Table of contents for November / December 2023 in WIRED UK

FUN DISGUISED AS WORK As photographer Wilson Hennessy will tell you, the only thing more fun than picking what goes into our Gear roundups is getting hands-on with them in the studio: “It was awesome to see what WIRED chose as the next generation’s entertainment—and then giving them a color-drenched treatment. I absolutely loved playing with the kid-sized Fender—and who knew Transformers would become big enough to bite your hand off!” UKRAINE’S ENERGY FRONTLINE Sasha Maslov visits some of Ukraine’s power plants—and the people who keep them going, despite Russian attacks on infrastructure: “The energy workers face daily danger to make repairs and keep the power on. These attacks are intended to demoralize Ukraine’s people, but I think it’s having the opposite effect.” STEVEN LEVY Levy meets Sam Altman, CEO…

You can have the world’s best idea, but if it doesn’t fit on the back of a truck then it’s a non-starter,” says Ray Winkler, who’s been loading ideas onto the backs of trucks for close to 30 years now. Winkler is the CEO of STUFISH, where he leads a team of architects who take designs for mind-blowing stage sets from drawing boards to concert halls and stadia all over the world. He’s showing WIRED around the company’s central London office/workshop/studio—it’s littered with plastic scale-models; a highlights reel of some of the biggest bashes in recent memory. There’s the Union Jack-streaked set for the Coronation Concert, and a mini troupe of dancers tiered up the steps for Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella slot. Across the room, a balsa prototype of the iconic,…

THE FIRST TIME we speak, Joep Meindertsma is not in a good place. “I cry every other day,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his home in the Dutch city of Utrecht. “Every time I say goodbye to my parents or friends, it feels like it could be the last time.” Meindertsma, 31, is the founder of Pause AI, a grassroots protest group campaigning for a halt in the development of artificial intelligence. He’s been interested in AI for a couple of years, but the technology’s sudden growth, spurred by the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, made him worry about the future of humanity. He watched as the bots became more and more sophisticated, and as figures like Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI, warned of the…

Location: London IN THE LATE 1600S, the English philosopher John Locke published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a seminal text in which he proposed the idea that humans are born as blank slates, without any innate instincts or ideas. Instead, Locke argued, we accumulate knowledge through experience and contact with the outside world. Now, more than 300 years later, a copy of that book sits in the in-house library of Google DeepMind, one of the world’s most famous AI companies, which is trying to make machines intelligent in the way Locke described—by exposing them to existing knowledge. It is in this vast library-cum-office space in London, where a giant golden helix rises up through the central spiral staircase, that I meet Lila Ibrahim, chief operating officer of the company dedicated…

This first complication for Hermès’ sport watch collection artfully takes the winning design of the existing H08, then adds a 41 mm lightweight case made from a composite of carbon fiber and graphene powder, a titanium bezel, 46 hours of power reserve, and 100 meters of water resistance. Then, to top it all, this monopusher chrono has all three functions—start, stop, and reset—built into the single pusher in the crown at 3 o’clock. The bad news? You’ll have to wait, as it’s not arriving till next year. €15,000 hermes.com…

Technically speaking, any level of water resistance over 100 meters is pointless, especially when you consider an advanced recreational scuba dive will only take you as deep as 30 meters. So why go for 1,200 meters? This is precisely the depth the Omega Seamaster Ploprof, resplendent in new “summer blue” livery for the collection’s 75th anniversary, operates to. Why? Because, originally, it was a real tool for professional saturation divers. Although the first intentional saturation dive took place in 1938, it wasn’t until the 1960s that this type of diving became commercialized. Saturation diving involves underwater jaunts at depth for long periods, which saturates the bloodstream with diving gas. To prevent numerous decompressions every time the diver surfaces, and therefore risking decompression sickness (aka “the bends”), divers are held in a…

The Hoxton headquarters of Subdial, a business founded in 2018, ticks plenty of the boxes you’d expect for an east London tech startup: an airy, open-plan space in a mixed-use block; fridges stocked with craft beers; expansive standing tables for team get-togethers; a pet dog padding around. Less familiar, though, is the large, glass-fronted cubicle at the heart of the building. It’s home to a small team of white-coated watchmakers hunched over workbenches, busily carrying out the inspection, servicing, and authentication of the thousands of pre-owned watches that Subdial transacts. The company’s founders, Christy Davis and Ross Crane, embody the same qualities that they prescribe to the customers now flowing into the popular pre-owned market: High-achieving professionals whose ease around subjects like finance, asset trading, and data analytics has greased…

There’s usually a point during a WIRED interview where the gloves come off: the subject realizes they have full license to geek out. With Richard Ipyana “Ipy” Siegrist, it’s towards the end of our conversation, getting to the bottom of how this wood engineer from Basel ended up occupying an unheard-of role in the Swiss watch industry: product development in materials at historic watchmaker, Oris. More specifically, how his involvement resulted in the most promising use of carbon fiber in watchmaking yet. “Oris tends to draw comparison to reinforced concrete,” he says. “How the carbon fibers are like the steel bars, giving strength to the polymer composite. But for me, it comes back to wood. I still keep a workshop with a friend, and I’m constantly reminded that nature is…

Skeleton watches might be seeing a surge in popularity, but they aren’t a new concept. The art was first invented in 1769 by André Charles Caron, a French watchmaker who, along with his son-in-law Jean-Antoine Lépine (father of the modern pocket-watch), realized that there was something seductive about exposing the intricate workings of a watch; a frisson in revealing what had once remained unseen. It is a highly meticulous specialism, taking a base movement and expertly open-working it by hand to take away all but the essentials, so its inner mechanics can be put on show. Take away too much, though, and you compromise the structural integrity of the watch. It requires precise calculations, meticulous handiwork, and an artist’s eye—a delicate balance that can really only be achieved by a skilled…

Fifty-one dollars and 69 cents. That was the charge, including tip, for the 2.95-mile trip I took in May from my downtown New York City apartment to the West Side facility where Uber was holding its annual product event, called Go-Get. The ride-hailing company’s charges have been higher in recent years, and fluctuate in any case, but that was nuts. As Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi knows, high rates are one consequence of trying to run his company as an actual business, as opposed to a scorched-earth feral growth machine. His predecessor, Travis Kalanick, had built an enormous, enthusiastic user base by subsidizing rides with the company’s vast reservoir of VC funding. Under Kalanick, Uber skirted regulations, shrugged off safety issues, and presided over a workplace rife with sexual harassment. After…

BE@RBRICK 400% Audio Portable Bluetooth Speaker This 11.02-inch tech teddy has 360° audio via two custom 20 mm tweeters and two 40 mm wideband woofers, while the li-ion battery is good for 6 hours. For added cuteness, you hold the bear’s hand to adjust the volume and skip tracks—but the location of the rear charging port may lead to uncomfortable silences… $499 bearbrick.audio Robosen Flagship Series Grimlock Yes, tell yourself you spent £1,399 on a robot dinosaur because you thought your kids would want it. There’s no judgment here. Building on the tech that enabled its Optimus Prime to “roll out”, Robosen’s latest ode to the 80s G1 Transformers packs in 34 servos, 85 microchips, and 6-axis IMU sensors to enable this slice of nostalgia to walk, talk, and—yes—transform from…

EDWARD TIAN DIDN'T think of himself as a writer. As a computer science major at Princeton, he’d taken a couple of journalism classes, where he learned the basics of reporting, and his sunny affect and tinkerer’s curiosity endeared him to his teachers and classmates. But he describes his writing style at the time as “pretty bad”—formulaic and clunky. One of his journalism professors said that Tian was good at “pattern recognition,” which was helpful when producing news copy. So Tian was surprised when, sophomore year, he managed to secure a spot in John McPhee’s exclusive non-fiction writing seminar. Every week, 16 students gathered to hear the legendary New Yorker writer dissect his craft. McPhee assigned exercises that forced them to think rigorously about words: Describe a piece of modern art…

Christie Hemm Klok hailed down Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi for an almost-drive-by photoshoot that, while rapid-fire, still had to bring something fresh: “Shooting for WIRED is always interesting. I often get to meet folks who are changing how we interact with the world, and so it really can’t be boring. Our shoot with Dara had to be quick—often, CEOs are pressed for time and we have to get things done within 30 minutes, and then they’re off again. We scouted around for about an hour first, and settled on some areas that he hadn’t been photographed in before. The best location turned out to be a corner tucked behind a service elevator.”…

In March 2020, days into the first Covid lockdown, 26-year-old Richard Benc used his new spare time to sketch out the blueprint for a chronograph wristwatch, which he posted to a Facebook forum. A trained product designer, Benc’s introduction to watches had been designing cheap, licensed products for white-label manufacturers—“things like Peppa Pig and Star Wars watches,” he says—before gaining experience with the Braun electronics brand. The chronograph, though, was more personal, scratching an itch to combine the aesthetics of vintage watches with something fun: on a layout inspired by classic mid-century, hand-wound chronos, he added a dial in the hot pink and green tones of a watermelon. “I set myself a design brief for a watch that was playful and different, while also being a serious piece, with lots…

You used to know where you were with watch dials. Tradition dictated that dress watches were white, tool watches were black, and dive watches were blue. But at some point, magazines like this one started to write about color trends, as if the watch companies now met up in secret, consulted a Pantone chart and decided en masse on next year’s “it” color. First it was green. Then salmon-colored dials were all the rage. In 2022, there was no consensus at all. Perhaps emboldened by the fact these outré new dials had not sent customers running from the tills—or more likely, emboldened by how well they did on Instagram—all bets were off. Breitling broke with 70 years of monochromatic tradition and made its flagship Navitimer B01 in pistachio. Nomos dropped…

Tuning your eye into a 24-hour dial takes certain readjustment. (“Breakfast, at 4am?”). However, Patek Philippe’s curveball for 2023 aims to simplify such sleep-deprived scenarios: a new Calatrava featuring a syringe-shaped hour hand dedicated to telling the time for whichever time zone you currently reside. This hand sweeps all 360 degrees over a full day, superseding another stenciled-out hour hand deployed to tell the time elsewhere—or “home” in the Swiss vernacular. “Calatrava” after the shape of the marque’s fleur-de-lis logo (not to be confused with fellow Genevoise horologer, Vacheron Constantin and its quadrilateral V-tipped Maltese Cross). But the Calatrava Travel Time Ref. 5224R is not only a dual-time-zone watch, it’s Patek reminding us why it deserves to consistently top Swiss horological bucket lists. Cerulean hues, rosy precious metal, and rakish…

Watches often have technical features that largely go unused. After all, when was the last time you glanced at your tachymeter to calculate your speed, or thanked the horological gods for your dive watch’s helium escape valve? Blancpain’s new timepiece, however, has a feature that the brand hopes nobody will ever use at all: a moisture indicator. On the dial of the Fifty Fathoms 70th Anniversary Act 3 you’ll find two semi-circles, one gray, the other white. If the watch’s watertightness is compromised, a reaction causes the white one to turn gray, creating a uniform circle. Blancpain won’t reveal the chemistry that makes this possible, but the brand is confident that the case is sufficiently sound that the feature is essentially redundant from a functional standpoint. So why include it…

What would you do with the world’s biggest camera? Take the greatest Instagram selfie ever? Capture a stunning wildlife scene? What about probing the very structure of the universe itself? That’s what astronomers at the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile have opted for. Under construction at the peak of the 9,000-foot-tall Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, the observatory will sport the largest digital camera in history, a pristine telescope mirror as wide as a London bus, and a fast-moving mount to study the universe like never before. “The major strength of this technology is to see faint objects and the dynamic universe—things that are changing,” says Sandrine Thomas, deputy director of Rubin Observatory Construction. “That gives us a lot of information about the beginning of the universe, galaxies, and…

Pick up any piece of tech and Emma Pickering knows how it can be used to abuse, harass, and stalk women. Amazon’s Ring home doorbell cameras can monitor when someone leaves the house, or who visits. Workout apps and websites such as Strava show where and when people are exercising. And GPS trackers or audio recorders are often slipped into women’s belongings or attached to cars by abusers. “Perpetrators buy them in bulk and they’ll buy probably 60 very cheaply,” says Pickering, who works at Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse organization, where she heads a team that helps women secure their devices. Pickering says in one case “over 200” recording devices were found in a woman’s home. Refuge launched its Technology-Facilitated Abuse and Economic Empowerment Team in 2017, amid…

Location: Brussels ON JUNE 24, a little-known politician stepped in front of a room full of journalists, and declared that history had been made. That politician was Brando Benifei, and the moment he was marking was the European Union taking another step towards becoming the first government in the world to introduce major regulation on AI. Benifei is a swashbuckling kind of figure, with a thick mop of dark brown hair. His career in politics so far has been bookended by two major revolutions in how technology affects ordinary people’s lives. As he was starting out in student activism in southern Italy, he was simultaneously exploring the new world of social media platforms back at home. He describes himself as among the first wave of Italians to sign up for…

The MoonSwatch was the launch of 2022, triggering near-riots on the streets as flippers jostled in line with genuine enthusiasts, all desperate to grab a Bioceramic treat. Following the staggering success of the Omega collaboration was always going to tricky for Swatch Group, but after much speculation its next in-house mashup has arrived: The £340 Swatch x Blancpain Scuba Fifty Fathoms, or “Scuba Fifty”. It cheerfully remixes five models of Fathom in colorways inspired by sea slugs. And to justify that price bump, it’s ditched quartz for the budget brand’s automatic movement. Blending Swatch’s 90s Scuba line and Blancpain’s Fifty Fathoms dive-watch range, the new collection takes inspiration from the luxury brand’s timepiece that set the blueprint for analog dive watches. The original Fifty Fathoms was developed with the help…

The watch known officially as the “Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet Ultra-Complication Universelle RD#4” has almost as many complications—functions, in horological-speak—as it does syllables. It chimes in a variety of ways, it gives split-seconds chronograph readouts, it has a multi-display perpetual calendar, a tourbillon, and, of course, it tells the time. Audemars Piguet lists 23 complications in total, and 17 “special technical devices” to make these happen. As such, it is by some considerable distance the most complicated wristwatch ever made by the brand, whose octagonal 1970s bracelet watch, the Royal Oak, remains among the hottest and most iconic designs in current watchmaking. However, the Universelle, which takes its name from a high-complication pocket watch the firm made in 1899, adds a pinnacle model to AP’s other range, the round…

As a genre, the “integrated sports watch”, characterized by a robust, streamlined case that seamlessly flows into a supple bracelet, is the most hotly contested in today’s watch market. Its emblematic (and best-selling) models are the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and the Patek Philippe Nautilus, both conceived in the 1970s by Gérald Genta, the late Swiss designer who now enjoys godlike status among watch fans. But there was a third such watch that Genta mapped out back in the day. The IWC Ingenieur from 1976 has sometimes been seen as the “forgotten Genta”, with a patchy history and a lack of comparable market presence. Genta’s design was actually a revamp of a watch first made in the 1950s with engineers in mind (hence the name), its key feature being an…

The look of the classic aviation watch—white on black legibility, an instrumentation feel, sturdy construction—is among watchmaking’s most adaptable styles. So it’s no wonder brands return to it, particularly those with historic skin in the game. Zenith was prescient enough to register “pilot” as a trademark back in 1888 (when the term referred to ballooning), and still maintains exclusivity when it comes to putting the word on a watch dial. Its modern “Pilot” range has tended to have a heavy heritage flavor, but a full-scale relaunch this year embraces a modern direction. With a case-shape that’s both streamlined and rugged—particularly in gritty black ceramic—and a boldly graphic dial, it’s a design-forward interpretation. Both chronograph and automatic models are powered by versions of Zenith’s famous high-frequency El Primero. More specifically retro…

01 GRAND SEIKO TENTAGRAPH SLGC001 The movement in Grand Seiko’s first mechanical chronograph has a frequency of ten beats per second and a power reserve of three days—even when the chronograph function is in use—thanks to an energy-effcient Dual Impulse Escapement and two barrels in the Caliber 9SC5 movement. The 43.2mm titanium case and 100-meter water resistance make this high-end chrono a rugged option, too. £12,500 grandseikoboutique.co.uk 02 PATEK PHILIPPE CALATRAVA PILOT TRAVEL TIME CHRONOGRAPH 5924G-001 It’s been 8 years since Patek launched a Pilot-style watch, but 2023 changes that with the first chronograph in Patek’s Pilot line. Combined with a Travel Time function, the chrono push-pieces at 2 operate start/stop, while at 4 is reset/flyback. The 42 mm piece employs Patek’s self-winding CH 28-520 C FUS caliber, with 370 components…