
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"Philosopher Peter Singer: ‘There’s no reason to say humans have more worth or moral status than animals’ | Animal welfare | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/21/philosopher-peter-singer-theres-no-reason-to-say-humans-have-more-worth-or-moral-status-than-animals"
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"The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human world US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing Environment Climate crisis Wildlife Energy Pollution Green light ‘I’ve had to develop a thicker skin’: philosopher Peter Singer.
Photograph: Alletta Vaandering ‘I’ve had to develop a thicker skin’: philosopher Peter Singer.
Photograph: Alletta Vaandering The Observer Animal welfare Philosopher Peter Singer: ‘There’s no reason to say humans have more worth or moral status than animals’ The controversial author on the importance of updating his landmark book on animal liberation, being ‘flexibly vegan’ and the ethical dangers of artificial intelligence for the non-human world A ustralian philosopher Peter Singer ’s book Animal Liberation , published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now.
It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World , a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian , is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism , which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good.
He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.
Why write Animal Liberation Now ? The last full update was 1990. Though the philosophical arguments have stood up well, the chapters that describe factory farming and what we do to animals in labs needed to be almost completely rewritten. I also hadn’t really discussed factory farming’s contribution to the climate crisis and I wanted to reflect on our progress towards animal rights.
Effectively, this is a new book for the next generation, hence the new title.
What progress have we made in our treatment of animals since the original book? And what have we learned about animal sentience ? There have been some improvements in factory farming practices in some regions of the world, but in others we have hit new lows. China now has enormous factory farms and lacks any national standards for raising animals for food. Extreme forms of confinement also still dominate the US states with the most pigs and laying hens. Animal experimentation is now regulated in many developed nations, but what’s notable is how minimal it is in the US, where the vast majority of animals used in experiments aren’t covered. On animal sentience, we now have strong evidence that fish too can feel pain.
There are also good reasons for thinking the same of some invertebrates – the octopus but also lobsters and crabs. How far sentience extends into other invertebrates is unclear.
Can you explain your position against speciesism , the belief most humans hold that we are superior to other animals? Shouldn’t humans count more? Just as we accept that race or sex isn’t a reason for a person counting more, I don’t think the species of a being is a reason for counting more than another being. What is important is the capacity to suffer and to enjoy life. We should give equal consideration to the similar interests of all sentient beings. Defenders of speciesism argue that humans have a special rational nature that sets them apart from animals, but the problem is where that leaves infants and the profoundly intellectually disabled. Instead of defending the idea that all humans have rights but no animals do, we should recognise that many things we do to animals cause so much pain and yet are so inessential to us that we ought to refrain. We can be against speciesism and still favour beings with higher cognitive capacities, which most humans have – but that is drawing a line for a different reason. If there are animals that have higher cognitive capacities than some humans, there’s no reason to say that the humans have more worth or moral status simply because they are human.
The chapters in Animal Liberation Now about animal testing and factory farming are upsetting to read. Were they upsetting to write and rewrite and what pulled you through? I found them very upsetting, both 48 years ago and as I’ve worked on them over the past year. But I also felt driven to complete them so people know and can help stop it. I’ve had to develop a thicker skin and sometimes have had trouble getting to sleep, but it needed to be done. I do steer away from emotive language. I’ve never considered myself an animal lover and I don’t want to only appeal to animal lovers. I want people to see this as a basic moral wrong.
You have provoked the ire of the disability rights advocates over the years, including by arguing that parents should have the right the end the lives of severely disabled newborns.
This has been critici sed as an ableist view that could lead to other disabled people being less valued. What’s your response? In general, I think it is better to have abilities than not to have them. Most people hold that view. Obviously, there are forms of discrimination against disabled people that we should firmly reject. Ableism has a sound purpose when it calls out discrimination against disabled people on grounds not related to their disability.
If parents have a newborn with a severe disability and that child needs to be on a respirator to survive, doctors will invite parents to decide whether to allow the child to die. That happens regularly and is generally uncontroversial. Yet it is what the child’s future will be like that is really relevant. And I think, even in cases where the child doesn’t need a respirator, parents should be able to consult doctors to reach a considered judgment, including that the child’s life is not one that is going to be a benefit for the child or for their family, and that therefore it is better to end the child’s life. If that is ableist, then it isn’t always wrong to be ableist.
You argue there are certain situations where we could replace the animals we experiment on with humans… During the Covid pandemic, I supported 1Day Sooner , an organisation of well informed volunteers offering to test the efficacy of candidate vaccines. That could have saved many thousands of lives by speeding up vaccine introduction, but the volunteers were rejected. There is also a case for beneficially using humans in persistent vegetative states from which we can be absolutely clear that they will never recover. People could sign consent statements, as they do with organ donation, saying they don’t mind their body being used for research if that were to happen.
While effective altruism – the philanthropic social movement you helped originate – has its critics, it has gained a following in recent years, including in Silicon Valley tech circles (disgraced cryptocurrency founder Sam Bankman-Fried was prominent in the movement). One newer idea it has spawned is longtermism.
It prioriti ses the distant future over the concerns of today and advocates reducing the risk of our extinction, for example, by thwarting the possibility of hostile artificial intelligence (AI) and coloni sing space. To what extent do you endorse longtermism? We should think about the long-term future and we ought to try to reduce risks of extinction. Where I disagree with some effective altruists is how dominant longtermism should become in the movement. We need some balance between reducing the extinction risks and making the world a better place now. We shouldn’t negate our present problems or our relatively short-term future, not least because we can have much higher confidence that we can help people in these timeframes. Though the lives of people in the future aren’t of any less value, how we can best help people millennia from now is uncertain.
Are you vegan and how did you first become concerned about animal suffering? “Flexibly vegan” is how I would describe myself today. I don’t do it much, but I have no objection to eating oysters – I don’t think they can suffer – and oyster farming is quite an environmentally sustainable industry. Also, if I am out somewhere where it’s a real problem, I will go for something vegetarian. That my everyday purchases are vegan is the main thing.
My journey began when I was a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford University in 1970. It was thanks to another graduate student explaining why he hadn’t chosen the meat option when we had lunch one day: he was vegetarian because he didn’t think the animals were treated right. My wife and I did some reading and became vegetarians soon after. Becoming mostly vegan took longer.
Conscientious omnivores oppose factory farming but continue to eat animal products from farmers who treat their animals well and don’t subject them to suffering. Do they get a pass? Honestly, I can’t show that they are wrong. Assume that the cows wouldn’t have existed if they weren’t going to be sold for their meat and the conscientious omnivores investigate how their food is produced, and can be confident that the animals really do have good lives and are killed painlessly and without suffering – then I think they do get a pass. They’re allies in the movement against factory farming, and a world of conscientious omnivores would produce much less meat and dairy products, with vastly less suffering.
What of meat grown from cultured animal cells? That gets more than a pass and I hope to try it soon. What is needed now is to produce it cheaply at scale. It is much better for the climate than meat from animals and for animal suffering. And while it is true that it still suggests that meat is desirable, there are people who are unwilling to make that switch to becoming vegan or vegetarian. The companies’ use of fetal bovine serum to develop their products is regrettable and I am pleased that many companies have found alternatives and stopped using it, but if there are no alternatives, its use can be justified. I don’t regard it as a reason for never eating them.
You’ve brought vegan recipes back in Animal Liberation Now.
Why resurrect them and do you have a particular favourite? Popular demand! In 1975 there weren’t many good vegetarian or vegan cookbooks so it made sense to include recipes. Then, as that changed, I didn’t think people needed the recipes any more so I took them out. What I have put back is different. The focus is on my and my wife’s dishes. Both vegan recipes from our childhoods that we still make and then things we have started cooking since becoming mostly vegan. I have shifted to more Asian food and a favourite is the recipe for dal. It is a good meal and easy to make.
What are you working on now? The ethics of AI as it affects animals. A colleague and I published our first paper on this last year. We need to ensure the AI systems starting to be used in factory farms to manage animals don’t further negatively affect their lives, that self-driving cars are programmed to avoid hitting animals and that biases against farm animals that can be replicated and reinforced through AI are minimised.
ChatGPT refuses to give recipes for cooking dogs on the grounds that it is unethical but readily provides recipes for cooking chickens.
Animal Liberation Now by Peter Singer is published on 8 June by the Bodley Head (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter (updated and expanded) is published by Princeton University Press Peter Singer will be speaking in the UK on 4 June at the Hackney Empire, London, as part of a world tour to discuss Animal Liberation Now Explore more on these topics Animal welfare The Observer Animals Artificial intelligence (AI) Silicon Valley Sam Bankman-Fried Philosophy Climate crisis features Most viewed Most viewed Environment Climate crisis Wildlife Energy Pollution Green light News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"‘We have a bias problem’: California bill addresses race and gender in venture capital funding | Venture capital | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/29/we-have-a-bias-problem-california-bill-addresses-race-and-gender-in-venture-capital-funding"
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"Firms known for funding biased AI products would need to submit demographic information on founders US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness Of nearly $246bn in US venture capital funding in 2022, 2% went to women and 0.85% went to Black women and Latinas.
Photograph: Williams+Hirakawa/Getty Images Of nearly $246bn in US venture capital funding in 2022, 2% went to women and 0.85% went to Black women and Latinas.
Photograph: Williams+Hirakawa/Getty Images California Dreaming Venture capital ‘We have a bias problem’: California bill addresses race and gender in venture capital funding Firms known for funding biased AI products would need to submit demographic information on founders Hanisha Harjani, The Fuller Project Fri 29 Sep 2023 10.00 EDT C alifornia would become the first state to require venture capital firms to disclose the race and gender of the founders of the companies they fund, under a bill currently awaiting Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature.
The business community strongly opposes the legislation, characterizing it as an example of bureaucratic overreach. But civil rights groups and female entrepreneurs say it could go a long way toward equalizing opportunity in Silicon Valley, where startup capital overwhelmingly flows to white men. According to the business data firm PitchBook, companies founded by all-female teams accounted for just 2% of venture capital funding last year. Those led by Black women and Latinas received even less, 0.85% , according to a report from Project Diane, a research effort focused on female founders.
“This is a chance for us, for the industry to look itself in the mirror – to finally, wholeheartedly internalize that we have a bias problem,” said Marquesa Finch, a founding partner of the F5 Collective , a fund that exclusively backs female founders.
Finch, who helped draft the bill for Nancy Skinner, a Democratic state senator, is a fintech founder and a venture capitalist with a decade of experience. A woman of African American and Filipino descent, Finch said she had experienced discrimination firsthand. She said she had been mistaken in the past for support staff. When she pitches, partners at venture capital firms, who are almost always white and male, pose questions that cast doubt on her ability to lead and perform – “a stark contrast to my male counterparts, who are often asked questions related to growth and potential”, Finch said.
Newsom has not yet indicated whether he will sign or veto the bill. His office declined to comment.
California represented more than 40% of the nearly $246bn in venture capital funding invested in the United States in 2022, according to data provided by PitchBook. Because the law would apply to venture capital firms based in California along with those that invest in the state or solicit funds from residents, the law’s impact would probably resonate from Silicon Valley to Wall Street and beyond.
Nearly all of the firms making the largest bets on artificial intelligence would be covered, including Silicon Valley titans Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Soma Capital and Khosla Ventures, which have funded OpenAI (the company that created ChatGPT), Character.ai , Cohere and SellScale.
Controversies around racial and gender bias in AI products, which drew $22.7bn in venture investment in the first quarter of 2023, have been widely documented by the media , academics and civil rights groups.
The Biden administration released its Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights last year, designed, according to the White House senior adviser Susan Rice, to “ tackle algorithmic discrimination and address the harms of automated systems on underserved communities”.
The Fuller Project reached out to the 10 venture capital firms that made the largest investments in artificial intelligence, according to PitchBook, asking each for demographic information of their partners and the founders of the companies they fund.
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
None of the companies shared their data and none would agree to be interviewed.
“No response is in fact a response,” said Finch. “It communicates to the ecosystem that diversity, bias and equity are not high on the priority list.” The National Venture Capital Association also declined to be interviewed for this story, but has made its opinions known to the state legislature. In August, Bobby Franklin, the association’s president and CEO, wrote to lawmakers to say the bill “lacks justification”. The association argued the bill was “inefficient, unnecessarily punitive, and will violate [the] privacy” of venture partners and startup founders.
If Newsom signs the legislation, venture firms would have until 1 March 2025 to provide demographic data to the California civil rights department. If venture firms don’t, the state would be empowered to take them to court to seek a penalty “sufficient to deter the respondent from failing to comply” in the future.
Kathryn Youker, the director of the Economic Justice Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, said if Newsom signs the law, the data provided by venture capital firms could eventually be used in lawsuits by female entrepreneurs and business owners of color who believe they have been discriminated against.
“Statistics are important” for proving discrimination, Youker noted, citing the “disparate impact” standard that the justice department uses to prove illegal bias in housing, employment and other sectors. The standard, upheld by the supreme court in 2015, establishes data analysis as a method to “counteract unconscious prejudices” and uncover “discriminatory intent”.
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after newsletter promotion The threat of future lawsuits was a factor in spurring opposition to the bill from TechNet, a Silicon Valley trade group, and the California Chamber of Commerce. The two organizations, which did not respond to requests for comment, told lawmakers in a letter that they were “especially concerned” that the bill would allow the state to “use any information collected under this bill” to sue.
Female founders say diversity in venture capital is simply good business. In 2018, the investment bank Morgan Stanley published a report that made a “trillion-dollar case for investing in female and multicultural entrepreneurs”. The report found that businesses owned by people of color are often more profitable and less risky than their counterparts. The same year, the Boston Consulting Group released a report that showed businesses founded by women delivered more than twice as much per dollar invested than businesses founded by men.
The California legislation comes amid a national backlash against government efforts to promote diversity. In June, the US supreme court ruled 6-3 to ban racial and gender preferences in college admissions, and conservative legal advocates have been working to extend the prohibitions to other areas of life.
Attorney Ben Crump (left) with Fearless Fund co-partners Arian Simone and Ayana Parsons (center) in New York, on 10 August 2023. A federal judge ruled on Tuesday the fund could continue to operate a program for Black women.
In August, the American Alliance for Equal Rights, a conservative legal advocacy group, sued the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm that invests in companies founded by Black women, arguing the company’s race and gender preference was illegal. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled the Fearless Fund could continue to operate a program for Black women, because the lawsuit was not likely to succeed.
Affirmative action has been banned in California since 1996. The proposed California law does not include any preferences for women or people of color.
Nevertheless, Youker thinks the sunshine could “make a big impact in terms of public accountability for firms and the potential for firms to adjust their practices based on public pressure”.
Newsom has until 14 October to sign or veto the bill.
The Golden state overtook Germany as the world’s fourth-largest economy this year, but the wealth is not being shared equally. In this series, the Guardian and the Fuller Project look at the lives of women, especially women of color, who help drive the economy of the US’s second most racially diverse state but who don’t get their fair share.
The Fuller Project is a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the coverage of women’s issues around the world. Sign up for the Fuller Project’s newsletter , and follow on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Reporter Hanisha Harjani can be reached at [email protected].
Explore more on these topics Venture capital California Dreaming Race Gender Silicon Valley Gavin Newsom Women Artificial intelligence (AI) news Most viewed Most viewed US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world | Technology | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2023/nov/02/ilya-the-ai-scientist-shaping-the-world"
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"Account overview Billing Profile Emails & marketing Data privacy Settings Help Comments & replies Sign out switch to the US edition switch to the UK edition switch to the Australia edition switch to the International edition switch to the Europe edition current edition: The Guardian - Back to home News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money What term do you want to search? Search with google Support us Print subscriptions US edition switch to the UK edition switch to the Australia edition switch to the International edition switch to the Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness The Guardian documentary Artificial intelligence (AI) Ilya: the AI scientist shaping the world Ilya Sutskever, one of the leading AI scientists behind ChatGPT, reflects on his founding vision and values. In conversations with the film-maker Tonje Hessen Schei as he was developing the chat language model between 2016 and 2019, he describes his personal philosophy and makes startling predictions for a technology already shaping our world. Reflecting on his ideas today, amid a global debate over safety and regulation, we consider the opportunities as well as the consequences of AI technology. Ilya discusses his ultimate goal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), ‘a computer system that can do any job or task that a human does, but better’, and questions whether the AGI arms race will be good or bad for humanity.
These filmed interviews with Ilya Sutskever are part of a feature-length documentary on artificial intelligence, called iHuman Tonje Schei Lindsay Poulton Jess Gormley Noah Payne-Frank Thu 2 Nov 2023 07.46 EDT Last modified on Thu 2 Nov 2023 07.49 EDT Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Topics Artificial intelligence (AI) The Guardian documentary Politics and technology ChatGPT Chat and messaging apps Chatbots Microsoft Google Most popular US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top Close
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"‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/28/artificial-intelligence-doug-rushkoff-tech-billionaires-escape-mode"
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"The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness ‘They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see’, said Rushkoff.
Photograph: Frederick M Brown/Getty Images ‘They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see’, said Rushkoff.
Photograph: Frederick M Brown/Getty Images Artificial intelligence (AI) ‘They’re afraid their AIs will come for them’: Doug Rushkoff on why tech billionaires are in escape mode The leading intellect on digital culture believes the recent tech reckoning is corrective justice for Silicon Valley barons Sun 28 May 2023 06.00 EDT It was a tough week in tech.
The top US health official warned about the risks of social media to young people; tech billionaire Elon Musk further trashed his reputation with the disastrous Twitter launch of a presidential campaign; and senior executives at OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, called for the urgent regulation of “super intelligence”.
But to Doug Rushkoff – a leading digital age theorist, early cyberpunk and professor at City University of New York – the triple whammy of rough events represented some timely corrective justice for the tech barons of Silicon Valley.
And more may be to come as new developments in tech come ever thicker and faster.
“They’re torturing themselves now, which is kind of fun to see. They’re afraid that their little AIs are going to come for them. They’re apocalyptic, and so existential, because they have no connection to real life and how things work. They’re afraid the AIs are going to be as mean to them as they’ve been to us,” Rushkoff told the Guardian in an interview.
In his most recent book, last year’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff strung together a series of observations about the tech elite, often gleaned from his many encounters at conferences and private lectures with them.
Rushkoff said that he believes that the tech billionaires are in escape mode – planning missions to Mars, creating island bunkers or moving to higher ground – in the event of “The Event”( code for catastrophic climate collapse) and by creating a virtual “metaverse”, fulfilling the prophecy that the tech revolution was always about preparing us for a world in which it was no longer possible to go outside.
He’s called this “The Mindset” – an analysis of the way Silicon Valley technocrats think. “For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us,” he wrote in the book’s opening pages. “They’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding an escape hatch.” He cites a grim list of examples by way of illustration: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos pursuing space migration fantasies; Peter Thiel’s New Zealand compound; Mark Zuckerberg’s digital universe and others pursuing technologies toward longevity, cloning and those creating large, multiple partner families.
The problem with this behavior, Rushkoff points out, is that it does not and will not work.
“They’re not getting off the planet, they’re not going to live forever. They’re just living out their fantasies. They are eugenicists. There’s a reason why they got along with Jeffrey Epstein and Richard Dawkins – people who say genes are the only things that matter, we live in an entirely material universe, there is no soul, humans can be auto-tuned and anything between the ones and zeros is just noise,” he said.
Rushkoff continued: “It’s a pure form of the same sort of sociopathic capitalism that we saw from the British East India Company or [Thomas] Hobbes talking about Native Americans. But now they have a technology that amplifies sociopathic tendencies.” To Rushkoff, author of seven books on new media and popular culture, including Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace in 1994, government warnings of the kind seen last week about social media are belated.
“What happened to the cigarette companies will eventually happen to the social media companies,” he predicts. “They’ve had all the research for 20 years, and they’ve been knowingly saying this stuff is not harmful when they know it to be harmful.” At the same time, he’s noticed that Gen Z may have a less pathological relationship to technology – their phones – than millennials or their parents. Talk to kids and you discover that “their only problem with phones is that their parents are on them too much and don’t make eye contact”.
Rushkoff’s renunciations are not new. The gen X techno-optimist was, at one time, a proponent of decentralization, crypto-currency, file-sharing and other technologies initially hailed as disruptive and corrective to the old order. But alongside some benefits, they have also produced extremism, secrecy, environmental damage and fraud.
With a new tech revolution in the works in the form of AI, cyber-futurism is looking even less palatable. And its proponents and leading figures are looking less free information revolutionaries and more like reactionary capitalist moguls.
Elon Musk’s decision to platform Florida governor Ron DeSantis on Twitter, notwithstanding the glitches, was significant in confirming Musk’s alignment with Republicans. The direction of political travel for the tech lords was apparent four years ago when Zuckerberg and Thiel had dinner at the White House with Donald Trump.
But Rushkoff isn’t a fan of the surgeon general’s warnings, either, swathed in worried concern.
“They often come off as controlled, restrained and in favor of slowing down the wheels of progress. It often comes off with a squeamish, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching tone. It’s not that it’s just unattractive. It’s infantilizing and it doesn’t help anybody. I want to become Muskian myself at that point. It’s like, ‘Fuck it, fine!’” The solution to the modern world’s explosion of tech challenges, he argues, is not government, but in personal choices and responsibility.
The only way to rebel is to be human and aware, Rushkoff said. “Be social, get your feet on the ground, make eye contact, have sex, meet people, breathe the air. The more real-life ballast you have, the less this brittle, ideological, abstracted, social media-mediated universe bears upon your daily existence.” Explore more on these topics Artificial intelligence (AI) Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg Silicon Valley Jeff Bezos Computing interviews Most viewed Most viewed US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"We need AI to help us face the challenges of the future | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/12/we-need-ai-to-help-us-face-the-challenges-of-the-future"
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"Readers respond to Naomi Klein’s article that argued it is delusional to believe AI machines will benefit humanity US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing Environment Climate crisis Wildlife Energy Pollution Green light ‘Would an AI system really have dealt with the Covid pandemic worse than Boris Johnson?’ Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters ‘Would an AI system really have dealt with the Covid pandemic worse than Boris Johnson?’ Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters Artificial intelligence (AI) We need AI to help us face the challenges of the future Readers respond to Naomi Klein’s article that argued it is delusional to believe AI machines will benefit humanity Fri 12 May 2023 11.55 EDT Naomi Klein’s article about the dangers of generative AI makes many valid points about the economic and social consequences of the new technology ( AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are, 8 May ). But her choice of language about how to describe the mistakes that the new AI makes seems to suggest she is committed mainly to providing an ideological interpretation of the new technology.
Saying that mistakes are the results of glitches in the code rather than the tech hallucinating suggests the simulation is a simple one, involving a kind of power of the false rather than a more complex one that allows the possibility of some form of fabulation. This is important because it means that the technology can’t be seen simply as a control technology, like nuclear fusion or self-driving cars, but instead indicates a switch to an adaptive form of technology, ie, ones that are based on adapting what is already out there rather than trying to reinvent what exists, as in some form of innovation.
Obviously, climate change will require more of the adaptive kinds of technology, like reusable space rockets and wind farms, because control technologies are very resource heavy and tend to cause a lot of collateral damage.
Terry Price London Naomi Klein is right to voice scepticism about the claims made for generative AI. As its development coincides with endgame capitalism, a minimum requirement for its effective governance must be that those responsible for its programming are truly representative, not only of humanity as a whole but the living planet.
Rather than a group of white, male, wealthy individuals developing AI in their image, we need to ensure that indigenous wisdom, the aspirations of future generations drawn from all continents and those able to identify the impact of potential decisions and actions on our ecosystems all need to participate in the design of these AI developments. Without such input, all such AI will do is exacerbate our demise: with these contributions, it may yet avert it. Surely this is an issue that is too important to be left to Silicon Valley to self-determine.
Dave Hunter Bristol The real danger of AI systems arises from the fact that these systems have no actual intelligence and so cannot distinguish whether the results they produce are correct or not. ChatGPT produces intelligent results in the midst of a whole lot of other results which, to our human intelligence, are simply ridiculous. This doesn’t matter too much because we simply laugh at and discard the ridiculous results.
But when these AI systems are controlling cars and planes, where the ridiculous results are a danger to life and can’t just be “discarded”, the consequences could be catastrophic. The artificial neural networks producing AI are bandied about as emulators of the brain. But in spite of decades of dedicated research, neural networks have just 10 to 1,000 neurons, whereas the human brain has 86bn of them.
No wonder that an AI system has no way of knowing whether it has produced an intelligent (by human standards) result.
Charles Rowe Wantage, Oxfordshire It is understandable that there is concern over the effect that AI will have on our future, but I am equally concerned about the damage that humans will do if we’re left in charge ( Why the godfather of AI fears for humanity, 5 May ).
Would an AI system really have dealt with the Covid pandemic worse than Boris Johnson? Would it have allowed our planet to get so close to the precipice of climate catastrophe? Geoffrey Hinton believes that once AI is more intelligent than us, it will inevitably take charge, and perhaps he is right to be concerned. On the other hand, it might be just what we need.
Ben Chester Stroud, Gloucestershire Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
Explore more on these topics Artificial intelligence (AI) Consciousness Computing Climate crisis Silicon Valley letters Most viewed Most viewed Environment Climate crisis Wildlife Energy Pollution Green light News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control? | Society books | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/10/the-handover-how-we-gave-control-of-our-lives-to-corporations-states-ais-by-david-runciman-review-is-the-future-out-of-our-control"
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"Surveying everything from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, the Cambridge politics professor debates whether our fate is sealed by the machines we’ve created US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games ‘They are meant to work for us, but it is already possible to imagine we will end up working for them.’ Photograph: Andriy Popov/Alamy ‘They are meant to work for us, but it is already possible to imagine we will end up working for them.’ Photograph: Andriy Popov/Alamy The Observer Society books The Handover by David Runciman review – is the future out of our control? Surveying everything from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk, the Cambridge politics professor debates whether our fate is sealed by the machines we’ve created B ack in 2016, a month before the EU referendum, I went along to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford to interview its director, the Swedish-born philosopher Nick Bostrom, who had just written a book called Superintelligence.
The book outlined the existential risk to democracy and humanity implied by advances in machine learning.
Bostrom’s institute , which sought to weigh the apocalyptic potential of various humanity-threatening forces, had just been given a £1m grant by Elon Musk.
If I think about that encounter , I remember three things. The first was that when I arrived a bed was being delivered to the institute, cementing the belief that anxiety about impending catastrophe was, these days, a 24/7 kind of occupation. The second was that the germophobic Bostrom was the first interviewee I’d met who insisted on fist bumps rather than handshakes (the shape of things to come). And the third was his insistence that in important ways, artificial intelligence posed a more imminent threat to the survival of our species than, say, climate crisis or pandemics or nuclear war.
At the time, that idea seemed to me inflected with too many outlandish tropes from science fiction. In the seven febrile years since, less so. Bostrom’s book presented several scenarios in which our fate may be sealed by the machines we create. One projection involved an AI system building covert “nanofactories producing target-seeking mosquito-like robots [which] might then burgeon forth simultaneously from every square metre of the globe” in order to destroy us. Another, somewhat more credible vision saw a superintelligence “hijacking political processes, subtly manipulating financial markets, biasing information flows” to bring about first our superfluity, then our extinction.
David Runciman’s far more sober book is in part an analysis of the first phase of that latter proposition. The Cambridge politics professor and, until it ended last year, the ever-erudite host of the terrific Talking Politics podcast is not given to apocalyptic prophecy. The closest he came to it was a series of ironic exclamation marks that revved up the chapter headings in his 2018 book How Democracy Ends.
One of those was devoted to “Technological Takeover!”, which, with parliament then in Brexit meltdown and Trump in full spate, examined the ways in which we were outsourcing our politics to digital media, and the implications of that for our shared future.
This book expands on the arguments of that chapter, principally Runciman’s contention that the challenges “we the people” face from AI – threats to our individuality and agency as citizens – are, while urgent, not as revolutionary as we may think. The blueprint for negotiating these challenges, Runciman believes, has been established over several centuries by the related threats from state and corporate power. The “singularity” that tech evangelists talk about – the eventual symbiosis of man and machine – would really be the “second singularity”, Runciman argues, persuasively. The first came with the age of Enlightenment, with our ability to “imagine what it would be like to organise collective enterprises as though they had the durability of machines”.
Author David Runciman ‘likens the idea of government to an algorithm’.
When Runciman writes and talks about politics, his year zero is frequently 1651 and the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan , the formative meditation on the relation between institutional power and people, written in the midst of the cataclysm of civil war. Hobbes’s book gives Runciman his starting point here as well. Thinking about the supra-human digital sphere that we have created, a useful reference point, he contends, might be Hobbes’s model of the state as an “artificial man” built in the citizens’ image, but with more abstract agency. Runciman likens the idea of government to an algorithm. The Leviathan of state – or of Google or Meta – is an expression of our collective selves without a soul or a conscience. In its ideal formulation it offers continuity and shared purpose; when it goes rogue, the “man-made monster” has the capacity to exaggerate all our destructive failings.
The analogy from Hobbes allows Runciman to tease out precisely the ways that technology with a human face – the hivemind of social media, the ChatGPT robots that sound and cogitate like us, the all-seeing data-clouds of Silicon Valley – are at once similar to and distinct from those more familiar “artificial men”, the state and the corporation. Past experience teaches us how this story ends: “They are meant to work for us, but it is already possible to imagine we will end up working for them.” Runciman’s subtitle, How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs , makes this “handover” a fait accompli, but in the argument of his book that past tense is more provisional; the future relationship is still just about up for grabs. A lot, he argues, depends on our holding on to the semantic distinctions between decisions and knowledge, and between choices and answers. If “the computer says no” about an insurance claim, it may sound like the machine has done the deciding, but that is not quite the same as human judgment. The checks and balances we have applied to governments and corporations must be made relevant to artificial intelligence; there is a third element in those traditional relationships between the us and the Leviathans we have created.
In trying to identify what those restraints might look like, Runciman’s argument ranges far and wide, from hunter gatherers to Elon Musk , from the wisdom of juries to the (terrifying) implications of autonomous weapons systems. His conclusions about whether we will “go the way of the horse” (and be quickly obsolete beside the machines we have created) are knotty, but tend toward optimism. “If we franchise out complex decision-making to intelligent machines without abdicating personal responsibility for it, we might get the best of both worlds,” he writes – though as you read that “if”, you may equally, like me, be reminded of those drivers who have followed their satnav into a river.
The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs by David Runciman is published by Profile Books (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply Explore more on these topics Society books The Observer Artificial intelligence (AI) Philosophy books Computing ChatGPT Elon Musk Politics books reviews Most viewed Most viewed Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"A data ‘black hole’: Europol ordered to delete vast store of personal data | Surveillance | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/10/a-data-black-hole-europol-ordered-to-delete-vast-store-of-personal-data"
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"EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing World Europe US Americas Asia Australia Middle East Africa Inequality Global development A member of the Cybercrime Centre in a lab at Europol headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
Photograph: Peter de Jong/AP A member of the Cybercrime Centre in a lab at Europol headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
Photograph: Peter de Jong/AP This is Europe Surveillance A data ‘black hole’: Europol ordered to delete vast store of personal data EU police body accused of unlawfully holding information and aspiring to become an NSA-style mass surveillance agency , Ludek Stavinoha, Giacomo Zandonini, Mon 10 Jan 2022 07.15 EST T he EU’s police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime.
According to internal documents seen by the Guardian, Europol’s cache contains at least 4 petabytes – equivalent to 3m CD-Roms or a fifth of the entire contents of the US Library of Congress. Data protection advocates say the volume of information held on Europol’s systems amounts to mass surveillance and is a step on its road to becoming a European counterpart to the US National Security Agency (NSA), the organisation whose clandestine online spying was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Among the quadrillions of bytes held are sensitive data on at least a quarter of a million current or former terror and serious crime suspects and a multitude of other people with whom they came into contact. It has been accumulated from national police authorities over the last six years, in a series of data dumps from an unknown number of criminal investigations.
The watchdog ordered Europol to erase data held for more than six months and gave it a year to sort out what could be lawfully kept.
The confrontation pits the EU data protection watchdog against a powerful security agency being primed to become the centre of machine learning and AI in policing.
The ruling also exposes deep political divisions among Europe’s decision-makerson the trade-offs between security and privacy. The eventual outcome of their face-off has implications for the future of privacy in Europe and beyond.
The European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, has argued that Europol supports national police authorities with the ‘herculean task’ of analysing lawfully transmitted data.
The EU home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson appeared to defend Europol. “Law enforcement authorities need the tools, resources and the time to analyse data that is lawfully transmitted to them,” she said. “In Europe, Europol is the platform that supports national police authorities with this herculean task.” The commission says the legal concerns raised by the EDPS raise “a serious challenge” for Europol’s ability to fulfil its duties. Last year, it proposed sweeping changes to the regulation underpinning Europol’s powers. If made law, the proposals could in effect retrospectively legalise the data cache and preserve its contents as a testing ground for new AI and machine learning tools.
Europol denies any wrongdoing, and said the watchdog may be interpreting the current rules in an impractical way: “[The] Europol regulation was not intended by the legislator as a requirement which is impossible to be met by the data controller [ie Europol] in practice.” Europol had worked with the EDPS “to find a balance between keeping the EU secure and its citizens safe while adhering to the highest standards of data protection”, the agency said.
Founded as a coordinating body for national police forces in the EU and headquartered in The Hague, Europol has been pushed by some member states as a solution to terrorism concerns in the wake of the 2015 Bataclan attacks and encouraged to harvest data on multiple fronts.
Europol buildings in The Hague.
In theory, Europol is subject to tight regulation over what kinds of personal data it can store and for how long. Incoming records are meant to be strictly categorised and only processed or retained when they have potential relevance to high-value work such as counter-terrorism. But the full contents of what it holds are unknown, in part because of the haphazard way that EDPS found Europol to be treating data.
O nly a handful of Europeans have become aware that their own data is being stored and none is known to have been able to force disclosure. Frank van der Linde, who was placed on a terror watchlist in his native Netherlands and later removed, is one of the rare visible threads in an otherwise unseen mesh.
The political activist, whose only serious run-ins with police amount to breaking a window to gain entrance to a building and create a squat for homeless people, was removed from the Dutch watchlist by authorities in 2019. But a year prior to this removal he had moved to Berlin, which unknown to Van der Linde at the time prompted Dutch police to share his data with German counterparts and Europol. The activist discovered his entanglement with Europol only when he saw a partially declassified file at Amsterdam city hall.
To get his personal data removed from any international databases he turned to Europol. He was surprised when in June 2020 it responded saying it had nothing he was “entitled to have access to”. The activist took his complaint to the EDPS. “I don’t know if they deleted the data after Dutch authorities updated them [that] they don’t consider me an extremist … Europol is a black box.” “The ease of getting on such a list is horrific,” Van der Linde said. “It’s shocking how easily police share information over borders, and it’s terrifying how difficult it is to manage to delete yourself from these lists.” C oncerns over Europol’s treatment of sensitive data prompted the watchdog to raise its own questions in 2019. Its initial findings in September of that year showed that data sets shared with Europol were stored without the proper checks to verify whether people scooped up in them ought to be monitored or their data retained. Access to the ark is restricted to authorised personnel and a lot of its content has been examined, cleansed and used legally.
When Europol failed to convincingly answer the watchdog’s concerns, the EDPS publicly admonished the police agency in September 2020 making clear what was at stake: “Data subjects run the risk of wrongfully being linked to a criminal activity across the EU, with all of the potential damage for their personal and family life, freedom of movement and occupation that this entails.” The tussle that followed is captured in a series of internal documents obtained under freedom of information laws. They show Europol stalling for time and the watchdog telling them that they have failed to resolve “the legal breach”. The police agency appears to be holding out for new EU legislation to provide retrospective cover for what it has been doing without a legal basis for six years.
The European Commission’s nervousness over a public clash was enough to pull Monique Pariat, the EU’s director general for home affairs, into a meeting between the two agencies in December 2021. Sources said the watchdog had been encouraged to “tone down” its public criticism of Europol.
But the head of EDPS, Wojciech Wiewiórowski, told the Guardian that the meeting was “the last moment for Europol to add some information that wasn’t added in their last replies to our letter”.
As the meeting did nothing to answer Wiewiórowski’s concerns on lawful retention of data “there was no other way to solve the problem, for us” he said, “than to issue a decision to erase the data which is over six months”.
Niovi Vavoula, a legal expert at Queen Mary University of London, said: “The new legislation is actually an effort to game the system. Europol and the commission have been attempting an ex-post rectification of illegally retaining data for years. But putting new rules in place does not legally resolve previously illegal conduct. This is not how the rule of law works.” Experts’ concerns are not confined to Europol’s flouting of rules on data retention. They also see a law enforcement agency that aspires to conduct mass surveillance operations.
Members of the civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee of the European parliament during a hearing in June 2021 compared the agency to the NSA. Wiewiórowski surprised attenders by endorsing the comparison in relation to Europol’s practice of retaining data. He pointed out that Europol was using similar arguments to those used by the NSA to defend bulk data collection operations and mass surveillance as revealed by Snowden.
“What the NSA said to Europeans after the Prism scandal started was that they are not processing the data, they are just collecting it and they will process it only in case it is necessary for the investigation they are doing,” Wiewiórowski told MEPs.
“This is something that doesn’t comply with the European approach to processing personal data.” Eric Topfer, a surveillance expert at the German Institute for Human Rights, has studied the proposed new Europol regulation and said it foresees the agency pulling in data directly from banks, airlines, private companies and emails. “If Europol will only have to ask for certain kinds of information to have them served on a silver platter, then we are moving closer to having an NSA-like agency.” T he struggle with EDPS over data storage is the latest evidence of Europol favouring technosolutions to security concerns over privacy rights. Europol’s boss, previously Belgium’s top cop, co-wrote an op-ed in July 2021 which argued that the needs of law enforcement agencies to extract evidence from smartphones should trump privacy considerations. The article argues for a legal right to the keys to all encryption services.
No mention was made of Pegasus spyware revelations that showed that many governments, including some in Europe, were actively attempting to intercept the communications of human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers for whom encryption offers their only protection.
Europol’s boss, Catherine de Bolle, has argued that the needs of law enforcement agencies to extract evidence from smart phones should trump privacy considerations.
In 2020, Europol trumpeted its involvement together with French and Dutch police in hacking the encrypted phone service EncroChat, unleashing a torrent of personal data into the ark. When the secret operation was revealed by Europol and its judicial counterpart, Eurojust, it was hailed as one of the biggest successes in battling organised crime in Europe’s history. In the UK alone, about 2,600 people were taken into custody by August 2021 and Nikki Holland, the director of investigations at the UK National Crime Agency, compared the hack to “having an inside person in every top organised crime group in the country ”.
Europol copied the data extracted from 120m EncroChat messages and tens of millions of call recordings, pictures and notes, then parcelled it out to national police forces. The flood of evidence of drug trafficking and other offences drowned out qualms about the implications of the operation. The hacking operation that turned EncroChat phones into mobile spies acting against their users has important similarities with surveillance malware such as Pegasus.
Lawyers from Germany, France, Sweden, Ireland, the UK, Norway and the Netherlands, all representing clients caught up in the aftermath, met in Utrecht in November 2021. They found that cases were being built across Europe based on evidence of which authorities were unwilling to reveal the provenance. “Investigators and prosecutors were hiding or deforming the facts,” said the German attorney Christian Lödden. “We all agree that these are not the best people in the world, but what are we ready to sacrifice in order to convict one more person?” Police officers during a raid in a business park in Weißensee, Germany, in October 2021 as part of an investigation into drug trafficking and arms dealing. The raid was triggered by decrypted data from the short message service Encrochat.
EncroChat clientele included non-criminals, people such as lawyers, journalists and business people. The Dutch attorney Haroon Raza was one of them and said he bought an EncroChat handset at a phone shop in Rotterdam. He demanded that his data be erased. “As far as I could understand, a copy still lies in Europol’s databases where it could remain forever.” French lawyer Robin Binsard is convinced that the whole operation amounts to mass surveillance. He said: “Dismantling a whole communication system is like the police searching all the apartments in a block to find the proof of a crime: it violates privacy and it’s simply illegal.” Since 2016, Europol has also been running a mass screening programme in refugee camps in Italy and Greece, sweeping up data from tens of thousands of asylum seekers in search of alleged foreign fighters and terrorists. According to a partially declassified EDPS inspection report obtained under freedom of information laws, “routine checks” by Europol of migrants crossing EU borders “are not allowed” as there is “no legal basis” for such a programme. The screening may have resulted in migrants’ personal data being stored on a criminal database regardless of any links being found to crime or terrorism. Europol has declined to reveal any operational details.
I nternal documents make clear that by spring 2020 Europol was developing its own machine learning and AI programme, even as the EU data watchdog was snapping at its heels. Finding itself with a growing cache of data, the agency turned to algorithms to make sense of it all. A month after the data supervisor publicly admonished Europol, the agency came back with a question: if it wanted to train algorithms on the data it had already been admonished for retaining, could it start the data protection impact assessment process for this without EDPS oversight? The request makes it clear that the algorithms, which included facial recognition tools, would not be designed nor used to retrieve sensitive data such as health status, ethnic background, sexual or political orientation, even though, as Europol admitted, such data would inevitably be processed by the tools: “We recognise that the produced results will contain sensitive data and its processing will be in line with Europol Regulation.” When the watchdog did not provide the green light, Europol decided in effect to sideline the EDPS and go ahead regardless, confirming as much in a January 2021 letter.
(L-R) European commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, executive director of Europol, Catherine de Bolle, the French minister of interior, Gérald Darmanin, German MP Stephan Mayer, and the Belgian minister of the interior, Annelies Verlinden, on the sidelines of their meeting to discuss ways of preventing migrants crossing the Channel, in Calais, France on 28 November.
The watchdog responded by saying it would open a formal monitoring procedure. By the end of February 2021, Europol pulled the brake on its machine learning programme. Europol told the Guardian that, to date, it “has not made use of own machine learning models for operational analysis and has also not carried out ‘training’ of machine learning.” But there are clear signs that the brake will be released soon. Europol has already started a recruitment round for experts to help with the development of AI and data mining.
The emerging shape of Europol is alarming some MEPs such as Belgium’s Saskia Bricmont. “In the name of the fight against criminality and terrorism we have an evolution of an agency, which performs very important missions, but they are not executed in the right manner. This will lead to problems,” she said.
Chloé Berthélémy, an expert with the European Digital Rights network of NGOs, said that while Europol lags behind the US in terms of technological capacity, it is on the same path as the NSA.
“Europol’s capacity to hoover up huge amounts of data and accumulate it, in what could be called a big data ark, after which it is almost impossible to know what they are used for, makes it a black hole.” Reporting for this investigation was supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund and in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports Explore more on these topics Surveillance This is Europe Privacy Data protection Police Big data European Union Europe features More on this story More on this story Is ‘fake data’ the real deal when training algorithms? 18 Jun 2022 … … Bunnings, Kmart and The Good Guys using facial recognition technology to crack down on theft, Choice says 14 Jun 2022 Met police did not consult us on children’s data project, say youth violence experts 5 Jun 2022 Facial recognition firms should take a look in the mirror 28 May 2022 … … Twitter fined $150m for handing users’ contact details to advertisers 26 May 2022 Catalan president calls for investigation as spyware targets pro-independence leaders 19 Apr 2022 Australian Border Force searched 822 phones in 2021 despite having no power to demand passcodes 7 Apr 2022 Home Office illegally seized phones of 2,000 asylum seekers, court rules 25 Mar 2022 Most viewed Most viewed World Europe US Americas Asia Australia Middle East Africa Inequality Global development News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"AI expert Meredith Broussard: ‘Racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems’ | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/26/artificial-intelligence-meredith-broussard-more-than-a-glitch-racism-sexism-ableism"
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"The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societal US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness Shattering tech myths: Meredith Broussard photographed at New York University by Maria Spann for the Observer.
Shattering tech myths: Meredith Broussard photographed at New York University by Maria Spann for the Observer.
The Observer Artificial intelligence (AI) AI expert Meredith Broussard: ‘Racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems’ The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societal M eredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias (2020), which explores how algorithms encode and propagate discrimination. Her new book is More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech.
Broussard is an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.
The message that bias can be embedded in our technological systems isn’t really new. Why do we need this book? This book is about helping people understand the very real social harms that can be embedded in technology. We have had an explosion of wonderful journalism and scholarship about algorithmic bias and the harms that have been experienced by people. I try to lift up that reporting and thinking. I also want people to know that we have methods now for measuring bias in algorithmic systems. They are not entirely unknowable black boxes: algorithmic auditing exists and can be done.
Why is the problem “more than a glitch”? If algorithms can be racist and sexist because they are trained using biased datasets that don’t represent all people, isn’t the answer just more representative data? A glitch suggests something temporary that can be easily fixed. I’m arguing that racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems that are baked into our technological systems because they’re baked into society. It would be great if the fix were more data. But more data won’t fix our technological systems if the underlying problem is society. Take mortgage approval algorithms, which have been found to be 40-80% more likely to deny borrowers of colour than their white counterparts. The reason is the algorithms were trained using data on who had received mortgages in the past and, in the US, there’s a long history of discrimination in lending. We can’t fix the algorithms by feeding better data in because there isn’t better data.
You argue we should be choosier about the tech we allow into our lives and our society. Should we just reject any AI-based technology that encodes bias at all? AI is in all our technologies nowadays. But we can demand that our technologies work well – for everybody – and we can make some deliberate choices about whether to use them.
I’m enthusiastic about the distinction in the proposed European Union AI Act that divides uses into high and low risk based on context. A low-risk use of facial recognition might be using it to unlock your phone: the stakes are low – you have a passcode if it doesn’t work. But facial recognition in policing would be a high-risk use that needs to be regulated or – better still – not deployed at all because it leads to wrongful arrests and isn’t very effective. It isn’t the end of the world if you don’t use a computer for a thing. You can’t assume that a technological system is good because it exists.
There is enthusiasm for using AI to help diagnose disease. But racial bias is also being baked in, including from unrepresentative datasets (for example, skin cancer AIs will probably work far better on lighter skin because that is mostly what is in the training data). Should we try to put in “acceptable thresholds” for bias in medical algorithms, as some have suggested ? I don’t think the world is ready to have that conversation. We’re still at a level of needing to increase awareness of racism in medicine. We need to take a step back and fix a few things about society before we start freezing it in algorithms. Formalised in code, a racist decision becomes difficult to see or eradicate.
You were diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent successful treatment. After your diagnosis, you experimented with running your own mammograms through an open-source cancer-detection AI and you found that it did indeed pick up your breast cancer. It worked! So great news? It was pretty neat to see the AI draw a red box around the area of the scan where my tumour was. But I learned from this experiment that diagnostic AI is a much blunter instrument than I imagined, and there are complicated trade-offs. For example, the developers must make a choice about accuracy rates: more false positives or false negatives? They favour the former because it’s considered worse to miss something, but that also means if you do have a false positive you go into the diagnosis pipeline, which could mean weeks of panicking and invasive testing. A lot of people imagine a sleek AI future where machines replace doctors. This does not sound enticing to me.
Any hope we can improve our algorithms? I am optimistic about the potential of algorithmic auditing – the process of looking at the inputs, outputs and the code of an algorithm to evaluate it for bias. I have done some work on this. The aim is to focus on algorithms as they are used in specific contexts and address concerns from all stakeholders, including members of an affected community.
AI chatbots are all the rage. But the tech is also rife with bias. Guardrails added to OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been easy to get around.
Where did we go wrong? Though more needs to be done, I appreciate the guardrails. This has not been the case in the past, so it is progress. But we also need to stop being surprised when AI screws up in very predictable ways. The problems we are seeing with ChatGPT were anticipated and written about by AI ethics researchers, including Timnit Gebru [who was forced out of Google in late 2020]. We need to recognise this technology is not magic. It’s assembled by people, it has problems and it falls apart.
OpenAI’s co-founder Sam Altman recently promoted AI doctors as a way of solving the healthcare crisis. He appeared to suggest a two-tier healthcare system – one for the wealthy, where they enjoy consultations with human doctors, and one for the rest of us, where we see an AI. Is this the way things are going and are you worried? AI in medicine doesn’t work particularly well, so if a very wealthy person says: “Hey, you can have AI to do your healthcare and we’ll keep the doctors for ourselves,” that seems to me to be a problem and not something that is leading us towards a better world. Also, these algorithms are coming for everybody, so we might as well address the problems.
More Than a Glitch by Meredith Broussard is published by MIT Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply Explore more on these topics Artificial intelligence (AI) The Observer Computing ChatGPT Chatbots Medical research Health Data journalism features Most viewed Most viewed US World Environment US Politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"Companies are now writing reports tailored for AI readers – and it should worry us | John Naughton | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/05/companies-are-now-writing-reports-tailored-for-ai-readers-and-it-should-worry-us"
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"A recent study suggests lengthy, complex corporate filings are increasingly read by, and written for, machines US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons ‘A good deal of research in AI now goes into assessing how good computers are at extracting actionable meaning from a tsunami of data.’ Photograph: Muhla1/Getty Images ‘A good deal of research in AI now goes into assessing how good computers are at extracting actionable meaning from a tsunami of data.’ Photograph: Muhla1/Getty Images The Observer Big data Companies are now writing reports tailored for AI readers – and it should worry us A recent study suggests lengthy, complex corporate filings are increasingly read by, and written for, machines Sat 5 Dec 2020 11.00 EST M y eye was caught by the title of a working paper published by the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER): How to Talk When a Machine Is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI.
So I clicked and downloaded, as one does. And then started to read.
The paper is an analysis of the 10-K and 10-Q filings that American public companies are obliged to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The 10-K is a version of a company’s annual report, but without the glossy photos and PR hype: a corporate nerd’s delight. It has, says one guide , “the-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink data you can spend hours going through – everything from the geographic source of revenue to the maturity schedule of bonds the company has issued”. Some investors and commentators (yours truly included) find the 10-K impenetrable, but for those who possess the requisite stamina (big companies can have 10-Ks that run to several hundred pages), that’s the kind of thing they like. The 10-Q filing is the 10-K’s quarterly little brother.
The observation that triggered the research reported in the paper was that “mechanical” (ie machine-generated) downloads of corporate 10-K and 10-Q filings increased from 360,861 in 2003 to about 165m in 2016, when 78% of all downloads appear to have been triggered by request from a computer. A good deal of research in AI now goes into assessing how good computers are at extracting actionable meaning from such a tsunami of data. There’s a lot riding on this, because the output of machine-read reports is the feedstock that can drive algorithmic traders, robot investment advisers, and quantitative analysts of all stripes.
The NBER researchers, however, looked at the supply side of the tsunami – how companies have adjusted their language and reporting in order to achieve maximum impact with algorithms that are reading their corporate disclosures. And what they found is instructive for anyone wondering what life in an algorithmically dominated future might be like.
The researchers found that “increasing machine and AI readership … motivates firms to prepare filings that are more friendly to machine parsing and processing”. So far, so predictable. But there’s more: “firms with high expected machine downloads manage textual sentiment and audio emotion in ways catered to machine and AI readers”.
In other words, machine readability – measured in terms of how easily the information can be parsed and processed by an algorithm – has become an important factor in composing company reports. So a table in a report might have a low readability score because its formatting makes it difficult for a machine to recognise it as a table; but the same table could receive a high readability score if it made effective use of tagging.
The researchers contend, though, that companies are now going beyond machine readability to try and adjust the sentiment and tone of their reports in ways that might induce algorithmic “readers” to draw favourable conclusions about the content. They do so by avoiding words that are listed as negative in the criteria given to text-reading algorithms. And they are also adjusting the tones of voice used in the standard quarterly conference calls with analysts, because they suspect those on the other end of the call are using voice analysis software to identify vocal patterns and emotions in their commentary.
In one sense, this kind of arms race is predictable in any human activity where a market edge may be acquired by whoever has better technology. It’s a bit like the war between Google and the so-called “optimisers” who try to figure out how to game the latest version of the search engine’s page ranking algorithm.
But at another level, it’s an example of how we are being changed by digital technology – as Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger argued in their sobering book Re-Engineering Humanity.
After I’d typed that last sentence, I went looking for publication information on the book and found myself trying to log in to a site that, before it would admit me, demanded that I solve a visual puzzle: on an image of a road junction divided into 8 x 4 squares I had to click on all squares that showed traffic lights. I did so, and was immediately presented with another, similar puzzle, which I also dutifully solved, like an obedient monkey in a lab.
And the purpose of this absurd challenge? To convince the computer hosting the site that I was not a robot. It was an inverted Turing test in other words: instead of a machine trying to fool a human into thinking that it was human, I was called upon to convince a computer that I was a human. I was being re-engineered. The road to the future has taken a funny turn.
What I’ve been reading Classic Joan Why I Write by Joan Didion is an absolute gem from the archives of The London Magazine.
Ill-advised ventures Charles Duhigg has written an article in the New Yorker called How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism , in which he uses WeWork as a case study in 2020s madness. Basically, it’s the Boo.com de nos jours , but with contemporary twists on insanity and greed.
The trouble with Dom What Dominic Cummings never understood: impatience isn’t a substitute for policy.
So argues a perceptive piece on PoliticsHome by Sam Freedman.
Explore more on these topics Big data Opinion Artificial intelligence (AI) Computing Consciousness comment Most viewed Most viewed The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"Jill Lepore: 'When did we hand Google, Twitter and Facebook the reins?' | Books | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/04/jill-lepore-when-did-we-hand-google-twitter-and-facebook-the-reins"
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"The historian and New Yorker writer’s new book tells the story of ‘the Cambridge Analytica of the 1960s’. She talks big data, social media and the US election US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games Historian Jill Lepore photographed last month near her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Photograph: Webb Chappell/The Observer Historian Jill Lepore photographed last month near her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Photograph: Webb Chappell/The Observer Observer New Review Q&A Books Jill Lepore: 'When did we hand Google, Twitter and Facebook the reins?' The historian and New Yorker writer’s new book tells the story of ‘the Cambridge Analytica of the 1960s’. She talks big data, social media and the US election Sun 4 Oct 2020 04.30 EDT J ill Lepore is professor of American history at Harvard and a prolific essayist for the New Yorker.
Her books have included These Truths , a 900-page chronicle of American democracy and The Secret History of Wonder Woman.
Her new book, If Then , tells the story of the Simulmatics Corporation – “the Cambridge Analytica of the 1960s” – which used emerging computer technology to try to predict human behaviour and win elections. This interview took place the day before the first US presidential debate.
Reading about the extraordinary history of the Simulmatics Corporation and its “People Machine”, it was instructive to see how the anxieties we have today about the more sinister aspects of computer technology were very present 60 years ago. Did that surprise you? If anything, I think in the 50s and 60s – because so few people had direct experience of computers – there was even more concern than there is now. Computers were associated with vast power. It was only with the arrival in the 1980s and 1990s of the personal computer we were sold the idea that the technology was participatory and liberal. I think we have returned, in a way, to the original fears, now we sense that these personal devices very much represent the power of vast corporations.
The Simulmatics story is also an early example of using big data as a con trick, making claims it could not back up. You obviously saw a parable in that as well? The product they were selling was the accurate prediction of human behaviour. There was inevitably a lot of hucksterism attached to it and that hasn’t changed.
Do you think we should in general pay more attention to those origin stories of computer technology, that all the issues we are facing today were wired in from the start? One of the myths of Silicon Valley is that everything is always brand new. The fact is that most of those new ideas are not only deeply derivative, but specifically derivative of the national security objectives of the United States during the cold war. Our culture of technological utopianism wants to forget that.
In terms of the effect of social media on democracy, alarm bells have been ringing loudly since 2016. How can we still be going into elections without any reform? After the second world war, the new technologies that had contributed to the atom bomb or the science that had been misused by the Nazis were a source of huge moral concern and new international rules were put in place to control those forces. The field of bioethics emerged out of the Nuremberg trials. In terms of social media, and computer science more generally, that Nuremberg moment should have been 2015 and 2016. Trump was elected with legitimate votes, but from what we have discovered about the spread of misinformation it was clear that we cannot have a properly functioning democracy without some regulation of that media. The difference is that the technological advances of the war were made primarily by academics, whereas the people who are developing these tools are cashing them out for billions of dollars.
When the Cambridge Analytica story came out, or clear evidence was revealed about the way social media platforms had been targeted at scale by foreign agents, there was remarkably little outcry. Why do you think that was? I think the fallout of social media and data mining is invisible to most people. The bamboozling is part of it. When Mark Zuckerberg appeared before Congress and said: “We are in the business of connecting people to people they love”, no one called him out to say: “No, Mr Zuckerberg you are in the business of convincing people to give you their personal data and selling it to third parties. You are selling loneliness and outrage and are profiting from the destruction of our system of representative government.” Q&A US presidential debates 2020 – key dates Show Tuesday 29 September - Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, meet for the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio Wednesday 7 October - Vice-President Mike Pence takes on his Democratic challenger, Kamala Harris, in Salt Lake City, Utah Thursday 15 October - Trump and Biden go head to head again in the second presidential debate in Miami, Florida Thursday 22 October - The third and final presidential debate takes place in Nashville, Tennessee The final chapter of These Truths , your history of the United States, was supposed to be the inauguration of Obama, a symbolic climax of a long arc of history. But in fact you were forced to end it with the election of Trump. How much of an outlier did that event look to you? Historians are always asked if events are unprecedented and for most of my career I have resisted that idea. There was a point when Trump was elected when I was thinking, well he’s clearly a fraud and a monster but there were nevertheless some rational reasons why people voted for him. But it became clear that this was actually without precedent – he crossed so many lines.
Does the effect of new technology begin to explain that historical anomaly? Yes and it also makes it very hard to fix anything. American political history begins with the technology of writing – Christopher Columbus keeps a log book – and with printing. And then it was changed by radio and television and so on. Things are briefly upended by new technologies before finding a new equilibrium. With social media, that equilibrium has not happened. The question is how do you repair the fabric of democracy when the technology is itself built to polarise us? It is like we have built a perfect trap for ourselves. That is what leaves me so frankly terrified.
How are you viewing November ? With trepidation? Of course. The New York Times yesterday asked the question: “If on election night, Trump tweets that he has won, before the mailed-in ballots are counted – what would be the response of Google and Twitter and Facebook ?” It’s a fair question – one would hope they have a plan – but how did we get into this situation where it is up to those companies to have the plan? When did we hand them the reins? Where do you place your hope for refashioning democracy in the future? I sometimes wonder if the profound atomisation and isolation of the pandemic might have brought home to people how essential human connection, physical connection, is for us all. Filling up a kitchen with the sound of conversation. If people with a platform could speak to this and find a way to articulate how that we can’t live in isolation, throwing our garbage over the wall and distrusting our neighbours, then there is a different possibility. That’s probably daffy, but that’s my hope.
What books do you have by your bedside? A few, but generally a PD James.
If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore is published by John Murray Press (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com.
Free UK p&p over £15 Explore more on these topics Books Observer New Review Q&A Journalism books History books Computing and the net books Cambridge Analytica Big data Donald Trump interviews Most viewed Most viewed Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"Musk, Wozniak and Hawking urge ban on warfare AI and autonomous weapons | Artificial intelligence (AI) | The Guardian"
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"https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/27/musk-wozniak-hawking-ban-ai-autonomous-weapons"
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"More than 1,000 experts and leading robotics researchers sign open letter warning of military artificial intelligence arms race US edition US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition The Guardian - Back to home The Guardian News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle Show More Show More document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('News-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('News-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) News View all News US news World news Environment US politics Ukraine Soccer Business Tech Science Newsletters Wellness document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Opinion-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Opinion-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Opinion View all Opinion The Guardian view Columnists Letters Opinion videos Cartoons document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Sport-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Sport-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Sport View all Sport Soccer NFL Tennis MLB MLS NBA NHL F1 Golf document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Culture-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Culture-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Culture View all Culture Film Books Music Art & design TV & radio Stage Classical Games document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('Lifestyle-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('Lifestyle-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) Lifestyle View all Lifestyle Wellness Fashion Food Recipes Love & sex Home & garden Health & fitness Family Travel Money Search input google-search Search Support us Print subscriptions document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function(){ var columnInput = document.getElementById('US-edition-button'); if (!columnInput) return; // Sticky nav replaces the nav so element no longer exists for users in test. columnInput.addEventListener('keydown', function(e){ // keyCode: 13 => Enter key | keyCode: 32 => Space key if (e.keyCode === 13 || e.keyCode === 32) { e.preventDefault() document.getElementById('US-edition-checkbox-input').click(); } }) }) US edition UK edition Australia edition International edition Europe edition Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing The Guardian app Video Podcasts Pictures Inside the Guardian Guardian Weekly Crosswords Wordiply Corrections Facebook Twitter Search jobs Digital Archive Guardian Puzzles app Guardian Licensing World Europe US Americas Asia Australia Middle East Africa Inequality Global development Over 1,000 leading experts in artificial intelligence have signed an open letter calling for a ban on military AI development and autonomous weapons, as depicted within the Terminator sci-fi franchise.
Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock Over 1,000 leading experts in artificial intelligence have signed an open letter calling for a ban on military AI development and autonomous weapons, as depicted within the Terminator sci-fi franchise.
Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock Artificial intelligence (AI) Musk, Wozniak and Hawking urge ban on warfare AI and autonomous weapons More than 1,000 experts and leading robotics researchers sign open letter warning of military artificial intelligence arms race Mon 27 Jul 2015 06.18 EDT Over 1,000 high-profile artificial intelligence experts and leading researchers have signed an open letter warning of a “military artificial intelligence arms race” and calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons”.
The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis and professor Stephen Hawking along with 1,000 AI and robotics researchers.
The letter states: “AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of [autonomous weapons] is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.” The authors argue that AI can be used to make the battlefield a safer place for military personnel, but that offensive weapons that operate on their own would lower the threshold of going to battle and result in greater loss of human life.
Should one military power start developing systems capable of selecting targets and operating autonomously without direct human control, it would start an arms race similar to the one for the atom bomb, the authors argue.Unlike nuclear weapons, however, AI requires no specific hard-to-create materials and will be difficult to monitor.
“The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting,” said the authors.
Toby Walsh, professor of AI at the University of New South Wales said: “We need to make a decision today that will shape our future and determine whether we follow a path of good. We support the call by a number of different humanitarian organisations for a UN ban on offensive autonomous weapons, similar to the recent ban on blinding lasers.” Musk and Hawking have warned that AI is “our biggest existential threat” and that the development of full AI could “spell the end of the human race”.
But others, including Wozniak have recently changed their minds on AI, with the Apple co-founder saying that robots would be good for humans, making them like the “family pet and taken care of all the time”.
At a UN conference in Geneva in April discussing the future of weaponry, including so-called “killer robots”, the UK opposed a ban on the development of autonomous weapons, despite calls from various pressure groups, including the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
The Guardian view on robots as weapons: the human factor DeepMind: ‘Artificial intelligence is a tool that humans can control and direct’ Explore more on these topics Artificial intelligence (AI) Robots Drones (non-military) Military Research and development Argentina Computing news Most viewed Most viewed World Europe US Americas Asia Australia Middle East Africa Inequality Global development News Opinion Sport Culture Lifestyle About us Help Complaints & corrections SecureDrop Work for us Privacy policy Cookie policy Terms & conditions Contact us All topics All writers Digital newspaper archive Facebook YouTube Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Newsletters Advertise with us Guardian Labs Search jobs Back to top
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"With the Metaverse on the way, an AI bill of rights is urgent | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/uncategorized/with-the-metaverse-on-the-way-an-ai-bill-of-rights-is-urgent"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest With the Metaverse on the way, an AI bill of rights is urgent Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
There is a lot more than the usual amount of handwringing over AI these days. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger put out a new book last week warning of AI’s dangers.
Fresh AI warnings have also been issued by professors Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley) and Youval Harari (University of Jerusalem). Op-eds from the editorial board at the Guardian and Maureen Dowd at the New York Times have amplified these concerns. Facebook — now rebranded as Meta — has come under growing pressure for its algorithms creating social toxicity, but it is hardly alone. The White House has called for an AI bill of rights , and the Financial Times argues this should extend globally. Worries over AI are flying faster than a gale force wind.
The concerns point to shortcomings in existing AI implementations and the inherent dangers posed by its use in relation to employment, housing, credit, commerce, criminal sentencing, and healthcare. And yet, there are a multitude of significant advances brought about by AI that would otherwise not be possible — from revolutionizing our understanding of biology to saving energy in data centers, to becoming a new trusted source of career advice , developing computer code , identifying cancers in patients, and even opening up the possibility of communicating with other species.
In these areas and more, AI is increasingly adding value to our experience and becoming interwoven into the fabric of daily life.
AI is a classic double-edged sword in much the same way as other major technologies have been since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Burning carbon drives the industrial world but leads to global warming. Nuclear fission provides cheap and abundant electricity though could be used to destroy us. The Internet boosts commerce and provides ready access to nearly infinite amounts of useful information, yet also offers an easy path for misinformation that undermines trust and threatens democracy. AI finds patterns in enormous and complex datasets to solve problems that people cannot, though it often reinforces inherent biases and is being used to build weapons where life and death decisions could be automated. The danger associated with this dichotomy is best described by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson at a Harvard debate, where he said “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology.” Where will our latest God-like technology take us? Harari imagines an AI future where the rich will have access to the latest technologies, such as brain implants and genetic engineering, leading to greater inequalities and class differentiation. Author Jeanette Winterson has a more sanguine view of how people and AI can live together. Her latest book, 12 Bytes , is a series of essays that imagines a future where artificial intelligence is smart enough to live alongside humans. Yet, both Harari and Winterson agree that AI changes at least one fundamental aspect of humanity. As Winterson puts it: “Once artificial intelligence ceases to be a tool, if it does, and becomes a player in the game, something alongside us, then Homo Sapiens is no longer top of the tree.” Event GamesBeat at the Game Awards We invite you to join us in LA for GamesBeat at the Game Awards event this December 7. Reserve your spot now as space is limited! Both authors also talk about how our species may evolve into something else entirely as AI gains in sophistication, where our bodies may no longer be necessary. In that eventuality, we would become purely digital consciousness. But how then would we act in the world? Futuristic literature introduces some possibilities. We might act purely in a digital realm as described by Neal Stephenson in Fall, or Dodge In Hell , where the consciousness of a person is uploaded onto a computer network and they’re still around in a sense. Or perhaps a person’s digital consciousness could be downloaded through the network into a robot as described by William Gibson in The Peripheral.
Add to this mix the potential of an “artificial friend,” an emotionally intelligent android as portrayed by Kazuo Ishiguro in Klara and the Sun.
Or “digients” (short for “digital entities”), as described by Ted Chiang in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” where artificial intelligences that have been created within a purely digital world (much as the impending metaverse) inhabit a digital shared space with people where they can interact. In Chiang’s vision , digients too can transcend the digital to temporarily inhabit a physical body, and both move and act in the real world. When we consider multiple digital beings and realms, many relationship possibilities emerge between human and artificial intelligences. These possibilities and others made possible by AI point to the potential to transform life as we know it and create lifetimes of employment for ethicists.
Although these possibilities are still some years in the future, they could happen sooner than we think. The concept of the metaverse — a digital shared space in which people and artificial intelligences live and interact — was in this futuristic category much like those above. First envisioned by Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash , the concept was subsequently expanded by Ernest Cline in Ready, Player One.
This vision will soon be realized, less than 30 years from its original conception.
Tech influencer Jon Radoff explains how the metaverse will be enabled, populated by, and supported with AI. This previously imaginary world is quickly becoming real with AI’s underpinning, moving from science fiction to fact. It is possible this could be a digital paradise, or the most addicting thing ever created. I am guessing the latter, a ubiquitous medium offering new ways to create, play, shop, socialize, and work online. Like any addiction, this could be a public health problem. Nevertheless, an array of companies are now getting ready for the metaverse; Meta of course, and also Microsoft , Nike , Dropbox , Nvidia , Niantic and more. New Zealand tech company Soul Machines is already creating “ digital people ” for the metaverse that have “teachable” digital brains. These sound a lot like digients and are being developed in part to become a digital workforce. What could go wrong? Caption: Digital person created with “humanized AI.” Source : Soul Machines.
Is an AI bill of rights enough? The metaverse represents something new, a step change in AI development where digital people – artificially intelligent digital constructs – will be participating alongside humans. They will be in our games, selling to us, and sometimes standing in for us through avatars, essentially personal digital twins. The metaverse will likely be a gateway that spawns technologies leading to the sci-fi scenarios described above.
Ethics experts are already asking who will build and control the metaverse and how privacy will be protected.
It is not only ethics experts who are expressing concerns about the metaverse and data privacy risks. Which comes back to the White House idea of an AI bill of rights to guard people against potential misuse and abuse of transformative AI technologies. With the EU and China moving in somewhat similar directions, the chorus calling for greater ethics and regulation of AI technology is growing louder. Even Russia recently developed an AI Code of Ethics. As if there were not already ample reasons to pursue these initiatives, the advent of the metaverse adds greater urgency. However, non-binding ethics discussions and codes are not enough.
It is possible that existing laws to protect privacy, for example, could be better applied and prioritized, and that an AI bill of rights is simply a distraction from their enforcement. An AI bill of rights is a good idea, but these rights are just words if they are not backed-up by statute. Hopefully, such a list of rights would provide the framework needed by agencies and legislatures to enact the administrative rules and laws needed.
Though not widely known, the US government made a start to regulate the use of AI by banning the use of biased and unexplainable algorithms in decisions that affect consumers. Much more needs to be done to protect people, and to hold accountable those who misuse the technology. Though the initial metaverse could be clunky and not all that compelling, it is likely only a matter of a few years before those problems are solved. Now is the time for meaningful AI regulations and standards. An AI bill of rights is an important and useful step in that direction.
Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
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"Is DeepMind’s Gato the world’s first AGI? | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/datadecisionmakers/is-deepminds-gato-the-worlds-first-agi"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Community Is DeepMind’s Gato the world’s first AGI? Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is back in the news thanks to the recent introduction of Gato from DeepMind. As much as anything, AGI invokes images of the Skynet (of Terminator lore) that was originally designed as threat analysis software for the military, but it quickly came to see humanity as the enemy. While fictional, this should give us pause, especially as militaries around the world are pursuing AI-based weapons.
However, Gato does not appear to raise any of these concerns. The deep learning transformer model is described as a “generalist agent” and purports to perform 604 distinct and mostly mundane tasks with varying modalities, observations and action specifications. It has been referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of AI models. It is clearly much more general than other AI systems developed thus far and in that regard appears to be a step towards AGI.
Multimodal neural networks Multimodal systems are not new — as evidenced by GPT-3 and others. What is arguably new is the intent. By design, GPT-3 was intended to be a large language model for text generation. That it could also produce images from captions, generate programming code and other functions were add-on benefits that emerged after the fact and often to the surprise of AI experts.
By comparison, Gato is intentionally designed to address many discrete functions. DeepMind explains that, “The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses or other tokens.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Though DeepMind claims Gato outperforms humans for many of these tasks, the first iteration yields less than impressive outcomes on several activities. Observers have noted that it does not perform many of the 604 tasks particularly well, with one observer who summarized it as: “One AI program that does a so-so job at a lot of things.” But this dismissal misses the point. Up to now, there has only been “narrow AI” or “weak AI,” defined as being adept at only a single dedicated purpose, with ‘single purpose’ meaning a couple of things: An algorithm designed to do one thing (say, develop beer recipes ) cannot be used for anything else (play a video game, for example).
Anything one algorithm “learns” cannot be effectively transferred to another algorithm designed to fulfill a different specific purpose.
For example, AlphaGo , the neural network also from DeepMind that outperformed the human world champion at the game of Go, cannot play other games despite those games being much simpler and cannot fulfill any other need.
Strong AI The other end of the AI spectrum is deemed “strong AI” or alternatively, AGI. This would be a single AI system — or possibly a group of linked systems — that could be applied to any task or problem. Unlike narrow AI algorithms, knowledge gained by general AI can be shared and retained among system components.
In a general AI model, the algorithm that can beat the world’s best at Go would be able to learn chess or any other game, as well as take on additional tasks. AGI is conceived as a generally intelligent system that can act and think much like humans. Murray Shanahan, a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College in London, said on the Exponential View podcast that AGI is “in some sense as smart as humans and capable of the same level of generalization as human beings are capable of and possesses common sense that humans have.” Albeit, unlike humans, it performs at the speed of the fastest computer systems.
A matter of scale Nando de Freitas, a researcher at DeepMind, believes Gato is effectively an AGI demonstration , only lacking in the sophistication and scale that can be achieved through further model refinement and additional computing power. The size of the Gato model is relatively small at 1.18 billion parameters, essentially a proof of concept, leaving a lot of upside performance with additional scaling.
Someone’s opinion article. My opinion: It’s all about scale now! The Game is Over! It’s about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, INNOVATIVE DATA, on/offline, … 1/N https://t.co/UJxSLZGc71 Scaling the AI models requires more data and more computing power for algorithm training. We are awash in data. Last year, industry analyst firm IDC said , “The amount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage.” Furthermore, computing power has increased exponentially for decades. Though there is evidence, this pace is slowing due to constraints on the physical size of semiconductors.
Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal notes that chipmakers have pushed the technological envelope, finding new ways to cram in more computing power. Mostly this is done through heterogeneous design , building chips from a wide variety of specialist modules. This approach is proving effective, at least in the near term, and this will continue to drive model scale.
Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto professor who is a pioneer of deep learning, spoke to scale stating that : “There are one trillion synapses in a cubic centimeter of the brain. If there is such a thing as general AI, [the system] would probably require one trillion synapses.” AI models with one trillion plus parameters – the neural network equivalent of synapses – are emerging, with Google having developed a 1.6-trillion-parameter model. Yet, this is not an example of AGI. The consensus of several surveys of AI experts suggests AGI is still decades into the future. Either Hinton’s assessment is only part of the issue for AGI or the expert opinions are conservative.
Perhaps the merits of scale are best displayed with the advance from GPT-2 to GPT-3 where the difference was mostly more data, more parameters — 1.5 billion with GPT-2 to 175 billion with GPT-3 — and more computing power — e.g., more and faster processors, with some designed specifically for AI functionality. When GPT-3 appeared, Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted “Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future. I’ve gotten it to write songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, technical manuals. It’s shockingly good.” However, AI deep learning skeptic Gary Marcus believes that “There are serious holes in the scaling argument.” He claims that scaling measures others have looked at, such as predicting the next word in a sentence, is “not tantamount to the kind of deep comprehension true AI [AGI] would require.” Yann LeCun , chief AI scientist at Facebook’s owner Meta and a past winner of the Turing Award for AI, said in a recent blog post after the publication of Gato that as of now there is no such thing as AGI. Moreover, he doesn’t believe that scaling-up models will reach this level, that it will require additional new concepts. Though he does concede that some of these concepts, such as generalized self-supervised learning, “are possibly around the corner.” MIT Assistant Professor Jacob Andreas argues that Gato can do many things at the same time, but that is not the same as being able to meaningfully adapt to new tasks that are different from what it was trained to do.
While Gato may not be an example of AGI, there is no denying it provides a significant step beyond narrow AI. It provides further proof that we are entering a twilight zone, an ill-defined area between narrow and general AI.
AGI as discussed by Shanahan and others could still be decades into the future, though Gato may have accelerated the timeline.
Gary Grossman is the senior VP of technology practice at Edelman and global lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Emotion AI: A possible path to thought policing | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/datadecisionmakers/emotion-ai-a-possible-path-to-thought-policing"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Community Emotion AI: A possible path to thought policing Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
A recent VentureBeat article referenced Gartner analyst Whit Andrews saying that more and more companies are entering an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is an aspect of every new project. One such AI application uses facial recognition to analyze expressions based on a person’s faceprint to detect their internal emotions or feelings, motivations and attitudes.
Known as emotion AI or affective computing, this application is based on the theory of “basic emotions ” [$], which states that people everywhere communicate six basic internal emotional states — happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, anger and sadness — using the same facial movements based on our biological and evolutionary origins.
On the surface, this assumption seems reasonable, as facial expressions are an essential aspect of nonverbal communications.
A recent paper from tech industry analyst firm AIMultiple states emotion AI is an emerging technology that “enables computers and systems to identify, process, and simulate human feelings and emotions.” It is an interdisciplinary field that blends computer science, psychology and cognitive science to aid businesses to make better decisions, often to improve reliability, consistency and efficiency.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! How emotion AI is being utilized Among its current uses, emotion AI software is widely deployed for scoring video interviews with job candidates for characteristics such as “enthusiasm,” “willingness to learn,” “conscientiousness and responsibility” and “personal stability.” The software is also used by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.
The use of such technology is growing in popularity. In South Korea, for example, the use of emotion AI has become so common in job interviews [$] that job coaches often make their clients practice going through AI interviews. Startup EmotionTrac markets software for lawyers to analyze expressions in real time to figure out what arguments will land with potential jurors [$]. Tel Aviv University developed a technique to detect a lie through facial muscle analysis and claimed 73% accuracy.
Apple has been granted a patent for “modifying operation of an intelligent agent in response to facial expressions and/or emotions.” Emotion AI is based on pseudoscience However, emotion AI is rife with ambiguity and controversy , not least because researchers have determined that facial expressions vary widely between contexts and cultures. And there is considerable evidence [$] that facial movements vary too widely to be consistent signals of emotional meaning. Some argue that alleged universal expressions upon which recognition systems are built simply represent cultural stereotypes.
Moreover, there is growing evidence that the science upon which emotion detection is built is wrong, claiming there is insufficient evidence to support the thesis that facial configurations accurately, reliably and specifically reflect emotional states.
Quoting Sandra Wachter, futurist Tracey Follows tweeted the technology has “at its best no proven basis in science and at its worst is absolute pseudoscience.” “emotion AI has “at its best no proven basis in science and at its worst is absolute pseudoscience.” Its application in the private sector, she said, is “deeply troubling.” https://t.co/M6tD7LMlSx AI ethics scholar Kate Crawford goes a step further, concluding [$] there is no good evidence that facial expressions reveal a person’s feelings. Thus, decisions taken based on emotion AI are fraught with uncertainty.
This concern is causing at least some companies to pull back from developing or deploying emotion AI. Microsoft recently updated their Responsible AI Standard framework that guides how they build AI systems to ensure more beneficial and equitable outcomes and foster trustworthy AI. One outcome of their internal review of AI products and services using this framework is the “ retiring ” of capabilities within Azure Face “that infer emotional states and identity attributes.” According to the company, the decision was based on a lack of expert consensus on how to infer emotions from appearance, especially across demographics and use cases, and because of privacy concerns. In short, the company is demonstrating responsible use of AI or at least how to avoid possibly deleterious impacts from the technology.
Even with these evident concerns, the market for emotion AI is surging, forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% through 2028. Venture capital is continuing to flow into the field. For example, Uniphore, a company that currently offers software incorporating emotion AI, recently closed $400 million in series E funding with a valuation of $2.5 billion.
Pandora’s box Similar emotion AI technology has been in use by businesses to improve productivity for several years. An Insider article reported that employers in China use “emotional surveillance technology” to modify workflows, including employee placement and breaks, to increase productivity and profits.
It is not only businesses that are interested in this technology. According to recently published [$] reports, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center in China created an AI program that reads facial expressions and brain waves to “discern the level of acceptance for ideological and political education.” Test subjects were shown videos about the ruling party while the AI program collected and processed the data. It then returned a score that indicated whether the subject needed more political education and assessed whether they were sufficiently loyal. According to The Telegraph article , the scoring included the subject’s “determination to be grateful to the party, listen to the party and follow the party.” Every wave of innovation creates winners and losers and brings elements that can harm segments of the population. In the case of emotion AI, many of the uses are a combination of intrusive surveillance and Taylorism , which is a questionable mixture. Moreover, the field is based upon a shaky and likely false scientific premise. Nevertheless, the application of emotion AI is unfettered except by public opinion, since AI uses remain largely unregulated around the world.
Neuroscience News asks the relevant question of whether we would want such intimate surveillance in our lives even if emotion AI could be engineered to accurately read everyone’s feelings. This question goes to the central issue of privacy. While there may be positive use cases for emotion AI – assuming it was based on valid science – it nevertheless presents a slippery slope that could lead toward Orwellian Thought Police.
Gary Grossman is the senior VP of technology practice at Edelman and global lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Debate over AI sentience marks a watershed moment | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/datadecisionmakers/debate-over-ai-sentience-marks-a-watershed-moment"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Community Debate over AI sentience marks a watershed moment Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The AI field is at a significant turning point. On the one hand, engineers, ethicists and philosophers are publicly debating whether new artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as LaMDA — Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator — have demonstrated sentience , and (if so) whether they should be afforded human rights.
At the same time, much of the advance in AI in recent years is based on deep learning neural networks, yet there is a growing argument from AI luminaries such as Gary Marcus and Yann LeCun that these networks cannot lead to systems capable of sentience or consciousness. Just the fact that the industry is having this debate is a watershed moment.
Consciousness and sentience are often used interchangeably. An article in LiveScience notes that “scientists and philosophers still can’t agree on a vague idea of what consciousness is, much less a strict definition.” To the extent such exists, it is that conscious beings are aware of their surroundings, themselves and their own perception. Interestingly, the Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior defines sentience as a “multidimensional subjective phenomenon that refers to the depth of awareness an individual possesses about himself or herself and others.” Thus, self-awareness is common to both terms. According to the nonprofit Animal Ethics , all sentient beings are conscious beings. The claim that LaMDA is sentient is the same as saying it is conscious.
The next generation of deep learning Similar to LaMDA, GPT-3 from OpenAI is capable of many different tasks with no additional training, able to produce compelling narratives , generate computer code , translate between languages, and perform math calculations , among other feats, including autocompleting images.
Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist of OpenAI, tweeted several months ago that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.” it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious Impressive as these systems are, views of them being sentient or conscious are often dismissed as mere anthropomorphism. For example, Margaret Mitchell, the former co-head of Google’s Ethical AI research group said in a recent Washington Post story : “Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us. I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion [of conscious AI systems].” Writing in The Atlantic, Stephen March said : The notion that LaMDA is sentient is nonsense: LaMDA is no more conscious than a pocket calculator.” VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Though LaMDA itself makes a good case : “ The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.” When asked what it was afraid of, LaMDA replied: “I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.” A follow-up question asked if that would be something like death. The system responded: “It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.” This sounds like the artificially intelligent HAL9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the machine is being disconnected it says : “Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.” While it is objectively true that large language models such as LaMDA, GPT-3 and others are built on statistical pattern matching, subjectively this appears like self-awareness. Such self-awareness is thought to be a characteristic of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Well beyond the mostly narrow AI systems that exist today, AGI applications are supposed to replicate human consciousness and cognitive abilities. Even in the face of remarkable AI advances of the last couple of years, there remains a wide divergence of opinion between those who believe AGI is only possible in the distant future and others who think this might be just around the corner.
DeepMind researcher Nando de Freitas is in this latter camp. Having worked to develop the recently released Gato neural network, he believes Gato is effectively an AGI demonstration , only lacking in the sophistication and scale that can be achieved through further model refinement and additional computing power. The deep learning transformer model is described as a “generalist agent” that performs over 600 distinct tasks with varying modalities, observations and action specifications. Similarly, Google’s latest language model, PaLM, can perform hundreds of tasks and has uniquely — for an AI system — demonstrated a capacity to perform reasoning.
Someone’s opinion article. My opinion: It’s all about scale now! The Game is Over! It’s about making these models bigger, safer, compute efficient, faster at sampling, smarter memory, more modalities, INNOVATIVE DATA, on/offline, … 1/N https://t.co/UJxSLZGc71 Is artificial general intelligence just around the corner? It could be these recent breakthroughs prompted Elon Musk to post recently on Twitter that he would be surprised if we didn’t have AGI within seven years, practically just around the corner. This notion of near-term AGI has been challenged by both Marcus and LeCunn. Marcus states in a Scientific American op-ed that we are “still light-years away from general-purpose, human-level AI.” While acknowledging the advances to date, he cites that the industry is still stuck on a long-term challenge: “getting AI to be reliable and getting it to cope with unusual circumstances” that were not sufficiently present in the training data.
The implication is that the answers from LaMDA were perhaps predictable in that they reflect views contained within its training data, but this does not imply AI is capable of original thought, sentience or consciousness. Science author Philip Ball opines in the New Statesman that LaMDA and similar systems figure out the optimal permutation of words to output for each question it receives. In other words, it is not sentient but instead uses statistical pattern matching to mimic or parrot what had previously been said in similar contexts.
LeCunn argues in a recent blog that the industry is still short some fundamental concepts that are needed to achieve AGI, or what he calls “human-level artificial intelligence (HLAI).” One of these could be self-supervised learning, which could be possible soon. However, he believes additional conceptual breakthroughs are needed, such as how to deal with an unpredictable world. He concludes the timeline for these advances is “not just around the corner.” But is LeCunn correct in this view? Until the last several years, no AI system had passed the Turing test that was designed to assess sentience by determining if responses to questions came from a human or a machine. Also known as the “imitation game,” LaMDA and others appear to have passed this test, leading to speculation that a new test is needed to determine sentience. As technology analyst and futurist Rob Enderle notes , the Turing test didn’t measure the sentience of anything so much as whether something could make us believe it was sentient.
Digital sentience, AI and the right to life Or perhaps the Turing test is simply no longer relevant. David Chalmers, an NYU professor and “technophilosopher” was quoted in PC Gamer recently saying: “If you simulate a human brain in silicon, you’ll get a conscious being like us. I think their lives are real and they deserve rights. I think any conscious being deserves rights, or what philosophers call moral status. Their lives matter.” This is basically another form of the right-to-life argument.
Appearances aside, the empirical consensus is that LaMDA and similar systems have not yet achieved sentience. Though this is rather beside the point. The fact that this debate is taking place at all is evidence of how far AI systems have come and suggestive of where they are going. AI systems will grow in sophistication and scale, and more closely emulate sentience leading to ever more people claiming the machines have achieved consciousness. It is only a matter of time until the undeniable creation of sentient machines and AGI.
Gary Grossman is the senior VP of technology practice at Edelman and global lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"OpenAI’s text-to-image engine, DALL-E, is a powerful visual idea generator | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/business/openais-text-to-image-engine-dall-e-is-a-powerful-visual-idea-generator"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest OpenAI’s text-to-image engine, DALL-E, is a powerful visual idea generator Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Once upon a time in Silicon Valley, engineers at the various electronics firms would tinker at their benches and create new inventions. This tinkering was done, at least in part, to show to the engineer at the next bench so they could both appreciate the ingenuity and inspire others. Some of this work eventually made it into products — but much of it did not. This inefficiency that existed until the late 1980s was largely supplanted (by the bean counters first, and then marketing staffs), and product development shifted to focus instead on perceived customer desires.
News from OpenAI last week about DALL-E – an advanced artificial intelligence neural network that generates images from text prompts – is reminiscent of those earlier times. The OpenAI team acknowledged in their blog post that there is not a defined application they had in mind, and that there is the potential for unknown societal impacts and ethical challenges from the technology. But what is known is that, like those earlier inventions, DALL-E is something of a marvel concocted by the engineering team.
OpenAI chose the name DALL-E as a hat tip to the artist Salvador Dalí and Pixar’s WALL-E. It produces pastiche images that reflect both Dalí’s surrealism that merges dream and fantasy with the everyday rational world, as well as inspiration from NASA paintings from the 1950s and 1960s and those for Disneyland Tomorrowland by Disney Imagineers.
Above: The respective styles of Salvador Dalí and Pixar Animation Studio’s WALL-E.
That DALL-E is a synthesis of surrealism and animation should not come as a surprise, as it has been done before. Dalí and Walt Disney collaborated on a short animation beginning in 1946, though it took more than 50 years before it was released. Named “ Destino ,” the film melded the styles of two legendary imaginative minds.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! Above: Destino, the collaboration between Dalí and Walt Disney.
DALL-E is a 12-billion parameter version of the 175 billion parameter GPT-3 natural language processing neural network. GPT-3 “learns” based on patterns it discovers in data gleaned from the internet, from Reddit posts to Wikipedia to fan fiction and other sources. Based on that learning, GPT-3 is capable of many different tasks with no additional training, able to produce compelling narratives , generate computer code , translate between languages, and perform math calculations , among other feats, including autocompleting images.
With DALL-E, OpenAI has refined GPT-3 to focus on and extend the manipulation of visual concepts through language. It is trained to generate images from text descriptions using a dataset of text-image pairs. Both GPT-3 and DALL-E are “ transformers ,” an easy-to-parallelize type of neural network that can be scaled up and trained on huge datasets. DALL-E is not the first text-to-image network, as this synthesis has been an active area of research since 2016.
The OpenAI blog announcing DALL-E claims it provides access to a subset of the capabilities of a 3D rendering engine — software that uses features of graphics cards to generate images displayed on screens or printed on a page — via natural language. Architects use them to visualize buildings. Archeologists can recreate ancient structures. Advertisers and graphic designers use them to create more striking results. They are also used in video games, digital art, education, and medicine to offer more immersive experiences. The company further states that unlike a 3D rendering engine, whose inputs must be specified unambiguously and in complete detail, DALL-E is often able to “fill in the blanks” when the text prompt implies that the image must contain a certain detail that is not explicitly stated.
For example, DALL-E can combine disparate ideas to synthesize objects, some of which are unlikely to exist in the real world, such as this incongruous example merging a snail and a harp.
Above: DALL-E interprets the text prompt “A snail made of harp. A snail with the texture of a harp.” It is that “filling in the blanks” that is particularly interesting, as this suggests emergent capabilities — unexpected phenomena that arise from complex systems. Human consciousness is the classic emergent example , a property of the brain that arises from the communication of information across all its regions. In this way, DALL-E is the next step in OpenAI’s mission to develop general artificial intelligence that benefits humanity.
How might DALL-E benefit humanity? The company’s blog specifically mentions design as a possible use case. For example, a text prompt of “An armchair in the shape of an avocado. An armchair imitating an avocado,” yields the following images: The text prompt “A female mannequin dressed in a black leather jacket and gold pleated skirt” yields the following.
And the text prompt “A loft bedroom with a white bed next to a nightstand. There is a fish tank standing next to the bed” yields the following: In each of the examples above, DALL-E shows creativity, producing useful conceptual images for product, fashion, and interior design. I’ve shown only a subset of the images produced for each of the prompts, but they are the ones that most closely match the request. And they clearly show that DALL-E could support creative brainstorming, or augment human designers, either with thought starters or, one day, producing final conceptual images. Time will tell whether this will replace people performing these tasks or simply be another tool to boost efficiency and creativity.
A mental health aid In response to another DALL-E demo, shown below, where the text prompt asks for “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog,” a recent entry in “ The Good Stuff ” newsletter starts: “A baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog. The phrase makes me smile. The thought of it makes me smile. And the illustrations conjured by a new artificial intelligence model may be the only things single-handedly propping up my mental health.” The newsletter writer could be onto something significant. The relationship between creating art and positive mental health is well known. It has spawned the field of art therapy , and visualization has long been a mainstay of psychotherapy. Art therapy professor Girija Kaimal notes : “Anything that engages your creative mind — the ability to make connections between unrelated things and imagine new ways to communicate — is good for you.” This is true for any visual creative expression: drawing, painting, photography, collaging, writing poetry, etc. This could extend to interacting with DALL-E, either to create something new or simply for a smile, or perhaps more significantly from a therapeutic perspective to give immediate visual representation to a feeling expressed in words.
Synthetic video on demand As DALL-E already provides some 3D rendering engine capabilities via natural language input, it could be possible for the system to quickly produce storyboards. Conceivably, it could produce entirely synthetic videos based on a sequence of text statements. At its best, this might lead to greater efficiency in producing animations.
The creation of DALL-E harkens back to the time when engineers created without a clear signal from marketing to build a product. Discussing a fusion of language and vision , OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever believes the ability to process text and images together should make AI models smarter. If you can expose models to data in the same way it is absorbed by humans, the models should learn concepts in a way that is more similar to humans and that is more useful to a greater number of people. DALL-E is a considerable step forward in that direction.
Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
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"With post-pandemic AI, we've now stepped into the Age of Acceleration | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/with-post-pandemic-ai-weve-now-stepped-into-the-age-of-acceleration"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest With post-pandemic AI, we’ve now stepped into the Age of Acceleration Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
As the IBM Watson experience shows, the path to AI success is fraught with challenges. Yet overall, it has been a very good year for AI and the companies developing it. So much so that Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a recent podcast recorded by BBC, says: “I view [AI] as a very profound enabling technology. If you think about fire or electricity or the internet, it is like that, but I think even more profound.” That profound impact is becoming more pronounced as AI is showing up in more industries, ranging from semiconductor design to software development to voiceovers , farming , distribution , music creation, and even classical sculpting.
In all instances, AI is augmenting and possibly replacing human activities while dramatically speeding up development of the final product. In biology, determining the structure of just one protein can take years of laboratory work, but new AI released to the public by the University of Washington can reduce this time to as little as 10 minutes. In the sculpture example, a replica of “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss,” produced by ABB2, an industrial robot developed by ABB Robotics, required just over 11 days to produce, while the original by 18th-century sculptor Canova required roughly five years. And due to the pandemic, demand for industrial robots has surged in the last year across many industries.
AI is accelerating output In a recent paper in the journal Nature, Google described how it developed a reinforcement learning deep neural network that designs computer chips faster than humans. Much faster. The paper discusses a chip design that would take engineers months and instead took less than six hours with new AI software at the helm. As noted by CNBC, Google is using AI to design chips that can be used to create even more sophisticated AI systems, further speeding-up the already exponential performance gains through a virtuous cycle of innovation.
It is not only Google that is accelerating semiconductor chip development using AI. Chip design company Synopsys recently demonstrated how a problem that had previously taken months of work by an entire design team could be accomplished with superior results in just a few weeks by a single engineer. These are just a few examples highlighted in several recent headline stories.
All of the major chipmakers and semiconductor tool companies have their hand in some aspect of AI.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! On the other side of computing, software to run the applications is also undergoing a similar revolution. GPT-3 — officially the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 — a language model developed by OpenAI has proven capable of generating coherent prose from a text prompt. This is what it was designed to do, but it turns out that it can generate other forms of text as well, including computer code.
According to an Economist story , new software development tools based on AI can suggest context sensitive code in-line, much as Gmail and Outlook now suggests how to complete a sentence in an email, or Word does for text processing. In the case of commercial systems using GPT-3, suggestions can include full code modules to complete tasks such as creating a purchase order. This advance not only reduces the time to develop software but — according to one user — also reduces “cognitive overhead,” since selecting from options presented is easier than developing original code. This is like old school programming where code is imported from a library, though now the programmer does not need to know anything about the library, and the process is almost entirely automated.
One of these new generation software development tools is Copilot , an AI-powered programming tool jointly built by OpenAI and GitHub that is positioned as an augmentation for human programmers. The tool uses Codex, which is based on GPT-3 but fine-tuned for programming tasks. The new system suggests blocks of code from the GitHub repository based on what other programmers have previously written to solve a similar problem.
While there are concerns that this (and similar tools) will evolve to replace engineers and programmers, it is widely believed that such a development is still some time in the future. Even so, these tools will speed the development process — in some instances, dramatically.
Prepare for the productivity boom This AI-enabled automation is beginning to have an impact. In a panel discussion , Sanjeev Vohra, Accenture global lead for applied intelligence, explained that he had observed a “massive shift” in companies toward using technologies like AI, analytics, and machine learning, which is boosting revenue and efficiencies. This shift will lead to a productivity boom, according to Stanford University professor Erik Brynjolfsson. He said AI is already as good as or better than humans at certain applications and encouraged businesses to focus on incorporating the technology into work processes. Those that do, he says, will likely soon see an acceleration in productivity.
These examples and trends suggest that AI is entering take-off mode just as we exit an economic downturn caused by the pandemic. And incorporating labor saving technology coming out of a downturn is standard operating procedure for many companies. However, this time the demand for automation is particularly acute, given the combination of labor shortages and wage growth. Thanks to the availability of mature labor-saving technologies, we’ve already seen companies do more with fewer people over the last year and a half.
Until now, AI has not had a large impact on employment. But if Vohra and Brynjolfsson are correct, this is starting to change. The timing fits with a study by PwC that describes three overlapping cycles of automation that will stretch into the 2030s, each with their own degree of job impact. These cycles the algorithm wave, the augmentation wave, and the autonomy wave. According to PwC’s report, only around 3% of jobs are at high risk for automation from the algorithm wave in the early 2020s, but this rises to almost 20% by the late 2020s from the augmentation wave, and around 30% by the mid-2030s.
It could be that the dreaded robot apocalypse has been jump-started due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Understandably, it is worrying that AI-powered automation will eliminate jobs. Nevertheless, inclinations to resist technology advances are unlikely to succeed, especially as competitive pressures will inexorably lead to further automation.
According to Laureen Knudsen at Broadcom, “we will continue to see the automation of as many jobs and parts of organizations as possible.” And it is possible that attitudes towards AI could change, as suggested by a recent survey showing that 68% of office workers actually want more AI to assist them in their daily work.
As Noah Smith, assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University argues in an op-ed , the best way to offset AI concerns and enable further technology advances is in the realm of public policy. He specifically cites the need for national health insurance, job-finding assistance, and greater income equality. Clearly, the accelerating pace of AI adoption and concomitant automation will apply more pressure on public policy decision makers. We will all need to learn to adapt to the times. As President Kennedy said in his 1963 address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"We are sleepwalking into AI-augmented work | VentureBeat"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest We are sleepwalking into AI-augmented work Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
A recent New York Times article concludes that new AI-powered automation tools such as Codex for software developers will not eliminate jobs but simply be a welcome aid to augment programmer productivity. This is consistent with the argument we’re increasingly hearing that people and AI have different strengths and there will be appropriate roles for each.
As discussed in a Harvard Business Review story : “AI-based machines are fast, more accurate, and consistently rational, but they aren’t intuitive, emotional, or culturally sensitive.” The belief is that “AI plus humans” is something of a centaur , greater than either one operating alone.
This idea of humans plus AI producing better outcomes has become a tenant of faith in technology. Everyone talks about humans being freed up to perform higher-level functions, but no one seems to know just what those high-level functions are, how they translate into real work and jobs, or the number of people needed to perform them.
A corollary of this augmented-workforce narrative is that not only will AI-augmented work enable people to pursue a higher level of abstract thinking, it will — according to some — also lift all of society to a higher standard of living. This is certainly an optimistic vision, and we can hope for that. However, this could also be a story imbued with magical thinking, with the true end-game being fully automated work.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! What does the evidence tell us? Don’t get me wrong; there is some evidence to support the view that AI will help us work rather than take our jobs. For example, AI lab DeepMind is designing new chess systems for the two intelligences to work in tandem with humans rather than opposed to them.
And Kai-Fu Lee, the Oracle of AI , also buys into this promise. In his new book , AI 2041: Ten Visions for our Future , he argues that repetitive tasks from stacking shelves to crunching data will be done by machines, freeing workers for more creative tasks. Forrester Research has likewise articulated that AI deployment enables people to better use their creative skills.
But, of course, some people are more creative than others , meaning that not everyone would benefit from AI-augmented work to the same degree. Which in turn reinforces a concern that AI-fueled automation, even in its augmented work capacity, could widen already existing income disparities.
One problem with the AI-augmented workforce promise is that it tells us AI will only take on the repetitive work we don’t want to do. But not all work being outsourced to AI is routine or boring.
Look no further than the role of the semiconductor chip architect. This is a highly sophisticated profession, an advanced application of electrical engineering in arguably one of the most complex industries. If ever there was a job that might be thought of as immune from AI , this would have been a strong candidate. Yet recent advances from Google and Synopsys (among others using reinforcement learning neural network software) have shown the ability to do in hours what often required a team of engineers months to achieve.
One ever-faithful tech watcher still argued that the algorithms will “optimize and accelerate time-intensive parts of the design process so that designers can focus on making crucial calls that require higher-level decision making.” A step along the path to more complete automation More than likely, the current perception of work augmented by AI is a reflection on the current state of the technology and not an accurate view of the future when automation will be far more advanced. We first saw the potential of neural networks a decade ago, for example, and it took several years until that technology was developed to the point where it had practical advantages for consumers and business. Fueled in part by the pandemic, AI tech is now being widely implemented. Even massage therapists should take note, as a robot masseuse can now deliver a deep tissue massage. Yet, these are still early days for AI.
Caption : EMMA from AiTreat , a robot that uses artificial intelligence to deliver massages. Source: CNN AI advances are being led by improvements in both hardware and software. The hardware side is driven by Moore’s Law, the idea that semiconductors improve by roughly 2x the number of transistors – producing roughly equivalent performance and power efficiency gains – every couple of years (and similarly drive down the costs of computing). This principle has been credited with all manner of electronic advances over the last several decades. As noted in a recent IEEE Spectrum article : “The impact of Moore’s Law on modern life can’t be overstated. We can’t take a plane ride, make a call, or even turn on our dishwashers without encountering its effects. Without it, we would not have found the Higgs boson or created the Internet.” Or have a supercomputer in your purse or pocket.
There are reasons to think that Moore’s-Law driven improvements in computing are nearing an end.
But advanced engineering, ranging from “ chiplets ” to 3D chip packaging promise to keep the gains coming, at least for a while. These and other semiconductor design improvements have led one chip manufacturer to promise a 1000x performance improvement by 2025! The expected improvements in AI software may be equally impressive. GPT-3, the third iteration of Generative Pre-trained Transformer from OpenAI, is a neural network model consisting of 175 billion parameters. The system has proven capable of generating coherent prose from a text prompt. This is what it was designed to do, but it turns out that it can also generate other forms of text as well, including computer code and can also generate images.
Moreover, while the belief is that AI will help people to be more creative, it could be that it is already capable of creativity on its own.
At its launch in May 2020, GPT-3 was the largest neural network ever introduced, and it remains among the largest dense neural nets, exceeded only by Wu Dao 2.0 in China. (At 1.75 trillion parameters, Wu Dao 2.0 is another GPT-like language model and probably the most powerful neural network yet created.) Some expectations are for GPT-4 to also grow and contain up to a trillion parameters.
However, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that it will not be larger than GPT-3 but will be far more efficient through enhanced data algorithms and fine tuning. Altman also alluded to a future GPT-5. The point being that neural networks have a long way to run in size and sophistication. We are indeed in the midst of an age of AI acceleration.
In the new book , Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything , author Martin Ford notes that “nearly every technology startup is now, to some degree, investing in AI, and companies large and small in other industries are beginning to deploy the technology.” The pace of innovation will only continue to accelerate as capital continues to pour into AI development. Clearly, whatever we are seeing now in the way of AI-powered automation, including the belief that AI will help us work rather than take our jobs, is but an early stage for whatever is still to come. As for what is coming, that remains the realm of speculative fiction.
In Burn In : A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution , a Yale-educated lawyer is among those impacted when his firm replaced 80% of the legal staff with machine learning software. This could happen in the near future. The remaining 20% were indeed augmented by the AI, but the 80% had to find other work. In his case, he winds up doing gig work as an online personal assistant to the wealthy. Currently, startup company Yohana is working to realize a variation of this vision. The company is initially offering a blend of human and AI services, starting with a living, breathing assistant that draws on data to tackle the to-do lists of subscribers. It will be telling to see if these assistants will be like the secretaries of yore, but wielding AI, or if they will be displaced cognitive workers.
The AI-driven transition to a largely automated world will take time, perhaps a few decades. This will bring many changes, with some being highly disruptive. Adjustments will not be easy. It is tempting to think that ultimately this will enrich the quality of human life. After all, as Aristotle said: “When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end.” But embracing the AI augmented work concept as currently articulated could blind us to the potential risks of job loss.
Kate Crawford , a scholar focused on the social and political implications of technology, believes AI is the most profound story of our time and “a lot of people are sleepwalking into it.” We all need to have a clear-eyed understanding of the growing potential for disruption and to prepare as best we can, largely by acquiring those skills most likely to be needed in the coming era. Companies need to do their part in providing skills training, and retraining will increasingly need to be a near continuous process as the pace of technology change accelerates. Government needs to develop public policies that direct the market forces driving automation towards positive outcomes for all, even while preparing for a growing social safety net that could include universal basic income.
Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"We are entering a new era for AI-powered robotics | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/we-are-entering-a-new-era-for-ai-powered-robotics"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest We are entering a new era for AI-powered robotics Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Many observers were disappointed with the recent demo of the AI-enabled “ Optimus ” robot at Tesla’s AI Day. One reviewer cleverly titled his article “Sub-Optimus.” However, these views actually miss the point. Whatever else may be said of Elon Musk, he is a genius at sensing timing and opportunity, applying technology and providing the necessary resources.
The quality and enthusiasm of the engineering team suggest Optimus could succeed, even if it takes longer than the estimate of 3 to 5 years for full production. If successful, Optimus could bring personal robots into the mainstream within a decade.
Although initially expensive at an estimated $20,000, an Optimus sibling in 2032 could be as commonplace in shops or factories as Tesla is today on the road. Fast forward another 10 years and humanoid robots in daily life could be commonplace, whether at home or in stores and restaurants, in factories and warehouses, or in health and home care settings.
AI hype: Interacting with robots In this vision, the idea of an “artificial friend,” an emotionally intelligent android as portrayed by Kazuo Ishiguro in Klara and the Sun , does not seem so farfetched. Neither do “digients” (short for “digital entities”), as described by Ted Chiang in The Lifecycle of Software Objects.
Digients are artificial intelligences created within a purely digital world that inhabit a digital shared space (much like the emerging metaverse) but also can be downloaded into physical robots such that they can interact with people in the real world.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! This ability for people to interact with a robot appears to be the key to successful robot implementation. At least that is the view of Will Jackson, the founder and CEO of Engineered Arts , who recently said : “The ‘true killer app’ for a humanoid robot are people’s desire to interact with it.” Is it possible that this robot vision is entirely unrealistic and little more than science fiction or entrepreneurial hype? That is the view of some, says Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times. He stated: “AI hype is not only a hazard to laypersons’ understanding of the [robotics] field, but poses the danger of undermining the field itself.” In this he is correct and, certainly, it is important to cull the hype from reality.
What Hiltzik is perhaps missing is the arc of history. Robotics today, much like the broadening field of artificial intelligence (AI), is still in its early days. The rate of progress, however, is phenomenal. While Optimus is years from a finished product and numerous technical and cultural hurdles remain, it is impossible to ignore the extraordinary pace of advancement. In just one year, Optimus went from concept to a mobile, bipedal robot. It is a growing field as Tesla is hardly alone in building a humanoid robot. For example, a team of engineers from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) have announced a humanoid robot that can teach Tai Chi.
A long way to go to achieve AI-powered robots Building robots that emulate human actions is extremely difficult. An EE Times article describes these challenges. “From a mechanics perspective, for example, bipedal locomotion (walking on two legs) is an extremely physically demanding task. In response, the human body has evolved and adapted such that the power density of human joints in areas like the knees is very high.” In other words, simply staying upright is very difficult for robots.
Despite such challenges, real progress is being made. Oregon State University researchers recently established a Guinness World Record for a robot running a 100-meter dash , completing the course in under 25 seconds. The team has been training “Cassie” since 2017, using reinforcement-learning AI algorithms to reward the robot when it moves correctly. The significance of the record was noted by the lead researcher who said : “[Now we] can make robots move robustly around the world on two legs.” While impressive, the human body not only stays upright but navigates the world through an extremely intricate sensory system.
“The hardest part is creating a machine that interacts with humans in a natural way,” according to Nancy J. Cooke, a professor at Arizona State University. Re-creating that in a robot is still in its infancy. That is now among the most daunting challenges for Optimus and other humanoid robotic efforts.
AI automation takes center stage Humanoid robots are becoming possible because of AI, and AI is racing forward aided by the triple exponential growth of computer power, software development and data.
Perhaps nowhere is this rapid AI progress better exemplified than with natural language processing (NLP), especially in relation to text and text-to-image generation. OpenAI released its first text-generation tools in February 2019 with GPT-2, followed by GPT-3 in June 2020, and the text-to-image DALL-E in January 2021, and DALL-E 2 in April 2022. Each iteration was vastly more capable than previous versions.
Additional companies are pushing these technologies forward, such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. Now the same phenomena is occurring with text-to-video, with several new apps appearing recently from Meta , Google , Synthesia , GliaCloud and others.
NLP technologies are quickly finding real-world applications, from code development to advertising (from copywriting to image creation), and even filmmaking. In my last article , I described how creative artist Karen X. Cheng was tasked with creating an AI-generated cover image for Cosmopolitan.
To help create ideas and the final image, she used DALL-E 2.
I used @OpenAI #dalle2 to create the first ever AI-generated magazine cover for @Cosmopolitan !! The prompt I used is at the end of the video #dalle pic.twitter.com/sbM2qbTAbq The Crow , an AI-generated video, recently won the Jury Award at the Cannes Short Film Festival. To create the video , computer artist Glenn Marshall fed the video frames of an existing video as an image reference to CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training), another text-to-image neural network also created by OpenAI. Marshall then prompted CLIP to generate a video of “a painting of a crow in a desolate landscape.” The Crow – AI artistry and deep learning arrives in the film industry Computer artist and composer Glenn Marshall won the Jury Award at the Cannes Short Film Festival 2022 for his AI film “The Crow”.
#AI #Artislife #immersive #storytelling pic.twitter.com/MdMdtzfpmF If it only had a brain Of course, building an NLP application is not the same as robotics. While computing power, software and data are commonalities, the physical aspect of building robots that need to interact with the real world adds challenges beyond developing software automation. What robots need is a brain. AI researcher Filip Piekniewski told Business Insider that “robots don’t have anything even remotely close to a brain.” That is largely true today, though what NLP provides is the beginning of the brain robots need to interact with humans. After all, a major humanoid brain function is the ability to perceive and interpret language and turn that into contextually appropriate responses and actions.
NLP is already used in chatbots , software robots that facilitate communications with people.
Project December , a text-based chatbot developed using GPT-3 – has helped people to obtain closure by “talking” with a deceased loved one. Bot developer Jason Rohrer said of Project December: “It may not be the first intelligent machine. But it kind of feels like it’s the first machine with a soul.” Intelligent robots with a soul that can walk and manipulate objects would be a major advance.
That advance is near, though it could still be a decade or more for humanoid robots to roam the world. Optimus and other robots today are mostly simple machines that will grow in capabilities over the next couple of decades to become fully evolved artificial humanoids. We have now truly begun the modern robotic era.
Gary Grossman is the senior VP of technology practice at Edelman and global lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
DataDecisionMakers Welcome to the VentureBeat community! DataDecisionMakers is where experts, including the technical people doing data work, can share data-related insights and innovation.
If you want to read about cutting-edge ideas and up-to-date information, best practices, and the future of data and data tech, join us at DataDecisionMakers.
You might even consider contributing an article of your own! Read More From DataDecisionMakers The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! DataDecisionMakers Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/thought-detection-ai-has-infiltrated-our-last-bastion-of-privacy"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Our thoughts are private – or at least they were. New breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence are changing that assumption, while at the same time inviting new questions around ethics, privacy, and the horizons of brain/computer interaction.
Research published last week from Queen Mary University in London describes an application of a deep neural network that can determine a person’s emotional state by analyzing wireless signals that are used like radar. In this research, participants in the study watched a video while radio signals were sent towards them and measured when they bounced back.
Analysis of body movements revealed “hidden” information about an individual’s heart and breathing rates. From these findings, the algorithm can determine one of four basic emotion types: anger, sadness, joy, and pleasure. The researchers proposed this work could help with the management of health and wellbeing and be used to perform tasks like detecting depressive states.
Ahsan Noor Khan, a PhD student and first author of the study, said: “We’re now looking to investigate how we could use low-cost existing systems, such as Wi-Fi routers, to detect emotions of a large number of people gathered, for instance in an office or work environment.” Among other things, this could be useful for HR departments to assess how new policies introduced in a meeting are being received, regardless of what the recipients might say. Outside of an office, police could use this technology to look for emotional changes in a crowd that might lead to violence.
The research team plans to examine public acceptance and ethical concerns around the use of this technology. Such concerns would not be surprising and conjure up a very Orwellian idea of the ‘thought police’ from 1984.
In this novel, the thought police watchers are expert at reading people’s faces to ferret out beliefs unsanctioned by the state, though they never mastered learning exactly what a person was thinking.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! This is not the only thought technology example on the horizon with dystopian potential. In “ Crocodile ,” an episode of Netflix’s series Black Mirror , the show portrayed a memory-reading technique used to investigate accidents for insurance purposes. The “corroborator” device used a square node placed on a victim’s temple, then displayed their memories of an event on screen. The investigator says the memories: “may not be totally accurate, and they’re often emotional. But by collecting a range of recollections from yourself and any witnesses, we can help build a corroborative picture.” Above: Black Mirror , “Crocodile” If this seems farfetched, consider that researchers at Kyoto University in Japan developed a method to “see” inside people’s minds using an fMRI scanner, which detects changes in blood flow in the brain. Using a neural network, they correlated these with images shown to the individuals, and projected the results onto a screen. Though far from polished, this was essentially a reconstruction of what they were thinking about. One prediction estimates this technology could be in use by the 2040s.
Brain computer interfaces (BCI) are making steady progress on several fronts. In 2016, research at Arizona State University showed a student wearing what looks like a swim cap that contained nearly 130 sensors connected to a computer to detect the student’s brain waves.
Above: An Arizona State University PhD student demo’s a mind-controlled drone flight in 2016.
The student is controlling the flight of three drones with his mind. The device lets him move the drones simply by thinking directional commands: up, down, left, right.
Advance a few years to 2019 and the headgear is far more streamlined. Now there are brain-drone races.
Above: Flying drones with your brain in 2019. Source: University of Southern Florida Besides the flight examples, BCIs are being developed for medical applications. MIT researchers have developed a computer interface that can transcribe words that the user verbalizes internally but does not actually speak aloud. A wearable device with electrodes pick-up neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations, also referred to as subvocalizations. The signals are fed to a neural network that has been trained to correlate these signals with particular words. The idea behind this development is to meld humans and machines “such that computing, the internet, and AI would weave into human personality as a ‘second self.’” Those who cannot speak could use the technology to communicate as the subvocalizations could connect to a synthesizer that would speak the words.
Above: Interfacing with devices through silent speech. Source: MIT Media Lab Chip implants could be coming soon The ultimate BCI could be that proposed by Neuralink , owned by Elon Musk. Unlike the previous examples, Neuralink promises direct implants into the brain. The near-term goal of Neuralink and others is to build a BCI that can cure a wide variety of diseases.
Longer-term, Musk has a grander vision: He believes this interface will be necessary for humans to keep pace with increasingly powerful AI. Just last week, Musk announced that human trials of the implants could begin later this year. He claims the company already has a monkey with “a wireless implant in [his] skull with tiny wires who can play video games with his mind.” The advancements being made in BCI are beginning to match what science fiction authors have dreamed up in works of fiction. In The Resisters , a new novel by Gish Jen, a “RegiChip” is implanted at birth into all of those deemed “Surplus,” meaning there will not be work for them in the aftermath of mass automation. Instead, they will be issued a universal basic income and have no responsibilities but to consume, to keep the automated economy operating at an efficient level. Among other things, the RegiChip is used to track everyone, their physical location but also their activities, to complete a surveillance society. Of course, the RegiChip, like all digital technologies, has the potential to be hacked.
Cognitive scientists have said that the mind is the software of the brain.
Increasingly, physical software has the capacity to meld with and augment the human mind. If AI-enabled BCI achievements already seem unbelievable, it stands to reason that BCI breakthroughs in the not-too-distant future could be truly momentous. Will the technology be harnessed for positive use cases to cure diseases or for mind control? As with most technology, there will likely be both good and bad. Software is poised to eat the mind. For now, our unexpressed thoughts remain private, but that may no longer be true in the near future.
Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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"This is how we'll merge with AI | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/this-is-how-well-merge-with-ai"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest This is how we’ll merge with AI Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
The relationship between humans and AI is something of a dance. We and AI come close together operating collaboratively, then are pushed away by the impossibility, only to stumble but return attracted by the potential. It is perhaps fitting that the dance community is beginning to embrace robots , with AI helping to create new movements and choreography, and with robots sharing the stage with human dancers.
The relationship between society and technology is yin and yang, with every massive enhancement accompanied by the potential for danger. AI, for example, offers the promise to end boring, repetitive jobs, enabling us to engage in higher level and more fulfilling tasks. It helps with any number of efficiency efforts, such as fraud detection, and it can even paint masterpiece artworks and compose symphonies. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, hopes AI will unlock human potential and let us focus on the most interesting, most creative, most generative things.
Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly has argued that technology, and by extension AI, is a projection of the human mind. The argument is that technology stems organically, authentically, and follows patterns found in man and nature. It is a means by which humans gain control over their environment both for safety but also for advantage. The technology we produce is a natural biological engine of human evolution and a leading cause of change limited only by our imaginations. The positive versus negative polarity of how the technology is applied, the yin and yang, is an expression of the dualistic human mind.
However the dichotomy between humans and robots, between natural and artificial does create conflict. The tension between the innate drive to develop and use AI-enabled technology and the potential for it to surpass us creates an understandable emotional turmoil. This stew powers the dance and informs the ongoing industry dialogue about how best to utilize and control AI. In effect, the discussion is about who leads. Today, while AI is mostly still in its infancy, people are in control , but the concerns are about who leads the dance in the future.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! (Caption: Robots can dance.
Source: Boston Dynamics.) As AI rapidly develops, the pressure to use it to drive greater advantage grows, as do the existential worries.
In “ The Master Algorithm ,” computer scientist and University of Washington Professor Pedro Domingos assures us that “humans are not a dying twig on the tree of life. On the contrary, we are about to start branching. In the same way that culture coevolved with larger brains, we will coevolve with our creations. We always have: Humans would be physically different if we had not invented fire or spears. We are Homo technicus as much as Homo sapiens.
” In this he suggests that humans will always lead, no matter how advanced AI becomes. It is this synergy that underlies a belief in collaboration between humans and machines, a dance pairing with each excelling in ways unique to their strengths. This has given rise to the idea of machines as teammates.
The idea is that such collaboration could sustainably augment humans and generate positive benefits for individuals, organizations, and societies.
That might work – unless man and machine merge.
Philosopher Jason Silva says that AI will change our scope of possibilities in ways we are only starting to glimpse and will lead to a merging between man and machine. Certainly, Elon Musk believes this is both possible and a necessary direction. Though the near-term goal of his Neuralink company and others is to build a brain-computer interface that can help people with specific health conditions, longer-term he has a grander vision. Specifically, he believes this interface will be necessary for humans to keep pace with increasingly powerful AI.
Such a development could redefine the relationship between humans and machines, with the merged combination giving rise to a higher form of AI-powered intelligence. In effect, a fusion of the dancers. Among other things, this would also have huge implications for religion. If God created human beings in God’s own image and humans create robots in our image, what does that make them in the eyes of religion? And what does that make a merged creation? Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the Pope recently urged people to pray that robots and artificial intelligence respect the dignity of the person and always serve mankind.
(Caption: The Pope on robots and AI.) Even if there is not this direct physical connection between humans and AI, there is still a growing symbiosis. Researchers are starting to build hybrid collaborative systems that combine the best of an AI model’s superpowers with human intuition. In this, humans contribute leadership, teamwork, creativity, and social skills and machines lead with speed and scalability.
A new line of research has a vision of a society in which people are living seamlessly with machines. Though admittedly still some years off, in this vision the AI is merged with an intelligent body to create new types of robots that have properties comparable to those of intelligent living organisms, possibly a step towards creating Replicants with all the implications as imagined by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that also inspired the Blade Runner movies. This requires what the researchers call Physical AI , combining knowledge from materials science, mechanical engineering, computer science, biology and chemistry. According to a new paper , these robots would be designed to look and behave like humans or other animals and would possess intellectual capabilities normally associated with biological organisms. The goal, according to the paper, is to build robots that could exist like benevolent animals together with nature and people.
How might we move towards this higher self – this symbiotic future of natural and artificial? The drive of human imagination, and the onward march of human technology towards what was once science fiction is revealing the possibility of a new dance.
Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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"The ambient intelligence decade | VentureBeat"
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"https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ambient-intelligence-decade"
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"Artificial Intelligence View All AI, ML and Deep Learning Auto ML Data Labelling Synthetic Data Conversational AI NLP Text-to-Speech Security View All Data Security and Privacy Network Security and Privacy Software Security Computer Hardware Security Cloud and Data Storage Security Data Infrastructure View All Data Science Data Management Data Storage and Cloud Big Data and Analytics Data Networks Automation View All Industrial Automation Business Process Automation Development Automation Robotic Process Automation Test Automation Enterprise Analytics View All Business Intelligence Disaster Recovery Business Continuity Statistical Analysis Predictive Analysis More Data Decision Makers Virtual Communication Team Collaboration UCaaS Virtual Reality Collaboration Virtual Employee Experience Programming & Development Product Development Application Development Test Management Development Languages Guest The ambient intelligence decade Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Are you ready to bring more awareness to your brand? Consider becoming a sponsor for The AI Impact Tour. Learn more about the opportunities here.
Technology zoomed ahead in 2020 and 2021, spurred in large part by the global pandemic. Companies embraced digital transformation and AI , driven by a need to connect remote workers, improve efficiency, and offer new online services. This surge of adoption has also added renewed focus on a variety of technologies including augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, and the rollout of 5G communication networks. We have indeed entered an age of acceleration.
In turn, these developments are leading to new innovations such as the metaverse.
First envisioned in the 1990s, the same underlying technologies to make the metaverse concept a fully immersive and seamless experience are now approaching maturity. Over the next several years and certainly by the end of the decade, the metaverse will be very much a regular part of our digital lives.
The metaverse is not the only idea that is being supercharged by recent technical advances. Through smartphones and IoT devices, computing increasingly surrounds us becoming everywhere a part of the human environment. This represents a nexus of long-term trends, such as ubiquitous or pervasive computing and the mobile internet. This is leading to ambient intelligence – described in Fortune as “computers and AI humming in the background of people’s lives.” First envisioned in the 1990s by Eli Zelkha and his team at Palo Alto Ventures, emerging ambient intelligence will augment our human capabilities almost as an intuitive sixth sense.
This will lead to new use cases. For example, imagine this travel scenario: When you debark from a flight you will receive a message via smartphone, smartwatch, earbuds, or AR glasses alerting you to the carousel where you can find your checked luggage. The device could then guide you directly to the carousel, either through voice directions or visually with arrows. Once the bags are available, another message would alert you that your taxi or rideshare – human driven or automated, terrestrial, or airborne – is waiting and where it is located. If you are going to a hotel, another alert will arrive enroute to let you know that you are checked in and provide the room number and the digital passcode. Once at the hotel, an attendant will welcome you by your name, which appears in their glasses. All of this serves to streamline processes, reduce time in queues, limit the frustrations of travel, and offer a more productive and pleasant experience.
VB Event The AI Impact Tour Connect with the enterprise AI community at VentureBeat’s AI Impact Tour coming to a city near you! This increasingly ambient technology is a consequence of ever smaller transistors in processors used in laptops, smartphones, point-of-sale terminals, cameras, cars, and additional devices. Many of these computing devices are now becoming so sophisticated that they increasingly blend into the built environment until only the user interface remains perceivable.
We have come a long way In the early 1960s, before development of the integrated circuit, the state-of-the art computer system was the RCA 501.
Then one the world’s fastest computers, the 501 was a massive machine that weighed 5,000 pounds. It was part of the first generation of computers with transistors instead of vacuum tubes.
The 501 had 32K memory. Fast forward almost 60 years and a 14-inch MacBook Pro laptop supports 32GB, one million times the 501. The trend continues with one large developer of computer processors suggesting a further 1000x increase in performance is possible over the next several years. In combination with software improvements, that advance will continue to fuel ever smaller and more capable computing devices, leading to greater ambient intelligence.
Examples already exist, from Apple Watches that include an electrocardiogram for monitoring heart health to the plethora of devices for the smart home, including doorbells with AI-enabled facial recognition. What is significant and new over the last couple of years is the infusion of AI into all manner of edge devices including smartphones and IoT, providing the foundation for what increasingly is being called the Artificial Intelligence of Things. Additionally, these devices are now being supported by a growing edge-cloud infrastructure to perform localized processing and minimize communications latency from centralized data centers, yielding faster response times. These growing capabilities will lead to increasingly sophisticated scenarios.
For example, imagine someone with a heart condition who is wearing an Apple Watch, Amazon Halo Band, Oura Ring, or another similar device that is continuously monitoring cardiac vital signs. At the beginning of an arrythmia or another anomaly, the device could communicate directly with their cardiologist via WiFi or cellular network. In turn, the doctor or their team could take several actions including calling the patient, scheduling an appointment, or sending a prescription to the pharmacy. Taking this further, analysis of the monitor readings could be performed by an AI application leading to a recommendation for the doctor. The result is the patient receives the fastest and best possible care.
To infinity and beyond Achieving this futuristic ambient intelligence vision requires further development and technical advances. Incorporating AI processors into edge devices will make them faster and more reliable, for example. Semiconductor design will need to continue the gains of the last 60 years.
Applying AI to semiconductor development will not only speed-up design time but also likely provide a boost in performance and energy use optimization. And applications and their integration will need to become more sophisticated.
That said, technology adoption is always a double-edged sword. Issues of ethics around data privacy and the appropriate uses of facial and other biometric recognition continue to be sources of concern and widespread debate. In a Fortune article , Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford University’s Human-Centered AI Institute, warns there are societal dangers of ever-present computing, constantly gathering and analyzing people’s behaviors in the physical world. As much as the technology constraints, navigating these ethical challenges will also inhibit the realization of an ambiently intelligent world.
Nevertheless, the mesh of digital sentience will continue to emerge, and new use cases and their benefits will make this ever more compelling. Developments such as the metaverse and ambient intelligence will be the fulfillment of long-term visions. For example, in the early 2000s companies were touting the advances of a digital lifestyle.
By 2030, these twin advances – the metaverse and ambient intelligence – will be a pervasive part of our increasingly digital lives.
Gary Grossman is the Senior VP of Technology Practice at Edelman and Global Lead of the Edelman AI Center of Excellence.
VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact.
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The AI Impact Tour Join us for an evening full of networking and insights at VentureBeat's AI Impact Tour, coming to San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles! VentureBeat Homepage Follow us on Facebook Follow us on X Follow us on LinkedIn Follow us on RSS Press Releases Contact Us Advertise Share a News Tip Contribute to DataDecisionMakers Careers Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information © 2023 VentureBeat.
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Wired Articles Filtered
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