Índex per June 2020 a WIRED

About the cover We sent Ramona Rosales to photograph Marcus Hutchins in Los Angeles while everyone was social distancing. Unlike your cliché hacker, Hutchins goes outside, surfs even. “I found great, bright backgrounds near a business that was closed due to the virus,” Rosales says. She and her “assistant” (aka husband) maintained a safe distance as she shot portraits of our cover subject.…

ECONOMY PANASONIC RP-805N With stellar sound, these headphones punch well above their modest price tag. Three levels of noise abatement outwit any external audio distraction, and 20 hours of battery life guarantees you a lot of uninterrupted jams. My favorite feature is the sensor on the right earpiece. Cup your hand over your ear to pause your tunes and pipe in sound from the real world—perfect for quick conversations with your family during the work-from-home day or late night listening sessions. BUSINESS SONY WH-1000XM3 Like the Panasonics, these also have a nifty feature where you can touch the earpiece to hear the outside world, but these headphones add even more impressive noise reduction, better sound quality, and other bells and whistles that make them some of my favorites right now.…

Bicycling in a hilly, busy city like San Francisco provides a cognitive as well as a physical workout. I survive in traffic by flexing not only my quadriceps but my theory of mind, the capacity to imagine the thoughts and intentions of others: Will the guy riding a Bird scooter swerve to avoid that pothole? Will the UPS driver try to run that yellow light? But self-driving cars stump me. Last year, when General Motors stepped up testing of its Cruise autonomous vehicles, I began to encounter the sporty white hatchbacks with rooftop sensors once or more each day. At first the cars were overcautious and twitchy, earning angry honks from human drivers for unnecessary braking and hesitant turns. With time, I felt able to read and even exploit these…

Well, friends, here we are, in what they call interesting/crazy/insane times. Here I am, at least; you have your own Here. A There! Yet one blurs into the other—your There contains (metaphysically as well as orthographically) my Here, which can be everywhere. Confused? Welcome to my wonderful life. Is it a lonely life? Isolated? Without colleagues, friends, kinfolk, skinfolk? Never. While I love my toys, Ripley is, and has always been, a person of the people. Ask my quantum trivia team, my space-ska band (Skarthur C. Clarke for life), or my niece Sheniece. But lean closer—careful, don’t bump your head—and I’ll tell you a secret, from one Here to another: All of these relationships, these pastimes and pursuits and pleasures, take place at what’s come to be called—somewhat regrettably—a “social…

Did you find yourself, over these last fascinating and upsetting weeks, always on camera? Attending meetings and social gatherings, pitches and parties, over videoconference? Toasting into the void? I had to construct a little studio, building a tower of books and mounting lights on top to get the backdrop right. I hate the moment when you enter the call and it shows you all alone in your corner. In that instant I see only my lopsided jaw and splotchy nose, a meaty jug of disappointment, mirrored back at me. Then again it’s the only face on hand. You can’t order a new face on Amazon. You can’t even get a new webcam; everything is sold out. ■ Way before video calls, I was a freelancer, in a one-room apartment. I…

FINAL FANTASY XIV Windows, Mac, PS4 Massive multiplayer games aren’t as intimidating as they look, and FFXIV’s community can’t wait to prove it. Design a character using the game’s super-detailed character generator, engage in quests, go bop some slimes on the head, and make a couple of friends in the big city. Soon you’ll be traversing psychedelic worlds and fighting fantastical beasts alongside friendly strangers (or actual friends). DON’T STARVE TOGETHER Windows, Mac, PS4, Xbox One In this beloved survival game, players chop down trees, mine for gold, cook campfire dinners, make tools, and build structures—all in an effort to not die. Wander the gloomy yet cartoony world with up to five other players, exploring the natural realm and pooling resources until you eventually earn protective clothing and magic spells. The…

TOO MANY POOPS Easy to learn and tough to master, this card game (shown above) encourages you to collect adorable cats, which deposit tiny plastic “pooples” into their owner’s litter box every round. To win, you need to hoard felines, but not too many—just like in real life, having more than 10 poops in the litter box means you lose. With each turn, you can acquire more cats or offload your pooples into someone else’s litter box for some truly catty backstabbing. (2 to 6 players, ages 7+) $20 PANDEMIC LEGACY: SEASON 1 The classic 2008 board game Pandemic used whole-world, Risk-like mechanics. This sequel offers a twist that puts players closer to the action. It’s structured like a TV series, starring tireless health care workers trying to quell a…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS LEARNING FASTER BY THE MOMENT. HOW WILL HUMANS KEEP UP? In the summer of 2009, the Israeli neuroscientist Henry Markram strode onto the TED stage in Oxford, England, and made an immodest proposal: Within a decade, he said, he and his colleagues would build a complete simulation of the human brain inside a supercomputer. They’d already spent years mapping the cells in the neocortex, the supposed seat of thought and perception. “It’s a bit like going and cataloging a piece of the rain forest,” Markram explained. “How many trees does it have? What shapes are the trees?” Now his team would create a virtual rain forest in silicon, from which they hoped artificial intelligence would organically emerge. If all went well, he quipped, perhaps the simulated brain…

In war, speed kills. The soldier who is a split second quicker on the draw may walk away from a firefight unscathed; the ship that sinks an enemy vessel first may spare itself a volley of missiles. In cases where humans can’t keep up with the pace of modern conflict, machines step in. When a rocket propelled grenade is streaking toward an armored ground vehicle, an automated system onboard the vehicle identifies the threat, tracks it, and fires a countermeasure to intercept it, all before the crew inside is even aware. Similarly, US Navy ships equipped with the Aegis combat system can switch on Auto-Special mode, which automatically swats down incoming warheads according to carefully programmed rules. These kinds of defensive systems have been around for decades, and at least…

Monday morning, 8 am. Neal Browning walked into the waiting room. He took in the reception desk, the play area for kids, the table full of magazines that he was too cautious to touch. There was another patient waiting, a woman in her forties with brown, chin-length hair. Browning wasn’t sure whether she was here for the same historic reason that he was, so he decided to follow standard waiting-room procedure and sat quietly—no conversation, no eye contact. After a few minutes, a nurse called the woman back and he watched her disappear behind a door. Another few minutes passed and it was his turn. First, there were questions: Still no fever? Still no contact with anyone who’s been sick? Then there was a round of blood draws. Browning, a…

AT A ROUND 7 AM ON AQUIET WEDNESDAY in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion’s driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout. He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he’d been smoking all night. For a fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this…

Dani Bell was a British copywriter who hankered for her own marketing startup. Like many founders today, though, she faced a roadblock. She couldn’t code. ■ Normally, an entrepreneur in that situation would need to spend money, and maybe even raise it, to hire developers. But Bell did something different: She bolted together software from various online services. ■ Bell used a point-and-click tool called Webflow to build her site and a client-management tool to let customers order services. Airtable, an online spreadsheet, let her store details about each job. And she glued many of these pieces together by cleverly using Zapier, a service that uses if-then logic to let one online app trigger another. (Whenever Bell creates a new task for one of her contractors, for example, Zapier automatically…

ROLI LUMI KEYS When you have no option but to stay inside, it’s a great time to take up a hobby that educates and entertains. Roli Lumi teaches you the basics of playing piano while brightening the mood with a light show. The keys are 85 percent the size of those on a regular piano, and all 24 of them are illuminated in a rainbow of hues—each note is a different color. Play the pressure-sensitive plastic ivories as they flash to guide you through the lessons in the companion app. A larger device makes it easier to follow notes scrolling down the screen; the app is available for iOS and Android, but it’s best on an iPad. The selection is a bit lacking (I can only play that Imagine Dragons…

PLEX Plex is widely recognized for its excellent media-server software. But the company has also partnered with big-name studios like MGM, Lionsgate, and Warner Bros. to build a decently stocked streaming larder focused on classics. For starters: The Right Stuff, Raging Bull, and Apocalypse Now. It also carved out international licensing deals that allow content to be streamed in multiple countries; unlike many services, the Plex library should remain accessible when you get to travel again. IMDB TV To access IMDb’s streaming library, you’ll need to create an account or use your Amazon credentials. Current options are decent but not great; the most popular movie appears to be Fury, although bonus points for carrying Sing Street. Your best binge bet is probably the sci-fi series Fringe, and not just because it…

“Mom, can you fill up my water-keeper?” I looked down from making meatballs. My 5-year-old was holding a contraption that appeared to consist of several crayon drawings inside a large Ziploc that was suspended—via various forks and drinking straws—in a mixing bowl. “Sure,” I said. I washed my hands and poured water in the bowl. She nodded and walked away. Like many working parents, I never anticipated having to keep my kids home for months. Though my husband and I already work from our home and are both lucky enough to stay employed, the orders to shelter in place filled us with dread. Neither of us are teachers. The other adult commitments we have—earning an income, doing the laundry—don’t disappear just because we’re all now trapped inside, hiding from microbes.…

In late January, more than a week before Covid-19 had been given that name, hospitals in Wuhan, China, began testing a new method to screen for the disease, using artificial intelligence. The plan involved chest CTs—three-dimensional scans of lungs displayed in finely detailed slices. By studying thousands of such images, an algorithm would learn to decipher whether a given patient’s pneumonia appeared to stem from Covid-19 or something more routine, like influenza. In the US, as the virus spread in February, the idea appeared to hold promise: With conventional tests in short supply, here was a way to get more people screened, fast. Health professionals, however, weren’t so sure. Although various diagnostic algorithms have won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration—for wrist fractures, eye diseases, breast cancer—they generally…

Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, has spent her career testing the world’s most sophisticated learning system—the mind of a baby. Gurgling infants might seem like no match for artificial intelligence. They are terrible at labeling images, hopeless at mining text, and awful at videogames. Then again, babies can do things beyond the reach of any AI. By just a few months old, they’ve begun to grasp the foundations of language, such as grammar. They’ve started to understand how the physical world works, how to adapt to unfamiliar situations. Yet even experts like Spelke don’t understand precisely how babies—or adults, for that matter—learn. That gap points to a puzzle at the heart of modern artificial intelligence: We’re not sure what to aim for. Consider one of the most impressive…