Tabla de contenidos para March / April 2022 en WIRED UK

In the 20 years since I popularized the acronym “AGI”, both the term and the concept have become far more widely accepted. No more is Artificial General Intelligence the exclusive pursuit of a few mavericks and visionaries: today, major corporate research labs are pushing toward AGI, professors at top universities publish AGI-oriented research, and conferences are dedicated to the subject. Even Vladimir Putin mentioned the importance of developing AGI during a speech in 2019. But despite the interest in creating a type of AI able to carry out all the intellectual tasks human beings can grapple with, the bulk of AI research remains dedicated to very narrow applications. Short-term business imperatives funnel most AI resources to practical, controllable business goals without requiring radically new business processes. For AI developers, it’s…

People in the ancient town of Veles, in what is now North Macedonia, followed the 2016 US presidential election closely. That’s because the region played host to a thriving fake-news industry, and in the final weeks of the campaign, more than 100 sites based in Veles were slinging lurid headlines about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Their goal was to juice social media clicks from partisan Americans and earn money from Google and other online ad companies. Documentary photographer Jonas Bendiksen traveled from his home near Oslo to the rolling hills of the riverside industrial city in 2019 and 2020 to chronicle this crucible of the post-fact era. The lean, bearded 44-year-old was inspired by a sense that fake news could be made even more potent by advances in machine…

THE FIRST TIME I SAW Mr. Pokee, a coffee-mugsized hedgehog with 1.9 million followers on Instagram, I naively thought he was somehow special. He has fluffy white belly fur and likes to scamper around on his stubby little legs. He frequently poses in front of heavily edited nature scenes, as if he’s photobombing a Windows desktop. Sometimes he holds a tiny teddy bear or wears tiny socks. When he smiles, he shows the most adorable, unthreatening fangs. But when I tapped the blue Follow button, I was surprised to see Instagram drop down a menu full of other hedgehog influencers I might enjoy. There was Koala, who wears glasses and poses in elaborate backdrops made to look like scenes from Harry Potter. There was Wilbert, who does hedgehog ASMR by…

—@oscartkav, via Instagram Honorable Mentions YOUR SESSION HAS BEEN SUCCESSFULLY UPLOADED. —AUSTIN ANDRU, VIA EMAIL MY AI SAID, “TRY ANALOG DATING.” —@JOSHDBLACK, VIA TWITTER HER INSURANCE ONLY COVERED CHAT BOTS. —SPENCER MCKEEHAN, VIA FACEBOOK SO TELL ME ABOUT YOUR MOTHERBOARD. —@J.D._HARELIK, VIA INSTAGRAM SWIPE LEFT UNTIL IT FEELS RIGHT. —@CVELASCOP, VIA INSTAGRAM CONNECTION INTERRUPTED. DATA CANNOT BE ANALYZED. —@DUYKHAM_, VIA TWITTER IF YOU ARE DEPRESSED, PRESS 1. —@JFINDURA, VIA TWITTER A TOTAL NEUROLOGICAL REBOOT SHOULD HELP. —KEVIN JEROME HINDERS, VIA FACEBOOK Every month, we ask for a new six-word story on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Submit your ideas there, along with the hashtag #WIREDSIXWORD. And visit the archive at wired.com/six-word to see how we’ve illustrated our favorites.…

For the past 20 years, the speed at which algorithmically-based companies operate and their capacity to scale has proved a challenge to governments across the world, which operate at a different pace with a broader and more complex set of priorities than the private sector. While the danger of misinformation, concerns about privacy, worker protections and the monopolistic nature of some tech companies cannot be dismissed, some in government seek to characterize technology solely as a force to be reined in. The hardening of positions between technologists and politicians damages both sides and—most importantly—humankind’s ability to tackle its most pressing challenges. This far-reaching work is going on in labs, research facilities, startups, institutions, corporates and, yes, governments, across the world. Robust institutions are central to this progress, but the role…

Cities have had a rough couple of years thanks to Covid. Now, as the world emerges unequally from the pandemic, many see a chance to fix the clunky, inefficient urban organisms we love to hate. But, rest assured, the city of the future won’t suddenly land as a sterile hellscape of flying cars and WeWorks as far as the eye can see. In fact, it’s being built, for better or worse, before our very eyes—you’ve just got to know where to look to see it evolving… The revitalization of the suburbs The pandemic emptied out city centres while suburbs flourished—creating “donut” cities that are empty in the middle. Cue the boom in local remote-working hubs. Membership at CoLab, a coworking space in the Connecticut town of Trumbull, increased by 90…

People in the ancient town of Veles, in what is now North Macedonia, followed the 2016 US presidential election closely. That’s because the region played host to a thriving fake-news industry, and in the final weeks of the campaign, more than 100 sites based in Veles were slinging lurid headlines about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Their goal was to juice social media clicks from partisan Americans and earn money from Google and other online ad companies. Documentary photographer Jonas Bendiksen traveled from his home near Oslo to the rolling hills of the riverside industrial city in 2019 and 2020 to chronicle this crucible of the post-fact era. The lean, bearded 44-year-old was inspired by a sense that fake news could be made even more potent by advances in machine…

At first sight, Audi’s 2022 Dakar contender doesn’t have much in common with your average family car. Designed to compete in the world’s toughest rally, the RS Q e-tron is a giant Tonka Toy, 4.5 metres long and two metres tall. Beneath the carbon panels is a tubular frame housing a battery, three electric motors and a petrol engine. It’s safe to assume it’s not coming to a high street near you. So why is Audi doing this? It’s partly the prestige of the Dakar, of course: since 1979, this event has been a byword for adventure. Originally starting in Paris, crossing the Sahara and finishing in Dakar, Senegal, the event moved to South America in 2008 following a terrorist attack in North Africa. In 2019 the Dakar moved again…

1. ON JUNE 11, 2017, IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, Erick Calderon was in the back room of the tile-importing warehouse he owns, printing product stickers. The printer was slow, so he padded across the blue-carpeted floor, past his cryptocurrency-mining rig, to his computer. He opened up Reddit and glanced at the latest posts. His eyes landed on one from a user named megamatt2000: “CryptoPunks: An experiment in digital collectibles on Ethereum.” Calderon clicked and found himself staring at a grid of 10,000 tiny, pixelated faces. The site offered a simple description of the collectibles. “Most are punky-looking guys and girls,” the text read, “but there are a few rarer types mixed in: apes, zombies, and even the odd alien.” Calderon started clicking on Punks. Every face led him to a…

From an enormous bear standing in a valley to river birds roosting by the water and gibbons swinging through the trees, British visual artist Jim Naughten’s latest solo exhibition appears to depict idyllic naturescapes. Look closer, however, and you’ll notice that not everything is quite as it seems: the leaves in these images are an unusual shade of blue, the grass unnaturally pink. The effect is a strange sense of dislocation; a vague disquiet about a dreamlike world that somehow manages to be both familiar and uncanny. This is precisely the objective of Eremozoic, which seeks to underscore the precarious state of the natural world—and humanity’s growing disconnect from the environment—by depicting it as a fantastical Shangri-La of sorts. “The idea behind the work is that our view of the…

On November 15, 2021, a Russian Nudol anti-satellite missile was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome into space. The target: an aging surveillance satellite. The strike was a success, but it left behind a cloud of debris so large that astronauts on the International Space Station were forced to seek shelter. “The orbital environment is already highly polluted due to the routine activities of the space powers, let alone when they start deliberately blowing things up in orbit,” says Dr Bleddyn Bowen from the University of Leicester, who specializes in space warfare. Russia isn’t alone: the US, China and India have also taken shots at satellites—this timeline shows all of the successful tests and the debris they created, as collated by the Secure World Foundation.…

IN the US Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab, Lisa Dyson and John Reed, respectively a physicist and a materials scientist, discovered they shared a common goal: to have an impact on climate change. The duo quickly realized that one way to do that was to look at the food on our plates: agriculture accounts for a quarter of annual greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire transportation sector—with the meat industry producing the most. Currently, global meat consumption nears 350 million tonnes a year and is set to rise. By 2050, the global population is estimated to balloon to ten billion people, meaning that if we are to preserve the climate, we need to cater to carnivores with alternative sources of proteins. Dyson and Reed hadn’t quite settled on how exactly…

Hundreds of hours of preparation, thousands of computer simulations, an army of test and safety engineers—it all comes down to the blink of an eye. There is a flash of intense kinetic energy, an explosion of sound, the burst of millions of tiny shards of glass. And then, it’s over. “People are always stunned,” says Thomas Broberg, senior technical advisor for safety at Volvo Cars. “Though they know what’s going to happen, no one is ever prepared for it.” In that fleeting, violent moment, a complex series of safety mechanisms—based on decades’ worth of data and knowledge—also kick into life. As the impactor slams into the doors of a Volvo C40 Recharge at 60kph, the vehicle’s Supplemental Restraint System (SRS) is activated. Side and curtain airbags are deployed. The seatbelt…

SWEET LIKE CHOCOLATE Johnny Drain and Arum Pak (above) are on a mission to smash the grip of Big Chocolate by creating a cacao-free alternative. So, obviously, photographer Nick Wilson bought £30 of goodies and had them go at it with a hammer for his shoot. “I was picking flakes of Flake from my kit for days,” he says. “From a scientific perspective, the Toblerone is hardest to crack—it’s the triangles.” SWEDEN ON THE CLOCK Photographic team Kristian Krän and Marco Grizelj (aka Aorta) hopped across their native Sweden, from Gothenburg to Stockholm, to meet Christian Landgren, the parent who coded a user-friendly version of the city’s official school app: “We arrived around noon for our shoot, aiming to capture a natural scene, but directing Christian and his son to…