We're 30 minutes from the beginning of RE:WIRED—a series of virtual conversations about humanity's biggest bets. You can register and watch at the link, but we'll be live tweeting today's events below: wired.trib.al/Rc5MO3q#REWIRED2021
Kai Fu Lee shares his optimism about AI in health care, but says there will still be challenges in the short term. "I actually don't see much of the downside of AI in healthcare. It's one of the few win-wins." - @kaifulee
Kai-Fu Lee says we need to move away from "explain the black box perfectly or we can't use it." If AI were easily explainable, it wouldn't be so powerful.
Yoky Matsuoka, cofounder of Google X, former CTO of Nest, and neurorobotics researcher, is live now. Watch right here: wired.trib.al/Rc5MO3q#REWIRED2021
Yoky Matsuoka talks about how AI can not only provide health care data and better predictive measures, but allow people to have increased independence without constant care.
Yoky Matsuoka reminds us it's okay to delegate—whether that's with family or friends or AI itself. "It's okay to get help from a human and tech combination. It's not scary and it can help make things better."
Is AI ready to takeover all home tasks? Matsuoka says she believes humans should still be the gatekeepers, but AI can be helpful in process and suggestions.
Next up: Jony Ive speaks to Anna Wintour about his new endeavors, priorities, and the very nature of creativity, ideas, and the future of design as he sees it.
"I struggled to get my head around, with iPod, that it's been 20 years," says Jony Ive. "What the iPod really marked was the beginning of creating far more specific products and devices." wired.trib.al/Rc5MO3q#REWIRED2021
Jony Ive discusses how the arrival of the wearable marks technology becoming more personal and intimate. The next phase: tech that "disappears beneath our skin."
On the late Steve Jobs, "As I think about him, my sense of him and what his contribution truly was, has grown and evolved," says Ive. "I've never met anyone more truly curious, more inquisitive, than Steve."
"If you create with love and genuine care, it's a way of expressing our gratitude for the species," says Ive, when asked about his company's name LoveFrom,
"It's so good in so many ways, we make the mistake of using it as a surrogate for actual communication." -Jony Ive on the danger of digital communication.
"Video connections do not encourage us to be quiet and thoughtful."
"Some of the tools that are most powerful, when we look at history, we find they are the most destructive." says Ive. "I do hope the world my boys grow into there's just a little more surprise and wonder and an awful lot less cynical dogma."
Next up: @TimnitGebru sits down with @tsimonite to discuss the flimsy oversight of tech industry AI projects, and how AI can benefit everyone in society, not just the few.
Gebru says that prioritizing publishing puts technologists in the position of putting out fires instead of thinking ahead. "The problem is right now we haven't been able to put out our imagination about what the future of AI could be like."
"Hope is a discipline," says Gebru. She says the incentive structure for AI research needs to shift from making the powerful more powerful to lifting a diverse range of voices. wired.trib.al/Rc5MO3q#REWIRED2021
Gebru says the problem isn't about getting people started in STEM earlier—the problem is the system they're being brought into. "If you bring people into a faulty system that's just going to destroy them, that's a form of turture."
What is the real cost of a lie on the internet—to ourselves, our communities, our societies?
These speakers know a thing or two about that. Tune in for the next session of RE:WIRED at 4PM EST right here: wired.trib.al/Rc5MO3q#REWIRED2021
Prince Harry. Renee Diresta. Rashad Robinson. Steven Levy. We're 15 minutes away from their session on the cost of a lie on the internet. Watch live right here: wired.trib.al/Rc5MO3q#REWIRED2021
"Self-regulated companies are unregulated companies" says Rashad Robinson. "People in charge will always choose growth and profit over integrity and security."
Prince Harry says the issue isn't too big to solve—it's a small number of accounts causing a huge number of problems. "More than 70% of the hate speech about my wife on Twitter can be traced to 50 accounts."
When asked if he has spoken to the big tech CEOs, Prince Harry says he had emailed Twitter CEO @jack . "I warned Jack that a coup was being staged on the day before (Jan 5), and I haven't heard from him since." -Prince Harry
"We will always lose the opportunity to create real change in the backrooms if people aren't aligned at the front door,"says Rashad Robinson. "It will require all of us to create real change."
Renee Diresta reminds that it's not just tech CEOs that hold power, but tech workers themselves who can put pressure on the people at the top from the inside.
"It's not just a social media problem, it's a media problem," says Prince Harry. "If the media is supposed to be holding us to account, who is holding them to account? It's become kind of a digital dictatorship."
"I think we're moving in the right direction, but I'm not sure I'm necessarily optimistic," says Renee DiResta. "I'm concerned that the normal way to participate online is to participate in the amplification of propaganda."
That's it from RE:WIRED Day One! Join us tomorrow for conversations with Stephane Bancel, Beeple, Jen Easterly, Neal Stephenson, John Cho, and more: wired.trib.al/aW5KtCT#REWIRED2021
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American police are spending hundreds of thousands on Massive Blue’s unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected traffickers.
Massive Blue calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.”
404 Media obtained a presentation showing some of these AI characters. These include a “radicalized AI” “protest persona,” which poses as a 36-year-old divorced woman who is lonely, has no children, is interested in baking, activism, and “body positivity.”
The audit covers DOGE’s handling of data at several Cabinet-level agencies, including:
–the Departments of Labor, Education, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services
–the Treasury
–the Social Security Administration
–the US DOGE Service (USDS) itself wired.com/story/gao-audi…
It's being carried out after congressional leaders’ requests and is centered on DOGE’s adherence to privacy and data protection laws and regulations.
A Congressional aide said the requests followed media reports on DOGE’s incursions into federal systems. wired.com/story/gao-audi…
Dozens of federal employees tell WIRED that Trump's federal return to office order has resulted in chaos (including bad Wi-Fi and no toilet paper), with productivity plummeting and public services suffering. wired.com/story/federal-…
One effect of all this, many federal employees tell WIRED, is that they are travelling long distances in order to spend all of their time in virtual meetings.
A Treasury employee says they spend most of their time at the office on video calls as well. wired.com/story/federal-…
It isn’t just traveling to work to sit on Zoom calls—it’s that there may be no place to take the call, or no working internet to connect to it.
WIRED granted employees anonymity to speak freely about their experiences. wired.com/story/federal-…
SCOOP: Elon Musk’s DOGE has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. wired.com/story/doge-hac…
DOGE ops have repeatedly referred to the company Palantir as a possible partner in the project, sources tell WIRED.
SCOOP: Shortly after senior Trump officials discussed the bombing of Yemen in a Signal group chat that just happened to include the Atlantic's editor in chief, a subset of the group feasted at a secret dinner featuring Trump where guests were asked to pay $1 million apiece to join. wired.com/story/trump-of…
The date was Saturday, March 15. President Donald Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago estate attending a “candlelight” dinner that wasn’t on his public calendar. On the lawn outside, luxury cars were on display: a Rolls Royce was parked near a Bugatti and Lamborghini.
Earlier that day, the United States had bombed Yemen, targeting Houthi leadership. At least 53 people, including children, were killed.
A Letter from WIRED's Editor: Ever since Elon Musk dove headfirst into backing Donald Trump’s presidential bid last year—to the tune of $280 million in contributions—WIRED has been tracking the billionaire’s political exploits and growing sphere of influence within the GOP and the Trump administration more specifically. We’ve been sourcing up, talking to people within and around federal agencies, as well as experts in disciplines including cybersecurity, AI, medicine, and more, about Musk’s potential impact.
What would Musk do, we wanted to understand, once Trump took back the White House on January 20? How would our government—and our country —change with Trump at the steering wheel and Musk riding shotgun?
Now the world, and WIRED, are finding out. The entire WIRED newsroom, from editors and reporters to fact-checkers and photo editors, has been working relentlessly to unearth new information about what exactly Elon Musk and his allies are doing across federal agencies, and to what end. What is changing, how, and what are the consequences? Amid the findings of our reporting, one overarching fact has become extremely clear: Musk is now in the driver’s seat, and he is implementing sweeping, shocking, and largely unchecked changes across the entirety of our country’s federal apparatus.