WIRED November 2022

WHEN A YOUNG HATEM KAMELI founded his first internet startup 20 years ago, right in the wake of the dotcom crash, his family and friends told him to concentrate on university studies and find a safe government job. Two decades and half a dozen businesses later, Hatem has become one of Saudi Arabia’s best known entrepreneurs, and is now the CEO of Resal, the Middle East’s largest platform for making digital gifts. “In all my companies, I have always tried to use new technologies in ways that make a real difference to the economy and have a positive impact on people’s lives,” he says. “Whatever I do, I want to add value to the community.” Things were not always easy in the beginning. Hatem shuttered two early online businesses because of a lack…

“IF PEOPLE DON’T HAVE more children, civilization is going to crumble,” proclaimed Elon Musk from a Tesla factory late last year. As usual, he was treated as an oracle. Deepening the effect, he added, preposterously: “Mark my words.” Musk spoke his truth at a Wall Street Journal event while hyping his proposed Tesla bot, an android that performs grunt work. Only a bot army, he said, can meet the corporate need for laborers willing to work without rest, meals, or complaint. (Human dignity is a drag on profits.) But until the bots are up and running, Musk’s Squid Game still needs flesh-and-blood workers. “The fundamental constraint is labor,” Musk said. “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough: There are not enough people. One of the biggest risks to civilization…

“THE ULTIMATE BATTERY pack would be one that consists of 100 percent active material. That is, every part of the pack stores and releases energy,” says Euan McTurk, an electrochemist at Plug Life Consulting. That’s because weight is one of the biggest challenges for EV engineers. Simply plopping in a larger, heavier battery is not a surefire way to increase range. A heavier car requires bigger brakes, bigger brakes require bigger wheels, and the increased weight of it all requires a stronger overall structure. It’s what car designers call the “weight spiral”—the bigger the battery, the more dead weight you have to lug around, which can eat away at any potential gain in range. Traditionally, EV battery manufacturers have used cell modules that are connected and then placed in packs. According to…

IN 1992, THE poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It’s a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects—orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her “Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeof” is what it sounds like. Her “Short Talk on Trout” is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book’s introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, “I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime.” Right about when she published that, the internet started to take of. Fast-forward 30 years and one of the latest ways to avoid boredom, at least for me, is to stay up late and goof around with AI…

NILS FRAHM HAS spent a lifetime turning the sounds in his head into reality—and he has the equipment to prove it. Inside the composer’s studio in Funkhaus Berlin, a former radio broadcasting center once used by the East German government, you’ll find the Klavins M450—the world’s tallest piano, on which the lowest bass string stretches nearly 13 feet. In 2015, Frahm toured with three pipe organs fitted with microcontrollers that transformed them into wooden synthesizers; the instruments were so large that they needed their own dressing room. He has performed on the piano using toilet brushes, hitting the strings as if playing the xylophone. On stage, he shuttles between electronic drum machines, synthesizers, and self-built mixing desks. Right now, he’s brainstorming an instrument inspired by the whir of air-conditioning units, but that’s…

BACK IN 2016, WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann described home as “a feeling” rather than something you own. He was introducing WeLive, his concept for rental apartments where lease terms were flexible and living spaces came furnished, right down to the linens and toiletries. The idea swapped traditional tenancy for “membership,” allowing people to move between WeLive apartments as easily as Equinox members swipe into a gym in any city. WeLive didn’t live long. It began to crumble, along with the rest of its parent company, in 2019, when a bid to go public revealed that WeWork had been losing more than $200,000 every hour. After WeLive went into crisis mode and halted plans to open more locations, the two existing sites began to operate more like hotels. WeWork eventually sold them. Three…