WIRED

In our March/April issue, Bradley Hope profiled the United Arab Emirates’ spy chief, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, and his attempts to become the AI industry’s indispensable man. Virginia Heffernan chronicled Novo Nordisk’s agonizing attempts to balance demand for its blockbuster products Ozempic and Wegovy—treated as weight-loss miracle drugs in the US—against its lifesaving treatments for type 1 diabetes. And Brendan I. Koerner followed one college student’s journey into the alluring, all-devouring world of door-to-door solar panel sales. RE: “THE KING OF OZEMPIC IS SCARED AS HELL” “I do not envy the CEO of Novo.”—u/you_were_mythtaken RE: “THE SHEIKH’S GAMBIT” We tend to think in American-centric ways when considering the power of the Tech Bro community—this is a mistake. —@ascablander.bsky.social Boy, as Americans, we are screwed! Appreciate the research…

One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets. Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity’s intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system. “We’re kind of playing Russian roulette,” says Michele Mosca, who co-authored the most recent “Quantum Threat Timeline” report from the Global Risk Institute, which estimates how long we have left. “You’ll probably win if you only play…

This is the year of quantum science and technology. Literally: The United Nations said so. But no amount of pomp and hype can make something true. The fact is, it’s been the year of quantum nearly every year for many, many years now. It’s always the next big thing. It’s always just about here. Well, is it? Really? Nearly a century ago, Erwin Schrödinger poked fun at quantum principles by comparing them to a cat that’s both alive and dead. Today, quantum computing finds itself in just such a state: a superposition of here and not-here, a series of world-changing breakthroughs that are, at the same time, also colossal letdowns. So what’s the real story? Let’s open the box and find out.…

Guillaume Verdon stands before me with a new kind of computer chip in his hand—a piece of hardware he believes is so important to the future of humanity that he’s asked me not to reveal our exact location, for fear that his head-quarters could become the target of industrial espionage. This much I can tell you: We’re in an office a short drive from Boston, and the chip arrived from the foundry just a few days ago. It sits on a circuit board about the width of a Big Mac. The pinky-nail-sized piece of silicon itself is dotted with an exotic set of components: not the transistors of an ordinary semi-conductor, nor the superconducting elements of a quantum chip, but the guts of a radically new paradigm called thermodynamic computing.…

The internet is massive. But does it have … actual mass? Big server farms and miles of fiber-optic cables do, of course, but we don’t mean the infrastructure of the internet. We mean the internet itself. The information. The data. The cybernetics. And because storing and moving stuff through cyber-space requires energy—which, per Einstein, has mass—it should, in theory, be possible to calculate the internet’s weight. Way back in the adolescent days of the web, in 2006, a Harvard physicist named Russell Seitz made an attempt. His conclusion? If you consider the mass of the energy powering the servers, the internet comes out to roughly 50 grams—or about the weight of a couple strawberries. People still use Seitz’s comparison to this day. We’re all wasting our lives on something…

Incredibly, Angelina Jolie called it. The year was 1995. Picture Jolie, short of both hair and acting experience, as a teenage hacker in Hackers. Not a lot of people saw this movie. Even fewer appreciated its relevance. Hackers was “grating,” Entertainment Weekly huffed at the time, for the way it embraced “the computer-kid-as-elite-rebel mystique currently being peddled by magazines like WIRED.” Thirty years later, Entertainment Weekly no longer publishes a magazine, WIRED does, and Hackers ranks among the foundational documents of the digital age. The last time I saw the movie, it was being projected onto the wall of a cool-kids bar down the street from my house. But that’s not the incredible thing. The incredible thing, again, is that Jolie called it. It. The future. Mid-way through Hackers, she’s…