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 11 / 16 / CONTENTS / 007

Nasa's R2 robotic
hand can turn
a knob, operate a
drill and hold
soft materials

109
FEATURE
FUTURE DREAMS FROM PLANET EARTH
WIRED and photographer Benedict Redgrove
take an exclusive tour of Nasa's vast space-travel
collection and reveal its ambitious plans
PHOTOGRAPHY (COVER AND THIS PAGE): BENEDICT REDGROVE
 11 / 16 / CONTENTS / 009

029
START
Humanitys last hope
well, Stephen Caves Leverhulme
Centre for the Future of Intelligence may
at least tame the odd rogue AI
099
R&D
Scientific progress
Emoji and human evolution; Spaun;
xenotransplantation; Googles quantum
computing lab; creating microtumours
134
FEATURE
Hype machine
Two companies are racing to build Elon
Musks hyperloop. Whether its physically
possible is only the start of their worries

036
START
Rwandas gas valve
Lake Kivus KivuWatt power station
isnt just harvesting methane its
also averting a huge national disaster
106
FEATURE
Where Nasa goes next
Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, introduces
a special photographic exploration
of Nasas past and future missions
148
FEATURE
Third life
Philip Rosedale created Second Life. Now,
with High Fidelity, he wants to build
infinite shared worlds this time in VR

047
IDEAS BANK
Brain food and provocations
Aggregation depreciates your mind; big
data is no replacement for a scientist;
the not-so-secret weapon of simplicity

061
GEAR
Rated and reviewed
Ducati Scrambler; retro games console;
future drinking; luxury leather.
Tested: builders radios; low-light cameras

084
PLAY
Fuji, filmed
Charles Emerson spent three weeks
taking photos of Japan then combined
them into a single, multi-layered image Above Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker and producer Annabel Jones (p79)

090 126 154

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX LAKE

PLAY FEATURE FEATURE

Stop. Scanner time Africa offline The digital Justice League
New Movement Collective and ScanLAB As African governments confront online Google is on a mission to protect the
Projects are turning dance moves dissent, the accused are finding internets most vulnerable. But doing
into a series of 3D-printed still lifes themselves cornered guilty or not good is a lot harder than Dont be evil
 Editor David Rowan
Creative director Andrew Diprose Deputy editor Greg Williams
Managing editor Duncan Baizley Digital editor Victoria Woollaston
Science editor Joo Medeiros
Product editor Jeremy White
Associate editor Rowland Manthorpe
Assistant editor Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Intern Ruby Lott-Lavigna
Director of photography Steve Peck
Deputy director of photography Dalia Nassimi
Deputy creative director Phill Fields
Art editor Mary Lees
App producer Pip Pell
App designer Ciaran Christopher
Chief sub-editor Mike Dent
Deputy chief sub-editor Simon Ward
wired.co.uk
Deputy editor Liat Clark
Acting deputy editor James Temperton
Staff writer Matt Burgess
Intern Amelia Heathman
Contributing editors
Dan Ariely, David Baker, Rachel Botsman,
Russell M Davies, Ben Hammersley, Adam Higginbotham,
Kathryn Nave, Daniel Nye Griffiths,
Tom Vanderbilt, Ed Yong
Director of editorial administration and rights Harriet Wilson
Editorial business manager Stephanie Chrisostomou
Human resources director Hazel McIntyre
Finance director Pam Raynor
Financial control director Penny Scott-Bayfield
Cond Nast International director of communications Nicky Eaton
Deputy managing director
Albert Read
Managing director
Nicholas Coleridge
WIRED, 13 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HN
Subscriptions marketing and promotions manager Claudia Long
Please contact our editorial team via
the following email addresses:
Reader feedback: rants@wired.co.uk
General editorial enquiries and requests
for contributors guidelines:
editorial@wired.co.uk
Press releases to this address only please:
pr@wired.co.uk
Advertising enquiries: 020 7499 9080
Commercial and paper production controller Martin MacMillan
Chairman and chief executive, Cond Nast International
Jonathan Newhouse
Directors Jonathan Newhouse (chairman and chief executive), Nicholas Coleridge (managing director), Stephen Quinn,
Annie Holcroft, Pam Raynor, Jamie Bill, Jean Faulkner, Shelagh Crofts, Albert Read, Patricia Stevenson
Commercial director Nick Sargent
Associate publisher and head of advertising Rachel Reidy
Senior account manager Elaine Saunders
Account manager Pavan Jhooti
Compiler, WIRED Insider Cleo McGee
Head of corporate and event partnerships Claire Dobson
Partnerships director Max Mirams
Partnerships manager Silvia Weindling
Events sales executive Nassia Matsa
Commercial art director Mark Bergin
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WIRED LOGO: SALLY HAMPSON. WOVEN IN A TRADITIONAL SHEPHERD CHECK, USING THE NATURAL COLOURS OF THE WELSH BLACK MOUNTAINS AND JACOB SHEEP
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Commercial senior production controller Louise Lawson
Commercial production co-ordinator Jessica Beeby
Tablet production controller Lucy Zini
 012 / WHO MADE THIS?

MAKING WIRED

NICK D BURTON
Manchester-based Burton turns
xenotransplantation into a comic
strip for R&D. I think my style is
very geometric more designed
than drawn, he says. I tried to
introduce a bit of charm into an
important and complex subject
I wanted it to be easy to get.

GENEVIEVE VON PETZINGER

Author of The First Signs, von
Petzinger sees a connection from
early cave art to the emoji on your
phone: Geometric signs from
Ice-Age Europe may have been one
of the oldest systems of graphic
communication and a precursor
to those cute little symbols.

ONE SMALL STEP FOR A PHOTOGRAPHER OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS

It took us several years to co-ordinate, but regular WIRED WIREDs assistant editor reports
photographer Benedict Redgrove finally got access to Nasas on the pending hyperloop projects
top-secret labs to capture their latest designs, plus a few and finds the journey far from
classics: Nasa is the greatest organisation in the world straightforward. It seems to
it mixes science, art, design, passion and technology. Here, attract colourful characters, he
Im in a training model of the Manned Manoeuvring Unit, says. The story has a lot of turns
used by astronauts in 1984. Standing there, it was easy and twists and I still have no idea
to imagine myself in the vastness of space. if the hyperloop will ever happen.

CLAIR MACDOUGALL
MacDougall writes about the
current crackdown on online
dissent in Africa. Governments
are becoming a big market for
online surveillance software, says
the Liberia-based journalist. So
citizens are going to face a battle
to secure their online space.

IN A WORLD OF HIS OWN ROBERT CIALDINI

WIRED associate editor Rowland Manthorpe reports back from Cialdini, author of Pre-suasion,
the virtual worlds being built on the digital ruins of Second explains why preparation is the
Life: On my last day at High Fidelity, a group of beta testers key to getting others to say yes.
were meeting in simulated space (above). It was amazing The best persuaders become the
incredibly lifelike, but its also better than real life, because you best through pre-suasion, he
have superhuman powers. We teleported to a virtual world says. The process of arranging
where someone had built a VR version of Manchester. Then we for recipients to be receptive to a
threw some simulated cows around, just because we could. message before they encounter it.
 014 / CHANNEL HOPPING

PRINT APPLE NEWS PODCAST

A MEASURED RESPONSE TO MICRODOSING POCKET WIRED THE WEEKLY VIEW FROM WIRED
An email from Ro Atkinson: I thought I ought to point Catch up with our Now approaching its 300th episode,
out in regard to your Startup fuel feature (09.16) that the latest stories via the the WIRED Podcast is the only regular
lower quantities that David Nichols was giving rats in his Apple News feed. digest of ideas, technology, design and
research on LSD (0.08mg/kg) would be the equivalent in Select WiredUK business stories you need. Hear the
a 79kg male of a dose of more than 6mg, while the sort of in Apple News WIRED worlds stories come to life
dose that a person might typically use is about 0.1mg, or, in among the subjects covered in recent
the amounts being used by microdosers, 0.01mg. Whilst it WIRED AWAKE episodes: the dangers of microbeads
is probable the efects would be realised completely difer- DAILY BRIEFING to the worlds oceans; Amazons Dash
ently in small rodents, it seems that given the dosage is Sent at 8am every button; Raspberry Pis global success;
60 times a typical dose, or 600 times a microdose, its not weekday, its your and giant ying buttocks that crash-
surprising that there would be a negative psychological daily round-up from land in a eld. Intrigued? Youll have
reaction. After all, an apple a day keeps the doctor away, the WIRED world. to hear for yourself to nd out more.
ten are a few too many, but after 600 apples a day and I Subscribe at wired. Listen at wired.co.uk/podcast, or
might start throwing them at people out of frustration. co.uk/wired-awake search WIRED UK on iTunes.

VIDEO

MAKE IT, BIG

Showing now on wired.co.uk: our
exclusive film with recent cover star
Bjarke Ingels. In the video, the premier-
league architect and BIG founder
explains, among other things, his
concept of hedonistic sustainability:
new approaches to sustainable
projects that increase quality of life,
rather than take elements away. Have
a look: wired.co.uk/video/bjarkeingels

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On wired.co.uk recently was a report on the continuing
PHOTOGRAPHY: NICO HESSELMANN; EYEVINE

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 STARTUP TALES / 017

Left-right:
Hyperloop One
CEO Rob Lloyd
and co-founders
Shervin Pishevar
and Josh Giegel

You might call this our crazy-big-ambition issue. Start with

an audaciously unproven idea from Elon Musk, ignore its
potential impossibilities, from economics to physics, and allow
anyone bold enough to attempt to build a business around it
while creating an entirely new form of inter-city transport. The
hyperloop, Musks conceptual vacuum-tube-based elevated
people-mover, became so hot in Silicon Valley for its 1,000kph
capability that VCs clamoured to write cheques and magazines
cleared covers. There were meetings with heads of state and
utilities CEOs, and the year 2018, even 2017, was whispered for
a public launch. But what, exactly, was happening on the ground?

This month, WIRED associate editor Oliver Franklin-Wallis tells
an extraordinary story of two rival companies vying to be rst to
launch if the lawsuits, personal vendettas and colourful technological
claims dont get in the way rst. Hyperloop One, co-founded by a
prominent Valley investor and stafed with former SpaceX talent, is
building heavy infrastructure and high-prole test launches but also
a reputation as a workplace whose acknowledged toxicity has led to
a number of allegations involving a noose, industrial espionage
and a current $250 million (188m) lawsuit. Its rival, Hyperloop
Transportation Technologies, meanwhile, has made limited
PHOTOGRAPHY: SPENCER LOWELL
Californian Philip Rosedale had similarly bold
ambitions when he launched Second Life as a
pioneering virtual world back in 2003. Since then,
his immersive universe has stalled in growth,
while keeping a loyal core of users a result
partly of the behaviour changes wrought by the
smartphone revolution. But now that virtual
reality has hit the consumer market, Rosedale
is back to reinvent his original project. Can
accessible VR make his new venture, High Fidelity,

practical progress for all its claims of near-readiness although
that has not stopped its co-founders, a former Italian rapper and a
one-time Uber driver, cultivating a movement of crowdsourced
collaborators. Its a gripping story thats ultimately not about
technology, but our growing assumption that the startup
entrepreneurs unrestrained self-condence will inevitably deliver.
Even if the reality can prove more complex.
the open-source shared virtual world that he
always dreamed of? Rowland Manthorpe spent
a week with Rosedales team both in person, in
their oices and as an in-world avatar. His feature
in this issue is an inspiring reminder that we will
always need these obsessive individuals whether
a Rosedale or a Musk to help us dream bigger.

DMA MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2015 DMA COVER OF THE YEAR 2015 DMA
TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2015 DMA MAGAZINE OF THE
YEAR 2014 BSME ART DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR, CONSUMER 2013 PPA
MEDIA BRAND OF THE YEAR, CONSUMER 2013 DMA TECHNOLOGY
MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2012 DMA EDITOR OF THE YEAR 2012 BSME
EDITOR OF THE YEAR, SPECIAL INTEREST 2012 D&AD AWARD: COVERS
2012 DMA EDITOR OF THE YEAR 2011 DMA MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2011
DMA TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR 2011 BSME ART DIRECTOR
OF THE YEAR, CONSUMER 2011 D&AD AWARD: ENTIRE MAGAZINE 2011
D&AD AWARD: COVERS 2010 MAGGIES TECHNOLOGY COVER 2010 PPA
DESIGNER OF THE YEAR, CONSUMER 2010 BSME LAUNCH OF THE YEAR 2009 David Rowan
REVENGE
OF THE
GREEN SLIME
This green gunk is alive and
dangerous. In July 2016, Utah
Lake was struck by an algal
bloom, affecting more than
384km2 of fresh surface water.
The cyanobacteria releases
toxins such as microcystin,
which can cause vomiting,
diarrhoea, skin rashes and
even liver damage. Utah Lake
was closed for 13 days, with a
period of caution for
swimmers after that. Even so,
almost 200 people reported
adverse effects.
Utahs was only the latest
bloom to hit American waters.
According to 2015 UNESCO
estimates, countering the
phenomenon now costs the
US more than $4 billion (3bn)
annually. Globally, there has
been an increase in the
incidence of harmful algal
blooms, says Anna Michalak,
a researcher at Stanfords
Department of Global Ecology.
But there are factors in
the US making waters more
prone to this problem.
The blame is often pinned
on phosphorus use in farming,
which feeds the algae when it
percolates to the water. Yet
Michalak explains that it is
difficult to find a single cause:
Whats going on is an
interplay between what were
doing on the land locally and
whats happening with the
climate globally, she says, as
warmer temperatures provide
the micro-organism with a
cosier habitat, and heavier
rains boost farm run-offs.
Changing weather patterns
are compounding the impact
of the extra phosphorus
reaching the water. Its the
perfect storm. Gian Volpicelli

020 / NEWS AND OBSESSIONS / EDITED BY ROWLAND MANTHORPE

PHOTOGRAPHY: RICK EGAN/AP
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

RAYMOND WEIL is proud to be supporting Swiss sailing team

Realteam as its Official Timing Partner and to introduce a new
freelancer able to support the crew in the most extreme sailing
freelancer collection
conditions. A nice little tip of the hat to Mr Raymond Weil who was
a member of the Geneva Yacht Club.

Join the discussion #RWRealteam

 PROOF OF CONCEPTION / START / 023

LINA BERGLUND HELPED FIND

the Higgs boson particle. But when
the Large Hadron Collider nished
its first run in 2012, the Swedish
particle physicist felt ready for a
change. Its impossible to top that,
she says. So I thought, why not try
something completely diferent?
That something was fertility app
Natural Cycles. Berglund, 32, began
working on the app while still at
CERN (the European Organisation
for Nuclear Research). I wanted to
give my body a break from the pill,
she says, but I couldnt find any
good forms of natural birth control,
so I wrote an algorithm for myself.
Berglunds algorithm based
on advanced statistical methods
from her time at CERN uses body
temperature to determine fertility.
After ovulation, increased levels
of progesterone make womens
bodies up to 0.45C warmer. Input
your daily temperature into her app,
and by comparing the readings with
those in its data set, it lets you know
when you can have unprotected
sex (shown as a green day in its
calendar) and when to use contra-
ception (shown as red).
Natural Cycles has conducted two
clinical trials, the second of which
analysed the data of more than
4,000 women aged 20-35. Over the
course of one year, there were 143 unplanned pregnancies, ten of which
occurred on green days, giving the app a 99.5 per cent eicacy rating
the same as the pill. Natural Cycles is currently the only app of its kind

BIRTH CONTROLLER
PHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI

to be regulated as an approved medical device, putting it in the same

category as condoms and IUDs albeit in a diferent class.
In June, the company received $6 million (4.5m) in series A funding
lead by Bonnier Growth Media, and its app has 100,000 users paying
6.99 per month. Berglunds next aim? For it to be classied as a contra-
Elina Berglund has gone from helping discover
ceptive, not a fertility monitor. We are a natural alternative to the pill the Higgs boson particle to creating Natural
with no side efects. Daniela Walker naturalcycles.com Cycles, an app-based alternative to the pill
 HIPPO
1 2 7. 1 k m
$1.6qt AURELIA
49 1 2 9. 0 1 k m
44
40 $1.67qt
46
38
45
28
HERSILIA 25
113km ORNAMENTA
$1.12qt 118.35km 21

VERITAS BRIXIA $1.29qt 22

115.65km C A R L O VA HENRIET TA
115.55km 35
1 1 5 . 76 k m 120.49km
$1.2qt $1.2qt
$1.21qt $1.36qt
DESIDERATA
132.27km

IDUNA
$1.8qt
50 121.04km
$1.38qt

HELIO
141.9km 17
MESSALINA
111.29km $2.22qt
$1.07qt BERBERICIA
URSULA 151.17km CHIRON
216km $2.69qt 166km
$1.45qt ASTEROPE $3.56qt
102.78km
$1.66qt
NI NI
FE FE
NI
PT FE CO CO
ASTEROID
34 NI 26 CO 13 H2O 8 H2O
TYPE
CO H2O N N
NH3
H N H H
NH3 NH3

Xc

Metallic-
carbonaceous

K
ALAUDA
194.73km 3
Stony MYRRHA
chondrite PA L M A $5.73qt
120.58km
188.62km
$1.36qt
Cgh
$5.21qt

Carbonaceous AEMILIA
mica/clay 124.97km
FE THIA $1.52qt
Cb 124.9km
37 H FREDA
4 $1.52qt 116.73km
NH3
Chondrite
(Alan Hills CHLORIS
$1.24qt
N 29
85085-like) K LY M E N E 123.57km
123.68km
$1.47qt
$1.47qt 30
B SEMELE 42
OPHELIA 120.56km
Uncommon 116.69km 18
carbonaceous
33 $1.36qt
32 $1.24qt 24
31
Ch 39
36
CHARYBDIS 41
Chondrite 43 LIGURIA
114.17km 48 47
(Bencubbin-like) 131.31km
ELFRIEDE
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TANETE
C $1.36qt COMACINA
TISIPHONE 1 1 7. 6 6 k m MARIANNA
115.63km 1 3 9. 3 9 k m
Carbonaceous $1.27qt 124.72 km
chondrite $1.2qt $2.11qt
$1.51qt
 DEEP-
SPACE
ERMINIA
KREUSA
150.13km
$2.63qt
I N F O P O R N
DOLLARS
Planning to mine asteroids?
GYPTIS
134.22km
$1.88qt
163.08km
Heres where the big money is
$3.38qt
P U L C O VA
19 1 3 7. 0 8 k m
A SINGLE LARGE ASTEROID CAN
$2qt PRINCETONIA
16 142.35km
hold as much platinum as has ever been
$2.25qt mined on Earth, but the real value of
14 these deep-space treasure troves might
CHICAGO be in their less glamorous contents.
11 158.55km Hydrogen, oxygen or ammonia
27 $3.1qt extracted from asteroids could be
10 used to refuel spacecraft or provide
radiation shielding for deep-space
ZELINDA SIEGENA missions far beyond the asteroid belt.
1 2 7. 4 k m 9 165.01km The idea is to set these [asteroids] up
$1.61qt NH3 $3.5qt as gas stations, and grow the economy
H

NEMAUSA
N STEREOSKOPIA in space so that we no longer need to
7 168.16km
1 4 7. 8 6 k m 15 H2O carry up everything out of Earths
$3.7qt
$2.52qt CO
gravity well, says Ian Webster, the
FE creator of Asterank, a database that
NI
charts over 600,000 known asteroids.
D AV I D A
326.06km Efforts are already under way to
$26.99qt NI claim this prize. Asteroid mining
FE startup Planetary Resources secured
CO $21 million (15.7m) in funding in May
1 H2O
to build a satellite system to monitor
ARETHUSA
136.04km DIOTIMA the use of the Earths resources.
N
$1.96qt 208.77km Another US company, Deep Space
H
$7.09qt Industries, is partnering with the
NH3
government of Luxembourg to launch a
test asteroid prospector in 2017.
LUCINA
20
One spacecraft is looking for samples
132.21km already. In December 2014, Japan
$1.8qt Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
2
sent the spacecraft Hayabusa 2 to land
on the asteroid Ryugu. If everything
goes to plan, in 2020 it will return to
23
Earth with material worth $95 billion
LACHESIS
(71bn), according to Websters
5 1 74 . 1 k m
estimate. WIRED assesses the most
$4.11qt
lucrative mining destinations in space.
6 Matthew Reynolds asterank.com

INFOGRAPHIC: VALERIO PELLEGRINI

12

ASTEROID
Real diameter (km)
WINCHESTER Value ($) quintillion (qt) CO C O B A LT N NITROGEN
171.71km
$3.94qt CO Composition FE IRON NH3 A M M O N I A
H I S PA N I A
1 5 7. 5 8 k m
$3.05qt Size:
1 Rank by value
H HYDROGEN NI NICKEL
asteroid value

H2O W A T E R PT P L AT I N U M

SPACE ROCKS / START / 025

026 / START / TORRE FIRMER

HOLDING
MEXICO CITYS NEW TALLEST BUILDING,
the Torre Reforma, posed a tricky design
challenge for London engineering firm
Arup, thanks to the citys predisposition
to earthquakes. The 246-metre-tall
skyscrapers triangular structure has a

SWAY
How does Mexicos
newest skyscraper
tendency to twist when hit with seismic
activity and wind. So Arup devised a new
model for constructing concrete structures
in earthquake-prone locations.
The core provides resistance to
earthquakes using reinforced concrete
sheer walls, connected by smaller concrete
resist earthquakes? elements known as coupling beams
which dissipate energy during a large
earthquake, explains Tom Wilcock, an
associate principal engineer at Arups
Advanced Technology and Research practice in New York.
Using historical earthquake data, and information from statistical
and physical earthquake models, Arups structural engineers simulated
representative earthquakes and their efects on the buildings structure
during the design process. Now, Wilcox says, the Torre Reforma can
withstand the full range of earthquake activity predicted for the next
2,500 years. Fingers crossed. Tina Amirtha arup.com

A series of spaced gaps within the concrete faade

allow the walls to bend without breaking
 astron.
WKHZRUOGVUVW
gps solar watch.
As Novak Djokovic travels the world, his Astron GPS Solar
keeps him on time, adjusting automatically to his time zone
at the touch of a button and using just the power of light.
With dual-time display, Astron is simply the worlds finest
GPS Solar watch.

*If there are changes in the region / time zone, manual time zone selection may be required.
 HUMANITYS LAST HOPE
well, Stephen Caves new Cambridge think tank may at least tame a rogue AI
PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON

THE MORAL MACHINE / START / 029

ICTURE A SELF-DRIVING CAR THAT DETECTS A PEDESTRIAN IN THE ROAD

and has to swerve to avoid them. Now imagine there are cyclists on both sides of
the car and only the one on the right is wearing a helmet. Should the car veer
right, even if it means punishing safer cycling? Stephen Cave chuckles ruefully.
At least since Socrates weve been worrying about moral philosophy and how
to describe whats right and whats wrong, he says. Now suddenly weve got to
program this into artificial systems and its like, damn, we havent got very far.
Cave, 43, is executive director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intel-
ligence, which opens in Cambridge on October 17. Funded with a 10 million grant
from the Leverhulme Trust, the centre is intended to unite thinkers and practi-
tioners from diverse disciplines to address the questions posed by AI, from simple
definitions (what exactly is AI?) to moral and legal conundrums (when AIs kill, who
should take the blame?). The list of researchers leading each of the nine projects is
a roll call of AI luminaries: Nick Bostrom, director of Oxfords Future of Humanity
Institute; Imperial Colleges Murray Shanahan; and Berkeleys Stuart Russell; but it
also includes specialists in law, politics and psychology. One project is being
led by Marta Halina, an expert in the cognition of chimpanzees. Thats a
project with a theoretical element thats also practically very relevant, says
Cave, whose 2012 book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It
Drives Civilisation investigated attitudes towards dying. Those worrying
about risks can use these milestones to think, well, if we reach that point,
then such-and-such a response needs to be triggered.
Some of the centres publications will come in the form of code. Leading
computer scientists Zoubin Ghahramani and Adrian Weller are creating
machine learning systems designed to be transparent and trustworthy
which Cave says could be adopted by Google DeepMind. He also expects
to work closely with policymakers they are really asking for this kind
of expertise. Here his experience will come in handy: he previously spent
eight years at the Foreign Oice, working mainly on EU treaty negotia-
tions. So will our confrontation with AI be any less tense than Britains
with the EU? There will always be problems, Cave says. Were not going
to solve them once and for all. Its more about creating the right kinds of
forums, communities and vocabularies so people can talk to each other.
Today people, tomorrow machines. Rowland Manthorpe lcfi.ac.uk AN IDEA SPARKED
Detecting lightning
is hard. The electro-
magnetic waves
emitted by strikes
move in concentric meteorologists or
STEPHEN CAVE ON circles that are
rarely parallel to the
paying companies
within 30 seconds.
General AI ground. So current We can distinguish
Theres an assumption were moving towards human-like systems ground- individual signals
based antennas originating from
intelligence, and it just isnt going to work like that. Were
that locate strikes different lightning
going to see a lot of narrow AI before we see general AI (AGI), using radio waves strikes, explains
and when we do get AGI its not going to be one thing it will underestimate the UBIMET co-founder
be a menagerie of systems, some dangerous, some useful. number of flashes, Manfred Spatzierer,
fail to record weak 39. Every strike
The kill switch strikes and cant has its own
process data fast characteristic
We need to be able to control these systems. The diiculty
enough to solve pattern.
comes when they become so sophisticated they can efec- the real problem: UBIMET already
tively start enhancing themselves and influencing their predicting a storm. has detectors in
environment, even changing their goals. But if were creating Vienna-based place in Europe,
tools, we need to know where the of button is. weather-service the US and parts
provider UBIMET is of Central and
hoping to fix this. South America, and
Job losses
It has a system Southeast Asia.
Its clear were going to face huge transitional problems as that measures Now the company
AI enters the workplace. My worry is that universal basic lightning at a third has partnered with
income isnt progressive: its going to involve giving money of a millionth of The United Nations
to a lot of people who dont need it. You can take that away a second, using Development
five ground- Programme to
in tax, but that tends to be very unpopular.
based antennas expand to central
to detect the Africa, where it
Autonomous weapons electrical discharge hopes to prevent
Although we dont want killer robots roaming the streets, of a strike. Once natural disasters
there are advantages to weapon systems that dont get lightning hits, the that can affect
angry, tired or vengeful. But they would have to comply with electromagnetic agriculture, health,
waves travel energy and water
international law, so we need a global approach to this now,
through two copper supplies. Amateur
before we nd ourselves in an AI arms race. coils at right weather watchers
ILLUSTRATION: JORDON CHEUNG

angles, inducing can download its

Privacy and AI a current. This is free MORECAST
Many benets of AI, for example in healthcare, will only come then registered app but for
by an embedded more specific
with large data sets, so privacy shouldnt mean a lockdown
device, transferred information,
on all personal information. However, we need greater to UBIMETs central youll have to pay
awareness of the real value of our data, and to demand processing unit for the data, or
transparency about who is using it and how. and transmitted to set up your own
sensors (London,
for example, would
need five sensors,
costing 40,000).
Striking stuff.
030 / START / THE MORAL MACHINE / STRIKE ACTION Ruby Lott-Lavigna
ubimet.com
 Youre Better
Than This

Listening Fail #30 Listen Better

Cable Nightmare at sonos.com
 032 / START / THE POWDER ROOM
BIG BANG THEORY
At the UKs last surviving firework factory, preparations are underway for
November 5. WIRED pays a visit to watch a Roman candles creation
1 2
THE WAREHOUSE
Kimbolton Fireworks
16,000-square-metre
warehouse in Huntingdon,
Cambridgeshire, is where it
all begins. Eleven employees
produce 750 products
here, making around 25,000
fireworks every year.
3 4
TOOLKIT
POWDERING BINDING
Scales are used to The powders are
measure powders combined and
such as oxidisers, moistened to
binders, colour activate the
enhancers and binder. Much of the
colour generators work at Kimbolton
like strontium is done by hand to
carbonate. These avoid unwanted
make up the sparks sensible
fireworks star-like in a factory full
exploding core. of gunpowder.
5 6
COATING MORE POWDERING
After the stars This is where it gets
have dried (a hot. Fire transfer
process that can powder is laid on
take four days
too much heat and
light can cause an
explosion), they are
top of each
bombette. This will
take the ignition
round and under
coated in a priming the bombette to
composition and light lifting powder
placed in these and propel the
bombettes. candle into the sky.
7
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY; CHRISTOFFER RUDQUIST
THE COMETS
These 30-millimetre-wide
blue cylinders are comets,
one of a Roman candles
most vital components.
Made of fine titanium powder,
they are responsible for
producing the fireworks MERGING
spectacular silvery tail. The Roman candle press takes two cardboard tubes at a time,
where it consolidates stars, comets and other components to
ensure the perfect burn (and explosion) when lit. Bangin. RL-L
 Youre Better
Than This

Listening Fail #33 Listen Better

Just Cant Let Go at sonos.com
 0 3 4 / S TA R T / G I R L S W O R L D

COSMETIC LIFT
As women ocked to the site to talk about
their routines, Weiss realised that beauty
companies had no idea what their customers
were up to. If I want to know how to do a
Online make-up company Glossier understands how to talk directly to you black cat eye, I dont drive to a department
store, Weiss says. Ill go on YouTube,
cross-check reviews of a product, and then
ON A WALL IN GLOSSIERS NEW YORK CONFERENCE ROOM HANGS A FRAMED maybe talk about it on Instagram. There
napkin with the beauty brands guiding principles scrawled in red lipstick: Inclusive, wasnt a brand that encouraged me to take
Innovative, Clever, Fun, Thoughtful. Not the most radical words, per se, but they begin ownership of my routine and understood
to explain how this completely digital company has built an online following so rabid that everyone is their own expert.
that, for a period of time last year, its eyebrow product had a 10,000-person waiting list. Glossier launched in October 2014 with
Glossier doesnt rely on celebrity ads or department store placements. Employees the Phase 1 Set, four skincare products in
talk to customers directly via email, social media, the blush-pink packaging. True to Weiss
companys site in a casual voice that young people under- philosophy, the tone was engaging and
stand. If theres such a thing as designing a millennial non-judgemental, even when Glossier
Founder Emily Weiss
approach for selling a product, this gets pretty close. realised that tone of added concealers to the Phase 2 line.
Its founder, 31-year-old Emily Weiss, worked at US Vogue voice is key to her Were not telling you that you need a
in 2010 when she launched the beauty blog Into The Gloss. businesss success concealer. Were providing a concealer
in case you want it, Weiss says. Were
trying to give you the tools to be able to
make whatever decision you want.
That breezy approach works for Glossier.
When Annie Kreighbaum, the companys
executive editor, trains new copywriters,
the first thing I tell them is to forget
everything, she says. And pretend youre
writing to your best friend. The brands
voice is that of your coolest friend who
knows that trying too hard is antithetical
to being cool. And its about pictures and
vibes as much as words: photos of Gisele
Bndchen, Georgia OKeeffe paintings,
glitter. Followers know that if they leave a
comment, Glossier will respond directly.
Asked if she feels competitive, Weiss
shrugs. How many lip balms do you own?
Zillions, she says. Were not saying we

PHOTOGRAPHY: CAIT OPPERMANN. STYLING: LAUREN GOODMAN. HAIR: CECILIA ROMERO. MAKE-UP: ALIANA LOPEZ
make the best of everything for everyone.
Yet many people love what they do, from
teenage girls who show of Glossier face
masks on Snapchat to thirtysomethings
who tag the brand in seles (the brand has
more than 250,000 followers). In the rst
quarter of 2016, Glossier sold as much as it
thought it would in a year, which made for
ve-gure waiting lists and impatient fans.
The next logical step would be retail,
Weiss concedes, though shes intentionally
vague. I think about the Apple Store, she
says. About creating hubs where you can
touch and experience a product, but you
can also connect with like-minded people.
Glossier does have a penthouse in its SoHo
offices, where it occasionally hosts
pop-ups. Weve had girls stay upstairs
for hours and order pizza. And we have to
be like, OK, thats a little too much.
She says that, but you can tell its a point
of pride. This is a woman who enjoys letting
you do what you want. Its paying off.
Marisa Meltzer glossier.com
 Listen Better
at sonos.com
 RWANDAS
GAS VALVE
APPS OF THE MONTH

PRISMA
Prisma harnesses deep neural networks
to reinterpret your smartphone photos as Lake Kivus KivuWatt power
works of art. Current graphical starting station isnt just harvesting
WIRED points include Roy Lichtenstein, Edvard
methane its also averting
Munch and Katsushika Hokusai, with new
artists added regularly. Results can be a huge natural disaster
hit-and-miss, but are always surprising.
iOS and Android, free prisma-ai.com

SCRIVENER
The beloved writing software, which
splits manuscripts into multiple blocks,
is finally available for iPhone and iPad. All
the desktop features cherished by writers
scriptwriting, different trash cans for
different documents, etc are there. Its
not cheap, but serious wordsmiths will
love it. iOS, 14.99 literatureandlatte.com

EXPONENT
This Y Combinator-funded developer
tool is an app for making apps. Its open-
source framework enables you to build
native apps for iOS and Android while
coding in JavaScript and React Native.
Founder Charlie Cheever is one of the
co-founders of knowledge-market Quora.
iOS and Android, free getexponent.com

AUXY
This pocket mixing-studio makes it
easier than ever for wannabe producers
to create their own beats. Its clever
interface breaks tracks into small chunks
which can be layered up and have effects
applied. Auxys simple, visual way to make
music also won it the Apple Design Award
at WWDC 2016. iOS, free auxy.co

LOOK UP
Nigerian-American artist Ekene Ijeoma
wants New Yorkers to engage with their
city instead of looking down at their
phones. His app runs in the background
and, once you reach a busy street
intersection, alerts you to look up and
allow something serendipitous to happen.
Android, free look-up.nyc

BRICKSHOTS
Ever wondered what your favourite
portraits would look like as Warhol-esque
works of LEGO art? Brickshots imports
WEIRD your pics and creates brick-by-brick
instructions. Youll have to provide your
own LEGO, but you can tweak the colour
scheme and number of pieces. iOS and
Android, free brickshots.co.uk Alex Jordan
 EEP BENEATH THE WATERS OF LAKE
Kivu in Africas Rift Valley lies enough gas to
power neighbouring Rwanda for the next 50
years or to poison the two million people
D who live along its shores. Deep springs
carry CO2-rich water from volcanoes to the
bottom of the lake, where bacteria turns
some of it into methane, explains Jarmo
Gummerus, country manager for Rwanda at
US energy rm ContourGlobal. In ordinary
lakes, this gas would disperse slowly into
the atmosphere; Kivu is so deep, all the gas
is trapped under pressure at the bottom.
ContourGlobals KivuWatt power station (below), inaugurated in May, now extracts
and burns this methane to provide 25mW of power to an energy-starved Rwanda.
The company is working to expand operations to 100mW over half as much the
PHOTOGRAPH: WERNER KING
current energy capacity of the countrys entire national grid.
Stored safely underwater, Lake Kivus methane reserve represents Rwandas
best hope for an energy-secure future. However, if the lakes pressure balance
destabilises, it could become the countrys greatest natural disaster. Over the
next few hundred years, Kivus gas reserves will continue to accumulate, until
a tipping point is reached and millions of tonnes of sufocating CO2 is released.
ESSENTIAL APPS / EFFLUVIUM ENERGY / START / 037
Destabilising events such as volcanic
activity or earthquakes could trigger
an eruption well before then. In 1986,
at Cameroons Lake Nyos one of only
two other lakes to share Kivus unusual
geochemistry a landslide triggered
just such an eruption, asphyxiating
1,700 people within a 25km radius. Kivu
is 2,000 times greater in size.
Given the scale of the hazard, not
interfering with Kivus gas-water
balance seems like a good idea. But,
Gummerus says, inaction could
be even riskier. We re-pump the
de-gassed liquid back down to 240
metres to ensure that the two layers
are not disturbed, he explains. But if
nothing is done, the gas pressure will,
eventually, exceed the water pressure.
By reducing the concentration of gas
were actually making the lake safer.
Kathryn Nave contourglobal.com
 0 3 8 / S TA R T / E V O LV I N G E D U C AT I O N

HOW CAN WE TEACH KIDS TO

BE PRODUCTIVE MEMBERS
OF TOMORROWS SOCIETY?
LAURA MCINERNEY
EDITOR, SCHOOLS WEEK

The truth is, we dont know what tomorrows society will involve.
We only know that some skills speaking, listening, compromising
have been useful to help us cope with changing circumstances.
Educating children with these skills could be done in our homes, but
most people believe in a minimum standard of education for everyone,
and the economy relies on parents being free
to work. Schools ensure children gain the
knowledge that has created productive
societies so far. For now, a bog-standard THE BIG QUESTION
school is probably the best answer. PB

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND MICHELL ZAPPA SUNEETA KULKARNI SALMAN KHAN

PROF. OF EDUCATION
EMERITUS, STANFORD
Most education policies are
based on old images of
schooling. Theres innovation,
but no system to take ideas
and scale them up. By
contrast, China has a
reputation for rote learning,
but is moving towards a model
FOUNDER, ENVISIONING.IO
Educators are under-
equipped at preparing
students for an uncertain
future, leading tomorrows
society to be shaped by
yesterdays tools. Wired from
the crib, future citizens speak
technology by default. Schools
cant afford to keep pace.
RESEARCH DIRECTOR,
THE SCHOOL IN THE CLOUD
The adage Learning to learn
still holds true. As teachers, we
have to create environments
conducive to exploration
because children are curious
and we must make the most
of this. The internet has
changed things dramatically.
FOUNDER, KHAN ACADEMY
Students need to have
agency over their learning.
First, by mastering the core
skills of reading, writing,
maths, sciences and critical
thinking these require a solid
foundation that cant be
learned in an industrial model
of education, where theyre
ILLUSTRATION: CARNE GRIFFITHS

based on critical thinking and
problem solving. Our young will
have to work with knowledge
that hasnt been discovered
yet, using technologies that
havent been invented yet. This
cannot be based on curriculum
from the 20th century.
Technology makers should
have a fiduciary duty to
education, offering
unrestricted training, cutting-
edge equipment and fiscal
percentage points. Consider it
a privately funded, publicly
beneficial R&D investment.
When a group of children
interacts via the cloud, they
realise that they have much in
common. They all have similar
dreams and hopes. The
challenge is placing before
them questions that will
trigger curiosity and search.
encouraged to be passive.
Instead of a grade-point
average, students should have
a portfolio of achievements:
computer programs, musical
compositions, speeches
given. These would be
powerful credentials.

TECHNOLOGY MAKERS SHOULD

HAVE A FIDUCIARY DUTY TO
EDUCATION MICHELL ZAPPA
C AP T URED BY JE S S Y PLUME
 Below: Carnegie Airborne Observatorys hyperspectral camera is housed in a Dornier 288 aeroplane

H
OW CAN YOU TELL IF AN
avocados gone bad just
by looking at it? By
examining it through a
hyperspectral (HS)
camera. These devices
also known as imaging
spectrometers see
things the human eye
cannot by scanning the
world across multiple
channels of light. Where
humans see three
wavelengths in the colour
spectrum (red, green and
blue), hyperspectral
sensors can detect as
many as 480. Trained at
an avocado or any of a
range of objects, from
eyeballs to trees they
can make visible the
items traits, by using the
reflective spectra created
in the images pixels.
Nasa developed the
cameras 30 years ago for
use in aerial imaging.
Were often in the
business of trying to
understand what things
are made of without
touching them, says
Robert O Green, senior
research scientist at
Nasas Jet Propulsion
Lab. Spectroscopy is a
powerful analytical tool
that enables remote
measurement for
scientific discovery and
other applications.
These cameras once
cost millions and
weighed hundreds of
kilograms now, San
Jose-based BaySpec
sells 250g ones for
$5,000 (3,800). Sure, RGB X 160 / START / 041
the quality isnt the
same, as smaller devices
tend to cover less

POINT, SHOOT AND

spectral range, but as
their price and size
continues to fall,
startups are sniffing
an oportunity.
Brnice Magistretti CHANGE THE WORLD
Hyperspectral cameras can spot diseases and rotten food and keen startups are circling
 E A R LY A D O P T E R S

WHATS EXCITING Im geeking out

over Rimmels Get
CARISSA FLOCKEN The Look app,
Co-founder and which lets you
CEO, Entry Point virtually try on
other peoples
makeup styles. For
busy people like
FIVE WAYS HYPERSPECTRAL me who have no
PHOTOGRAPHY IS time to consider
what to wear, let
IMPACTING THE WORLD alone perfect a
ENVIRONMENT new makeup look,
this is amazing.
Carnegie Airborne Observatory, US And the best part...
This California-based scientific conservation programme is mapping out the chemical no makeup
properties of forests to help predict tree mortality and determine vulnerability to drought remover required.
(WIRED 03.12). Two imaging spectrometers are fixed on an aeroplane to measure the
amount of water and nitrogen in each tree. The hardware is stable enough to achieve a
global mapping capability, says project leader Greg Asner. cao.carnegiescience.edu

WHATS EXCITING I love the Flic

smart button. You
RORY CELLAN-JONES connect it to your
Technology smartphone via
correspondent, BBC Bluetooth then
choose from a
menu of actions
it can control your
AGRICULTURE MEDICINE FOOD FOSSIL FUELS music, trigger your
camera, even find
Gamaya, Optina ImpactVision, Rebellion your phone. Having
Switzerland Diagnostics, US Photonics, US got one, I keep
Gamayas Canada ImpactVision uses Based in Texas, losing it maybe
drone-mounted Quebec-based hyperspectral Rebellion I need to stick it
hyperspectral Optina Diagnostics imaging to Photonicss to my forehead
camera flies is screening predict the shelf spectral video and invite people
over farmland to patients for life of food. The cameras search to press it.
map crops. The early signs of startup, a product for gases such
aim, according Alzheimers of Singularity as methane
to co-founder disease by taking University, is and hydrogen
Igor Ivanov, is to hyperspectral collaborating with sulfide to prevent
correlate spectral images of their the Fraunhofer explosions on oil
data with crop retinas. The Institute in rigs, refineries
WHATS EXCITING Im fascinated by
physiology team developed Germany on a pilot and pipelines.
to detect a metabolic to determine the When emissions the way JavaScript
disease, weeds hyperspectral pH and tenderness exceed a certain
MADISON MAXEY libraries such as
and nutrient retinal camera, of beef. There is a threshold, the Founder, Paper.js can
deficiencies. So which is being strong correlation camera raises The Crated change how
far, the team has applied to identify between the the alarm. Our patterns are
mapped around beta-amyloids, a pH value of red clients dont designed. Writing a
30,000 hectares key biomarker of meat and its usually choose simple parametric
of farmland the disease. The freshness, says to [get the] algorithm can
in Brazil. eye is a window CEO Abi Ramanan. alarm until a few generate countless
gamaya.com into systemic impactvi.com thousand parts variations on a
illnesses, says per million, says design, turning a
David Lapointe, the CEO Allison Lami laborious process
companys CEO. Sawyer. rebellion into something
optinadx.com photonics.com scalable. Ive been
using Paper.js to
make graphics for
textiles. RL-L

0 4 2 / S T A R T / R G B X 1 6 0 / E A R LY A D O P T E R S
 INDIAS WEB
ACEBOOK LAUNCHED ITS FREE BASICS
programme in India in February 2015, promising
WARRIOR
Nikhil Pahwa took on Facebook
to give millions of people free access to the and big telcos and won. Now hes
internet. The ofer sounded irresistible but New taking his campaign global
Delhi-based media entrepreneur
Nikhil Pahwa thought it too good
to be true. And he was right: the
social networks programme
gave free access not to the whole
web, but only to certain, pre-
selected sites. If there are 100
or 1,000 sites on Free Basics,
then most people would not
go outside that system to
explore the open web, says
Pahwa, 35. It limits compe-
tition and undermines the
neutrality of the web.
Pahwa had formed Save the
Internet two months earlier,
after internet and mobile
provider Bharti Airtel decided
to charge customers more for
making voice over IP phone
calls made through services
such as Skype and WhatsApp
than for internet browsing.
It was about preventing anyone large corpo- they read my version, not the regulators. His initial target for
rates, small service providers or government the petition was 15,000 signatures, which he says he hit in three
controlling what you and I get to access, he hours; over the next 12 days, more than one million people sent
says. So when Facebook launched Free Basics, submissions. We realised through this entire process that people
later called Internet.org, Pahwa saw this as an care about internet access and restrictions being placed on them.
extension of the same battle. Facebook was In February 2016, the Indian telco regulator ruled in the protesters
playing kingmaker, he says. favour and banned all telecoms providers, including Facebook,
Save the Internet, now known as the Internet from ofering discriminatory tarifs for data services. For Pahwa,
Freedom Foundation, waded through complex the owner of the news website MediaNama, victory was sweet
consultations on web law and produced but the ght was far from over. Now he is turning his attention to
explainers, policy suggestions and a website that defending open-web principles in other countries. There needs
let anyone email the regulator. We simplied to be one internet for the whole world, he says. All should get
the 118-page regulatory consultation paper access to the same internet as I do in India. The one space that
into 24 pages, says Pahwa. I had MPs tell me unites us all is the internet. Matt Burgess internetfreedom.in

044 / START / ACCESS ALL AREAS / WTE

W I R E D T I R E D E X P I R E D

Apollo 11 on GitHub Nested emulators Doom ports

PHOTOGRAPHY: VIKAS VASUDEV

Quantified meditation Quantised beats Qualified polls

Zuihitsu Tweets Finger

ZestFinance Facebook buying Experian Klout

McQueen leather Belly button cheese Personalised medicine

 I want to be
unhackable.
Thats why I want a solution that protects me
from online threats and keeps me worry-free.

www.kaspersky.co.uk
Nothing guarantees complete protection, so please exercise caution online.
2016 Kaspersky Lab. All rights reserved. Registered trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

WILLIAM POUNDSTONE
AGGREGATION
DEPRECIATES
YOUR MIND
Would you throw your pet off a cliff
for 1 million? I posed this dilemma
in a recent survey. Seven per cent of
the British public said yes. The same
survey also included a quiz of general
knowledge and current events. I found
that there was a correlation between
how well people did on the quiz and
how they answered the clif question.
The least knowledgeable were most
likely to sacrice their pet for cash.
This was not an isolated finding.
Inscores of surveys conducted in the
UK and the US, general knowledge
correlated not only with socially
responsible behaviour, but with income
(even allowing for educational level
and age), self-reported health and
happiness. Knowledge matters, even
in the mobile device age.
Thats why its important to make
the most of the many hours we spend
following the news online or elsewhere.
Now you can let your friends crowd-
source your news, choosing which
stories appear in your news feed. You
can configure news aggregators and
your TV remote to deliver a bespoke
version of the days events, one tailored
to your interests, tastes and prejudices.
Its The Daily Me, the news purged of
anything personally irrelevant or dull.
ILLUSTRATION: ARON VELLEKOOP LEN
Visionaries have long touted custo-
misable media, but its now claimed that
our surfeit of media choices actually
drives political polarisation and is
to be blamed for phenomena ranging
from Brexit to Donald Trump. But
theres another effect of customised
news that gets little attention and
BRAIN FOOD & PROVOCATIONS / EDITED BY JOO MEDEIROS / 047
may be equally as disturbing:
narrowcasting makes us stupid.
At least, it makes us less informed.
My knowledge survey asked partic-
ipants questions about the news,
history, geography, literature, science,
the arts and pop culture. The questions
were roughly what youd encounter
in a trivia game: What is the capital
of Canada? What is the religion of the
Dalai Lama? Locate Antarctica on an
unlabelled world map. Which is correct,
veil of tears or vale of tears?
The surveys also asked people which
news and information sources they
followed. In general, those who got their
William Poundstone news from TV news channels, social
is a bestselling networks or internet news aggregators
American author. were less informed than those who get
His latest book is their news from radio or newspapers.
Head in the Cloud: Most people in the survey followed
The Power of more than one news source and the
Knowledge in the average number was 4.5. I didnt average
age of Google
people who said they got all their news
(Oneworld)
from Facebook, but rather an average
of everyone who reported getting some
news from Facebook. My averaging is a
simple, though ham-handed, method-
ology that detected a lot of diference
between news sources.
People who followed one high-scoring
news source tended to follow other
high-scoring sources. Likewise,
audiences for low-scoring sources
followed other low-scoring sources,
helping account for the substantial
diferences in average scores. Its worth
noting that any given news source has
its own audience demographics. As
advertisers are aware, readers of The
Times are better educated than the
youthful one of Tumblr. Thus its not
surprising that certain news sources
have better-informed audiences.
Yet when you look past individual
sources and at the overall pattern, new
media audiences know less than old
media audiences. I believe this is in
part because these legacy media are
more diicult to customise.
Newspapers and radio newscasts
ofer a xed encapsulation of the days
news, with a beginning, middle and
end. Editors decide whats news the
audience doesnt. The audience tends
to absorb the full survey. They may be
half-listening or skimming much of
the time, but theyre less likely to be
changing the channel or being tempted
by clickbait. They learn what the news
editors think they should learn.
This dees the anti-elitist ethos of
our digital culture. We extrapolate the
virtues of free choice to conclude that
more choice is always better. But maybe
thats the wrong way to think of it.
Ulysses had himself tied to the mast
of his ship, so he could hear the music
of the sirens without succumbing to
their fatal lures. Today a Ulysses
pact describes a vow or contract that
restricts freedom of choice for ones
own good. You make one big decision
not to let yourself make many little,
dumb decisions. Thats essentially what
audiences of high-scoring media do.
They delegate news professionals to
assemble a balanced view of the days
news and expose themselves to ideas
that they might not have sought out,
acquiring the rarest commodity in the
mediascape: the big picture.
Customisation is like a McDonalds
burger: OK in moderation, as long as
you get a balanced diet otherwise.
You are what you know.

048 / IDEAS BANK / DATA NEEDS DIRECTION
ROGER HIGHFIELD
CRUNCHING BIG DATA
IS NO REPLACEMENT
FOR A GOOD SCIENTIST
I currently in the world was created in
n 2008, Chris Anderson, then-
editor of WIREDs US edition, wrote a
provocative article entitled The End
of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the
Scientic Method Obsolete.
He envisaged how scientists would
take the ever-expanding ocean of data,
send a torrent of bits and bytes into a
great hopper, then crank the handles
of huge computers that run powerful
statistical algorithms to discern
patterns where science cannot.
Anderson dreamt of the day when
scientists would no longer have to think.
Eight years later, the deluge is truly
upon us. Some 90 per cent of the data
the last two years. There are high hopes
that big data will pave the way for a
revolution in medicine. But we need
big thinking more than ever.
With two co-authors in the journal
Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society A, I just published a paper
outlining how biology is too complex to
rely on blindly harvested data.
Todays huge data sets still aford us
an impoverished view of living things.
Our largest land animal contains
around 1,000 trillion cells, has a genome
consisting of 3,000 million letters of
genetic code, some 30,000 proteins,
endless microbial passengers and so
on. It takes a bewildering amount of data
to fully capture the complexities of life.
The usual response is to put faith
in machine learning, such as articial
neural networks inspired by biological
ones. But no matter their depth
and sophistication, these methods
merely t curves to available data.
Blind data dredging is most likely to
produce false leads. Spurious correla-
tions are a familiar problem to those
who use machine learning to identify
promising new drugs. The same goes
for linking genes to disease. A recent
study of 61,000 exomes (the parts of
their genetic code that make proteins)
found only nine of 192 supposedly
pathogenic variants had a strong
disease association. The overestimate
of peak inuenza levels by Google Flu
Trends reminds us that past success in
describing epidemics is no guarantee
of future performance: we have to take
particular care when extrapolating
from existing data.
Researchers still need to ask the right
questions to create a hypothesis, design
a test and use the data to determine
whether that hypothesis is true. We
have seen the power of this approach
at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN,
which generates one petabyte of data
every day the equivalent of around
210,000 DVDs. Although the discovery
of the Higgs boson required a deluge of
data, physicists used theory to initiate
and guide their search.
In the same way, we do not predict
tomorrows weather by averaging
historic records of that days weather.
Mathematical models do a much better
job with real-time data from satel-
lites. That is why a team at Los Alamos
National Laboratory is using theory
to help guide the development of new
materials. They direct data collection
using Bayesian probabilistic methods,
with experimental design driven
bytheoretical insight.
A blend of theory and measurement
Roger Highfield
is director of
is how to make progress in medicine,
too. My co-author, Peter Coveney at
external affairs at UCL, has shown how to design a drug
the Science based on a persons genetic make-up,
Museum Group and within a matter of hours. He uses
Newtonian dynamics and heavy-
weight computation to explore how
candidate drug molecules interact with
a target protein in the body.
In the long term, we need mathe-
matical models of the human body (we
already have a pretty good beating
heart). Then, in a few decades, a doctor
will be able to create a virtual model of
you, based on your own data. She will be
ILLUSTRATION: CELYN
able to treat, dissect and explore your
digital doppelgnger before she experi-
ments on you. When that day dawns, we
will have truly personalised medicine.
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E V E N T PA R T N E R S T I C K E T I N G PA R T N E R

H E A L T H | M O N E Y | 2 0 1 6 | N E X T G E N | R E T A I L | S E C U R I T Y | E N E R G Y

E KEN SEGALL
arly on in my advertising career,
I slowly began to understand the
power of simplicity.
It happened when I went to work at
Apples ad agency, Chiat/Day, in LA.
Not that I had anything to do with
Apples award-winning ads I was a
glorified file clerk. But I was struck
by the simplicity in Apples advertis-
ing, and that inspired me to try my
hand at writing. I never imagined
that years later I would return to the
same agency (then called TBWA\
Chiat\Day) as creative director on
the Apple account and Steve Jobs
would become my client.
Working with Steve was an adven-
ture, but it was also an education.
I could see that simplicity had the
power to transform a business in the
most profound ways.
The year was 1997. Steve had just
returned to Apple after 11 years in
exile, and Apple was teetering near
bankruptcy. With the world eager to
see what Steve would do, we created a
brand campaign to lay the foundation
for things to come.
Steve was not your typical ad
agency client. He hated advertis-
ing that sounded like advertising
and demanded something that was
authentic and that captured the
essence of Apple. The result was
Think different. Those two words
described what the company had
always been about, all the way back to
its first days in the Jobs family garage.
The ads featured nothing more
than a single image of a person who
had changed the world for the better
accompanied by the words Think dif-
ferent. And the Apple logo, of course.
It was stark and simple, and became
the inflection point from which the
ILLUSTRATION: SERGIO MEMBRILLAS
reignited Apple would emerge.
After six months of the ads,
the first new computer model to
follow this campaign would also have
to be proof that the slogan wasnt
just advertising hype. We needed
a name for this computer, and Steve
already had one that he loved:
iRECALL / IDEAS BANK / 051
THE NOT-SO-SECRET
WEAPON OF SIMPLICITY
MacMan. Unless we could come up
with something better, that would
be it, he said. This was a terrifying
prospect. We were determined to save
the world from MacMan.
When I went to work on it, the name
Ken Segall iMac actually came quickly. Thats
worked with Steve because the concept of that machine
Jobs as his ad was the easy way to the internet
agency creative at a time when non-techy people were
director for 12 years, unsure how to get there. It was sim-
and he created the
ple logic: internet + Macintosh = iMac.
now-ubiquitous
H o w e v e r p e r f e c t t h e a ge n c y
Apple i-suffix. He is
author of THINK
believed it to be, Steve didnt like it
SIMPLE: How Smart at all. A week later, we shared new
Leaders Defeat names, and tried to bring back iMac
Complexity once again. But Steve would still
(Portfolio Penguin) have no part of it. It was only after
hed shared a mock-up with his inner
circle, that the positive reactions
changed his mind.
Given his minimalist sense of
design, Steve came to love how the
name looked on the machine. It was
concise and tasteful, and didnt dis-
tract from the shockingly different
shape and colour of that first iMac.
He appreciated that the i-format
created a simple naming framework
for future products even though
none of us imagined what lay ahead
for that little character. For one
simple letter, it sure did a ton of work.
As Apple continued its recovery
in the following months, Steves love
of simplicity became more visible in
hardware and software design, pack-
aging, and even the design of Apples
retail stores. Simplicity was a power-
ful competitive advantage.
Ben & Jerrys co-founder talked
about how the company maintained
simplicity as it went global. The CEO
of Whole Foods talked about culture
as the most powerful simplifier. But
simplicity isnt simple. It takes com-
mitment and energy and complexity
will creep in at any moment.
Apple, in particular, knows this.
Despite its history, the critical voices
among its customers are growing
louder. Some people feel that the com-
panys product choices are becoming
less distinct, its software has become
more complicated (Apple Music),
even the product naming feels less
simple (iPhone 6S, 6S Plus and SE).
Because Jobs led Apple to such
success, some people have a knee-
jerk reaction when they perceive that
something is different. The truth is,
Apple experienced a number of similar
moments in Steves time. The revolu-
tionary iPod, for example, expanded
into a line of four products. The com-
panys early cloud service, MobileMe,
was plagued with problems.
Personally, I dont worry that Apple
has lost its way. Simplicity is in the
companys DNA. Both Tim Cook and
design chief Jony Ive speak of it often.
The simple fact is that todays Apple
faces challenges that Jobss Apple did
not. Its audience has matured and
diversified. It must expand its product
line accordingly or lose customers to
competitors. (Just as it lost custom-
ers to Samsung for a couple of years
by not having a large-screen iPhone.)
As Apple continues to grow, what it
needs most is a Simplicity Czar. It
became the most valuable company
in the world by building products
people can fall in love with. When
that is the goal, simplicity is one place
where there can be no compromise.
 052 / IDEAS BANK / ASCENT OF ASSENT

ROBERT CIALDINI carry equal or even greater weight.
Besides, they were frequently in no
position to tinker with the merits of
THE SECRETS what they had to ofer; someone else
in the organisation had created the
THAT MAKE product, programme or plan they were
recommending, often in fixed form.
Researchers have been applying
a rigorous scientic approach to the
question of which messages lead people
to concede, comply and change. They
have documented the sometimes
staggering impact of making a request
in a standard way versus making

YOU SAY YES Their responsibility was to present

it most productively. To accomplish
that, they did something that gave
them a singular kind of persuasive
traction: before introducing their
message, they arranged to make their
audience sympathetic to it.
Theres a critical insight in all this
for those of us who want to learn to be
the identical request in a different,
better-informed fashion. Besides the
sheer impact of the obtained efects,
there is another noteworthy aspect of
the results: the process of persuasion
is governed by psychological laws,
which means that similar procedures
can produce similar results over a wide
range of situations.

L more inuential. The best persuaders

ike a kind of secret agent, I once
infiltrated the training programmes
of a broad range of professions dedi-
cated to getting us to say yes. For
almost three years, I recorded the
lessons taught to aspiring automobile
salespeople, direct marketers, TV
advertisers, front-line managers,
charity fundraisers, public relation
specialists and corporate recruiters.
Id expected that the aces of these pro-
become the best through pre-suasion
the process of arranging for recipients
to be receptive to a message before they
encounter it. To persuade optimally,
then, its necessary to pre-suade
optimally. But how?
In part, the answer involves an
essential but poorly appreciated tenet
in all communication: what we present
rst changes the way people experience
what we present to them next. It can be
exposure to a number, the length of a
line or a piece of music; it can be a brief
burst of attention to any of a variety of
selected psychological concepts. These
are things that enhance persuasion,
the concepts that most elevate the
And, if persuasion is lawful, it is
unlike artistic inspiration learnable.
Whether possessed of an inherent
talent for inuence or not, insightful
about the methods or not, a gifted
artisan of the language or not, it
is possible to learn scientifically
established techniques that allow any
of us to be more inuential.
Importantly different from my
previous book, Inuence, is the science-
based evidence of not just what best to
say to persuade, but when best to say
it. From that evidence, it is possible to
learn how to recognise and monitor
the natural emergence of opportune
moments of inuence. It is also possible
(but more perilous, ethically) to learn

ILLUSTRATION: PROJECT TWINS

fessions would spend more time than
the inferior performers developing
their requests for change: the clarity,
logic and desirable features of them.
Thats not what I found.
The highest achievers spent more
time crafting what they did and said
before making a request. They set about
their mission as skilled gardeners who
know that even the nest seeds will not
take root in stony soil or bear fullest
fruit in poorly prepared ground. They
spent much of their time toiling in the
elds of inuence, thinking about and
engaging in cultivation ensuring
that the situations they were facing
had been pre-treated and readied for
growth. Of course, the best performers
also considered and cared about what,
specically, they would be ofering in
those situations. But much more than
their less-effective colleagues, they
didnt rely on the legitimate merits of
an ofer to get it accepted; they recog-
nised that the psychological frame
in which an appeal is rst placed can
likelihood of assent. Its important how to create those moments. Whether
here to take note of my choice of operating as a moment monitor or
the word likelihood, which reflects a moment maker, the individual
an inescapable reality of operating who knows how to time a request,
in the realm of human behaviour recommendation, or proposal properly
claims of certainties in that province will do exceedingly well.
are laughable. No persuasive practice
is going to work for sure whenever it is
applied. Yet there are approaches that
can consistently heighten the proba-
bility of agreement. And that is enough.
A meaningful increase in those odds is
enough to gain a decisive advantage.
In the home, its enough to give us
Robert Cialdini
the means to get greater compliance
is the author of
with our wishes even from that
Pre-suasion: A
Revolutionary
most resistant of all audiences: our
Way to Influence children. In business, its enough to
and Persuade give organisations that implement
(Random these approaches the means to outpace
House Books) their rivals even rivals with equally
good cases to make. Its also enough to
give those who know how to employ
these approaches the means to become
better, even the best, performers
within an organisation.
On November 9, we will
announce the winners of the
2016 WIRED Audi Innovation
Awards. Here are the nominees
in our final categories:
Scientific Breakthrough
and Leadership in Innovation
A scientific breakthrough can unlock
long-standing problems and have the potential to
have a long-term impact on human wellbeing. But
which UK project thrilled and amazed us in 2016?

W I R E D A U D I I N N O VAT I O N A WA R D S later, the Hubble Space Telescope

CATEGORY 6: spotted the farthest galaxy ever

detected (GN-z11), some 13.4 billion
light years from Earth. But its not all

SCIENTIFIC been space news. German physicists

have turned on the Stellerator a
device to help study nuclear fusion.

BREAKTHROUGH US biologists have frozen a rabbits

Science is the scaffolding on which
innovation is built. From quantum
computers to 3D-printed organs,
genetic tweaking and super-strong
materials, the future is being cooked
up every day in university labs, R&D
units and experimental institutions.
Scientific innovation from astro-
physics to zoology is exciting and
its happening all the time in the UK,
as proven by the number of British
science-related biopics released
in recent years. The nation that
spearheaded a scientific revolution in
the 17th century is, of course, the birth-
place of Isaac Newton, DNA pioneers
Crick and Watson, and inventor of the
web Tim Berners-Lee.
Looking back, 2016 will likely be
remembered as a thrilling year in
science. In February, researchers at
the LIGO project announced that they
had detected gravitational waves
likely produced by two merging black
holes confirming a century-old
Einstein hypothesis. Less than a month
brain, and then thawed it without
damage, in a breakthrough for cryo-
preservation. Graphene has been
mooted as a way to build neural
implants, and a new cancer-spotting
microscope has been designed.
We asked a team of science experts
to nominate which were the most rele-
vant UK scientific discoveries that
have happened in 2016. Each nominee
has worked tirelessly to unlock
problems or scientific endeavours
that have the potential for positive
impact on human well-being. Which
of them will be awarded WIREDs
Scientific Breakthrough award?

THE JUDGES

Athene Roger Imran Gail Catharina

Donald Highfield Khan Cardew Paukner
A physicist and Highfield is a Khan promotes Professor of At Cambridge
author of over 250 prolific scientific science as the science, culture Nanosystems,
papers on soft writer and ex-Daily head of public and society at Paukners team
matter and the Telegraph and New engagement at the Londons Royal can turn methane
physics of biology. Scientist editor. Wellcome Trust. Institution. into graphene.
ILLUSTRATION: WAYNE MILLS
#WiredAudiAwards

THE NOMINEES

Henry Sheila
Snaith Rowan
Snaith is currently Rowans research
researching how to at the University
develop low-cost of Glasgow
energy harvesting contributed to
concepts, focusing a significant
on sunlight as breakthrough in
the power source. 2016, detecting
He is the group gravitational
leader of Oxford waves for the first
Universitys time. It proved
Photovolatic and a 100-year-old
Optoelectronic theory conceived
Device Group. by Albert Einstein.

Magdalena Guillem
Zernicka- Anglada-
Goetz Escud
Using molecular With the Pale
and cellular Red Dot project,
mechanisms, Anglada-Escud
Zernicka-Goetz is showing the
is building new public definitive
tools to enable the evidence of a
study of embryonic new, habitable,
development. Cell Earth-like planet
differentiation in in orbit around
human embryos is Proxima Centauri
being understood Earths second
better by working nearest star after
with mouse tissue. our own Sun.

Waseem Demis
Qasim Hassabis
At Great Ormond Hassabis is the
Street, Qasim is co-founder of
working on new Google DeepMind,
forms of leukaemia the firm closest to
treatment. His producing true AI.
approach which DeepMind Health
creates immune is working with
cells and kills the NHS to apply
drug-resistant machine learning
forms of the to new cancer
disease has treatments at
cured two children University College
with leukaemia. London Hospital.

Peter Kathy
Kazansky Niakan
Kazanskys team In February, the
of scientists at HFEA granted
the University of Niakan a licence
Southampton is to edit the genes
using specially of human embyros
nanostructured for research at the
glass to store The Francis Crick
information. The Institute. Its the
technique allows first time such
for up to 360TB of work studying
disc data capacity, differentiation
with stability at during human
temperatures of development will
up to 1,000C. have taken place.
Leadership in Innovation allows talent in
organisations to thrive whether its the coach
of an Olympic athlete, or a bold CEO inspiring
leaders and paving the way for others to succeed
W I R E D A U D I I N N O VAT I O N A WA R D S
CATEGORY 7:
LEADERSHIP
IN INNOVATION
To move forward, we sometimes
need people to show us the way.
Although technology projects and
science research are often team
eforts, just as often groups of innova-
tors achieve their best when rallying
behind a leader who is able to inspire
and motivate them with a visionary
idea or an exciting master plan.
Such leaders can come in many
guises: a maverick academic in
charge of a cutting-edge science lab;
an experienced businesswoman at the
helm of a company building ground-
breaking tech; a young entrepreneur
inventing an entire sector; a cele-
brated institution or university that
has kept successfully embracing new
challenges throughout the decades.
In all those cases, a clear vision
and a will to improve the world have
helped leaders make a diference and
triggered signicant change.
Leadership in innovation is not
just about setting and attaining
corporate goals, either. The inuence
of leaders often extends beyond their
companys boundaries, reaching out
to society. Steve Jobss unforgettable
stay hungry, stay foolish mantra,
and his tough leadership style, are far
more than Apples motto they have
become part of the modern lexicon
and consciousness.
In the same way, the current rush
of enthusiasm for learning about the
lives and opinions of other technology
A-list executives from founders
such as Richard Branson and Eben
Upton, to Nobel Prize-winners like
Paul Nurse is revealing of innova-
tors huge potential to bring about
meaningful discussion and change.
Thats why one of the categories
in the WIRED Audi Innovation THE JUDGES
Awards had to focus on Leadership
in Innovation to acknowledge and
celebrate the individuals and teams
Mike Reshma
who have inspired their personnel and
Lynch Sohoni
the public to greater heights. As CEO, Lynch Sohonis Seedcamp
A panel of judges (right) assisted has helped Invoke is a European
with pointing out who in private Capital raise more accelerator thats
enterprises, public institutions, than 1bn to invest invested in over
in tech ventures. 200 companies.
establishments of higher education
ILLUSTRATION: MARCUS MARRITT
and beyond has distinguished
themselves in 2016, bringing about
innovation and kindling other
peoples ambitions. But who or what
will eventually deserve WIREDs title
of innovator-in-chief?
#WiredAudiAwards

THE NOMINEES

Eben Paul
Upton Nurse
Upton founded Nobel Prize-
Raspberry Pi, the winner Paul
manufacturer Nurse launched
of small, cheap, the Francis
customisable Crick Institute,
computers. Its a biomedical
sold more than research facility,
ten million units in early 2016. He is
globally, helping its chief executive
inspire a new and director, with
generation of around 1,500
coders, creators scientists working
and makers. across many fields.

Matt Clifford Martha

& Alice Lane
Bentinck Fox
Clifford and Earlier this year
Bentincks Lane Fox joined
Entrepreneur First the board at
is a six-month- Twitter. She
long accelerator established the
programme. Its digital inclusion
helped more organisation
than 50 startups, DotEveryone
including Magic in 2015 and is a
Pony, which was House of Lords
bought for 102m. crossbencher.

Sheila Demis
Rowan Hassabis
After proving With DeepMind,
Einsteins theory acquired by Google
of gravitational in 2014, Hassabis
waves, Rowan aims to solve
was made chief intelligence. The
scientific adviser London-based
for Scotland. She company has
remains director been nominated
of the Institute for four out of the
for Gravitational seven WIRED Audi
Research. Innovation awards.

Dave Kathy
Brailsford Niakan
Brailsford In February this
Rory Madhumita Sarah Bill was knighted year, Niakan
Cellan-Jones Murgia Drinkwater Thompson following the became the
success of Team first biologist
Cellan-Jones is a Former WIRED Drinkwater heads Earlier this year, GB in cycling at to be permitted
journalist for BBC staff, Murgia is now up Googles Thompson began London 2012. He to genetically
News, specialising the FTs European Campus in London, leading Make It now leads Team modify human
in economics and technology a space dedicated Digital, the BBCs Sky, which embryos, using
technology. correspondent. to entrepreneurs. creativity initiative. implementing his the CRISPR-Cas9
marginal gains technique. She is
methodology a group leader at
has won the Tour the Francis Crick
de France four Institute and was
times in the last named as one
five years, most of the 100 most
recently with influential people
Chris Froome. by TIME magazine.
WIRED / AUDI PROMOTION
ver the course of the next 24 years,
fossil fuel consumption is set to
increase by 13.4 percent. To help
reduce emissions and increase fuel
efficiency, car manufacturers are
looking for alternative energy solu-
tions, as drivers are becoming more
aware of their impact on the planet.
One such smart solution is Audi
e-gas. The fuel, which is produced
through a combination of electrolysis
and methanation, is being developed
by two of Audis plants in Germany.
In the Audi e-gas plant in Werlte in
the German state of Lower Saxony,
renewably-generated electricity is
used to break water into hydrogen
and oxygen. In the second step, the
hydrogen is reacted with CO2 to yield
synthetic methane or e-gas.
# W I R E D A U D I AWA R D S At the end of 2016, the Audi A4 Avant
THE FUTURE g-tron is due for European release, with
the newly announced A5 Sportback
g-tron following. Drawing on the
OF FUELS: success of the A3 Sportback g-tron,
theyll bring CO2-free driving to even
more consumers. Add to that a range
E-GAS of up to 400km using gas alone and
more with the petrol engines assis-
tance plus the usual benefits of Audi
Its similarity to natural gas means ownership, and e-gas looks increas-
distributing Audi e-gas to filling ingly compelling. See wired.co.uk/
stations and into vehicles on a large wired-audi-innovation-awards
scale is easily viable. Audi says fuel
from the plant can power 1,500 Audi A3
AUDIS GOALS FOR 2025
Sportback g-tron cars for 15,000km of
CO2-neutral transport annually.
In addition to its
In contrast to Werlte, at a facility g-tron range, Audi
in Allendorf, methanation occurs via aims to release a
biological means. Elsewhere, Audi is standard fuel-cell
teaming up with partners to produce model, and wants
electric cars to
Audi e-diesel and Audi e-ethanol.
account for over a
These fuels are virtually climate-neu- quarter of its
tral, as they only release as much CO2 production by 2025.
during combustion as was chemically Audi is also
bound during production. Audi predicts planning a closed
sustainability loop,
that a car operated on e-diesel will
to reduce the
achieve a carbon footprint similar to environmental
that of an electric car using electricity impact of its
produced from renewable sources. manufacturing.
 RATED & REVIEWED / EDITED BY JEREMY WHITE / 061

DUCATI SCRAMBLER ICON

A modern take on WIRED extras
Ducatis 70s bikes, to this model.
the Scrambler Alongside the
Icon keeps the vintage W logo,
ride simple while theres a pop
adding design of fluorescent
flourishes such colour on the
as a teardrop- mudguard to
shaped tank. stand out against
Usually available the metallic grey
in red or yellow, paint. From 7,487
weve added some ducatiuk.com

WIRED
LOVES
WORDS: JOE MINIHANE. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE

F E T I S H
HOW WE TESTED
WIRED got access to the cavernous
Millennium Mills in Londons Royal
Docks, where work has started on the
3.5bn redevelopment by The Silvertown
Partnership. Armed with a hydraulic
cherry picker and site managers Paul
Fawcett and Steve Timperly, WIRED
dropped each radio on to rubble at one-,
two-, three-, four- and five-metre
intervals. If the radio still worked after
five drops, the height was increased to
ten and 20 metres. Sound quality was
rated in office and workshop conditions.
 2 3

TEST

HERE
COMES 4 5

THE DROP
WIRED tossed four brutish
builders radios from a cherry
picker to nd out which ones
are site-worthy or skip-ready

1. BOSCH GML50 2. FESTOOL 3. HITACHI 4. DEWALT 5. MAKITA Q MAX WORKING DROP

Besides the SYSROCK BR10 UR18DSDL DWST08810 DMR104 Q BREAKING POINT
IP54-rated FM/ Festool is known The spring- Designed to stack Compatible with
MW radio, this for its high-quality mounted cage with other DeWalt many slide and

20
spring-mounted woodworking is visually ToughSystem cluster batteries,
unit packs in two tools, so WIRED reassuring, but cases, this hefty this is a exible
230V standard didnt expect in practice is IP54- (dust- and choice that also
plug sockets, a much from its puny compared splash-proof) charges via
15

battery charger, palm-sized, 700g to the Bosch: its rated boom box mains power. Its
12V socket, USB, BR10. How wrong components creak features FM/DAB rugged, compact
SD card slot and we were. The lack when grabbed. and Bluetooth, design was a hit
10

an iPhone5-sized of DAB will put Despite the cheap plus a scaffold- with tester Steve
cavity with audio some off, but the plastic casing shaking down- Timperly who
connections. 10W neodymium which, predictably, ring subwoofer. was gutted when
Clear 360 sound speaker sounded shattered at the Audio is big but it smashed at the
5

lled WIREDs great. And, despite rst sign of rubble balanced, and it ten-metre-drop
workshop, despite the battery the radio was still played after mark. Despite his
the background popping off during robust. Bluetooth, a 20m drop, but insistence it could
noise. After the the drop test, the USB, AUX-in, operation was be Gaffer-taped
Metres 0

20-metre drop, radio bounced DAB and FM/ hindered by the back together, its
Hitachi UR18DSDL
Bosch GML50

Festool SYSROCK BR10

DeWalt DWST08810

Makita DMR104

externally, you imperviously off MW complete a smashed LCD fragile casing was
could barely tell it the rubble way decent feature screen. 8/10 189 a disappointment.
had been thrown beyond our 20m list, but the sound dewalt.com Audio is unrened,
WORDS: CHRIS HASLAM. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE; ROGER STILLMAN;

seven times. limit. 9/10 130 and build quality but loud enough
Sadly, the internal festool.com are better suited Spec for a busy site.
electronics failed to the site ofce. Built-in 5V/1A USB 6/10 109
the last test. 8/10 Spec 6/10 132 charging makitauk.com
260 bosch- Compatible with hitachi-koki.com Compatible with
professional.com 10.8-18V Festool 12V and 20V Spec
SHOT ON LOCATION AT SILVERTOWNLONDON.COM

batteries Spec DeWalt MAX 7.2 18V battery

Spec IPX3 splash-proof 5.5-19hr batteries (10hrs) compatibility Digital extra!
Takes 14.4 and 18V battery life AUX-in Download the WIRED
Li-ion batteries IPX4 water 4.5-17hr app to watch the
Drop-rated to 3m resistance battery life radios tested on-site

INDUSTRIAL TECHNO / GEAR / 063

Relax & Unwind
Introducing PowerView Motorisation from Luxaflex
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 F E T I S H

LOVE HULTN
R-KAID-R
This luxurious
solid-wood
WIRED
portable arcade LOVES
console with a
detachable eight-
way joystick
offers a nostalgia-
enhanced look at
early 80s gaming.
Handmade by
Swedish designer
Love Hultn and
limited to 50
units per case
material, the
R-Kaid-R contains
sufficient storage
space for up to
10,000 games,
from Pac-Man and
Space Invaders to
Asteroids. 2,499
lovehulten.com

The R-Kaid-R
is available in
walnut, maple
or green ash

IMITATION
GAMING
WORDS: KATHRYN NAVE. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE

Relive the glory days of

arcade action, albeit in a
far more refined setting

R-T YPE / GEAR / 065

 TESLA GOES BACK
TO THE FUTURE
Elon Musk launches his latest all-electric car
the Model X. But does it offer more than
DeLorean-style doors and a hefty price tag?

The Falcon Wings

rise up before
spreading out,
and are high
enough that an
adult can stand
under them
without stooping

The Model X 90D

has 259hp motors
at front and rear,
with a range of
487km; the P90D
has 259hp at front,
503hp at rear, and
a range of 466km

TEST
THE MODEL X MARKS STAGE THREE OF
Elon Musks masterplan for Tesla. First the
Lotus-based Roadster seduced early adopters,
then the Model S saloon lured eco-friendly
technocrats. Now, the Model X, an SUV with up
to seven seats, is targeting (wealthy) families.
Like most things Tesla, the Model X has been
a long time coming. Unveiled in 2013, it targeted
an early 2014 launch date. The rst right-hand-
drive UK cars wont arrive until the end of this
year, but WIRED was given a preview of the
European model at a Tesla event in Munich.
The delay is understandable: this is an excep-
tionally complex car from a company that, in
automotive terms, is minuscule. Even Musk
admitted that, Im not sure anyone should
have made this car, nor does he dispute that
the Falcon Wing rear doors were problematic.
Double-hinged and electrically powered,
theyve been designed to open with as little as
28cm of clearance either side, and ultrasonic
sensors stop the action if theres something in
the way. Their birth has not been trouble free,
with early customers complaining of doors that
stick and faulty sensors. Teslas head of sales and
service Jon McNeill told WIRED that software
updates will x these issues before UK deliveries
roll out, admitting that US early adopters had
efectively been used as test drivers.
Assuming hes right, theres no doubt the
Falcon Wings will prove an instant hit on the
school run. They have a practical benet too,
allowing easier access to the adult-friendly third
row of seats. Although the X comes as standard
with ve seats, most will be sold with three rows
of chairs in either a 2-2-2 or a 2-3-2 formation.
Individually mounted on a monopost, the middle
row of seats can independently recline, and the
WORDS: ALISTAIR WEAVER. PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX HOWE
third row tips and folds when not in use. Theres
an additional 187 litres of luggage space in the
nose, which Tesla calls a frunk (front trunk).
The rest of the cockpit will be familiar to
Model S owners. Attention focuses on the 17-inch
touchscreen. Android powered, it controls
everything from satnav to the electronic door
releases. This system has the advantage of
being easily updated and the disadvantage
of putting huge reliance on one piece of tech:
if the screen fails, theres little redundancy.
MILLENNIAL FALCON / GEAR / 067
The X uses a variation of the aluminium
chassis found in the Model S. There are electric
motors front and rear, delivering de facto
all-wheel drive, with the lithium-ion battery
pack between. On the agship P90D model, the
front motor develops 259hp and, on the rear,
503hp. The combined system power limited
by the battery pack is 532hp. Theres also
1,061kg/m of torque, which is available instantly.
Opt for the Ludicrous mode and you have a
2,468kg family car thats capable of accelerating
from 0-100kph in a shade over three seconds
thats supercar fast. Its wonderfully addictive,
but use it regularly and the claimed range of
466km will tumble dramatically.
The low-slung batteries help lower the centre
of gravity, but the Model X is no sports car. You
never quite escape the feeling youre sat in a
giant SUV, and its sheer bulk can be a problem
in the UK (at 227cm, its fractionally wider than
a Range Rover). The ride on the air suspension
CONVERTIBLE is also quite stif, and for all its SUV aspirations,
ATMOSPHERE the Model X isnt built for going of-road. Better
The Model X to sit back and enjoy the view through the largest
can be supplied panoramic glass roof in production.
with Teslas Model X life begins at 64,100 for the 60D
new Bioweapon rising to 100,000+ for the P90D. Add extras
Defense [sic]
such as Teslas autonomous driving (autopilot)
Mode. Tesla
claims this
system, and that gure can easily rise to more
features the than 120k. Its far from cheap, but despite its
industrys first late arrival, the Model X still has the electric SUV
medical-grade market to itself. No one else ofers such pace,
HEPA air-filter practicality and cool doors. 8/10 tesla.com
system which
removes 99.97 per
cent of particulate
exhaust pollution.
On its most
potent setting, it
creates positive
pressure inside
the cabin to
protect the
occupants. In
use its airliner-
cabin noisy, and
although WIRED
was unable to
test its efficacy
against a military-
grade bio attack
(as Tesla claims),
it did prove useful
in combating a
bout of hay fever.
HOW WE TESTED
Chaperoned by a Tesla representative, WIRED test-drove the Model X on a
pre-determined route of around 30 minutes in Munich. We also accumulated
additional unsupervised time behind the wheel of a Model X in Los Angeles.
 1

IMPERIAL
LEATHER
Four desirable products that
make the most out of this
materials luxurious qualities WIRED LOVES

1. B&W P9 2. THIS 3. PATEK

SIGNATURE IS GROUND PHILIPPE
Crafted with soft MOD PRO 5230R-001
Italian Saffiano The new Mod Pro Patek Philippes
leather, B&Ws has magnetic new timepiece
latest signature modular inserts for globetrotters
P9 headphones to accommodate boasts a 24-
are as technically all manner of hour day/night
adept as they are accessories and indicator for each
visually arresting. tablets, as well time zone, which
They feature new as your iPad Pro. can be changed
piston diaphragm It also features to align with each
speaker drivers a magnetic city found on its
that serve up slot for Apples face. The 239-
a crisp mid- Pencil stylus, part automatic
range and solid and a built-in mechanism
bottom end for Tile Bluetooth with 48-hour
studio-like sound tag, making power reserve
reproduction, the bag easy to runs at 21,600
and the hinged track if it (and vibrations per
design means your tech) goes hour for supreme
you can easily walkabout. 305 accuracy, and its
stash them in thisisground.com chocolate-brown
their bundled alligator leather
protective pouch. strap seals the
700 bowers- deal. CHF 42,300 F E T I S H
wilkins.co.uk patek.com

2
WORDS: JOE MINIHANE. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE; JOSH REDMAN

TAN LINES / GEAR / 069

4 4. NATIVE UNION TAG CABLE

The scourge of smartphone addiction
is charging: its a must if you want to
avoid a catastrophic end-of-day loss of
communications. Native Unions sharp tan
leather Tag loops on to bag straps, hiding
Apple Lightning and USB connectors
beneath a small flap. Youll need a power
source to charge, but this smart cable
means you need never resort to Low
Power Mode again. 40 nativeunion.co.uk
 070 / GEAR / CLICK TO REFRESH

IKAWA PRO
ROASTER
This app-
connected small-
batch roaster
gives precise
control over the
entire process,
with up to 20
temperature
points and ten fan
adjustments. A
custom-designed
hand-luggage-
sized Peli Storm
case makes the
Ikawa Pro easily
SEBASTIAN DRINKING transportable for
BERGNE HOT coffee testing
MILK LAB on the go.
London-based
2,200 (+VAT)
industrial designer
ikawacoffee.com
Sebastian
Bergnes Hot Milk
Lab is inspired by
a combination of
18th-century hot-
chocolate houses
and 21st-century
milkshakes. Its
glass beakers,
carafes and jug
with built-in
thermometer

LIQUID ASSETS
make mixing liquid
lactoprotein into
a social activity.
poa sebastian
bergne.com

WIRED quenches your thirst for innovative imbibing

WORDS: KATHRYN NAVE. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE; ROGER STILLMAN

GOAT STORY MUG

This horn- the traditional
shaped travel drinking horn,
mug pays tribute however, theres
to a popular no expectation to
legend that quaff your brew in
Each segment SPLINTERWORKS DIME the energising a single go the
folds back into the Constructed from 12 curving American walnut segments, each property of insulating grip
next, creating a edged with sycamore veneer, the hemispherical Dime cabinet coffee was first flips upside-down
pleasing display echoes the effect of a spinning coin. Inside, theres a wine rack discovered by a to act as a stand.
of engineering as it with storage for 14 bottles, a minibar for mixing drinks and a herd of Abyssinian From $29.50
opens and closes shelf for storing glassware. 1,950 (+VAT) splinterworks.co.uk goats. Unlike goat-story.com
 RIEDEL CRYSTAL AYAM DECANTER
The farmyard fowl may be an unusual inspiration for luxury wineware, but the curved
shape of the Indonesian Ayam hen translates to a surprisingly graceful hand-blown
crystal decanter. Designed by Maximilian J Riedel, this piece celebrates the firms 260th
anniversary and comes in clear (below), or with a white or black stripe. 316 riedel.co.uk

The curling tail

enables the
decanter to be
hung from the
edge of your table

F E T I S H

The Ayam
decanter speeds
up the aeration
of your red wine
by gurgling air
through the liquid
as you pour
072 / GEAR / TAKING A DIM VIEW

TEST

A SHOT
IN THE DARK
WIRED pits three big-brand full-frame digital cameras against each
other to see which one comes up trumps in the low-light stakes
 THERE USED TO BE CERTAIN UNIVERSAL TRUTHS
when it came to digital cameras. The bigger the unit, the
HOW WE TESTED
better it was, and the higher the pixel count, the greater the
WIRED used each
impetus for you to buy it until the numbers rose again. camera in low-light
Neither of those sentiments necessarily rings true any more, situations to assess
however, with high pixel counts being the exact opposite of focusing speeds and
what you need when shooting in low light. The more pixels image quality. These
you cram on to a sensor, the smaller each one has to be and included dimly lit
rooms and subjects
WORDS: AMY DAVIES. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE

thats bad news for light capture.

lit only by moonlight,
This is why the three cameras in this test have modestly
to an almost pitch-
low pixel counts in one case as low as 12.2 megapixels. black situation. All
First up, the Sony A7S II, which has been wooing low-light images were
shooters for some time, and also has an expanded top ISO reviewed for the test,
speed of 409,600. Next, the Nikon D5, which grabbed but only the Sony
headlines at launch for its incredible expanded ISO setting A7S II focused and
produced an image
of 3,280,000. This is very, very, very high and means its
(of varying quality) in
super sensitive to light. Finally, the Canon EOS 1DX Mark Digital extra!
all situations.
Download the WIRED
II is not as specced as the Nikon, but still boasts a pretty app to read extra
good sensitivity of ISO 409,600 (expanded). and extended reviews

USABILITY FOCUS IMAGE QUALITY CANON EOS 1DX II

You will likely want The first problem While the Nikon Score 7/10
your camera to do youll encounter wins in terms Sensor 20.2MP full-frame
more than perform when attempting of technical CMOS
in low light, and to shoot in dimly capability, being ISO range 100 - 51,200
each of these lit conditions is able to capture (native), 50 - 409,600
cameras has pros likely to be with an image at ISO (expanded)
and cons. The D5 autofocus. If your 3,280,000 doesnt Focus points 61 points,
sports a battery camera cant focus mean youll want to including 41 cross-type
which can last for on whats in front use it. Images shot sensors
a superlative 3,780 of it, the image at this level are Price 5,199
shots (the A7S II is going in the grainy, noisy and in
is only good for bin. Although all some cases barely SONY A7S II
310). The A7S II, three cameras are recognisable. Score 8/10
however, is much great at focusing Meanwhile, at Sony Sensor 12.2MP full-frame
smaller, lighter and in good lighting and Canons top Exmor CMOS
cheaper. Canons conditions, the speed of 409,600, ISO range 100 - 102,400
1DX II party trick more challenging images are usable (native), 50 - 409,600
is that it can aspects of low- at very small sizes, (expanded)
shoot at 14 frames light shooting start revealing subjects Focus points 169 points
per second. to separate them. you may not have Price 2,499
In a dimly lit room, even noticed were
all three cameras in front of you.
locked easily on For the average
to a target with a user, its the mid- NIKON D5
fraction of back range ISO speeds Score 8/10
and forth from that are of most Sensor 20.8MP FX
the Canon. When interest, since (full-frame) CMOS
it was only the youll be using ISO range 100 - 102,400
Moon illuminating these in situations (native) 50 - 3,280,000
the subject, the where there is (expanded)
Sony was the clear some if not a lot Focus points 153 focus
winner. Simply put, of light. Think dark points, including 99
the Canon can see street scenes, a cross-type sensors
in the near-dark, party or rooms lit Price 5,199
while the Nikon and by candlelight.
Sony can go a little
further. However,
the Nikon loses out
simply by virtue
of not having a
focusing assist
light like the Sony.
COGNITIVE #4
INSIGHT LANGUAGE
HOLDING SMART
CONVERSATIONS IN A
CONNECTED WORLD
THE FOURTH IN OUR SERIES ON IBM WATSON EXPLORES
HOW IT IS TAKING COGNITIVE LANGUAGE-LEARNING GLOBAL
WIRED.CO.UK/IBM-COGNITIVE-INSIGHT
Watson come here I want to see you.
That Watson was not IBM Watson,
of course, or even Watsons name-
sake Thomas J Watson, but Thomas A
Watson, assistant to Alexander Graham
Bell, and subject of the first phone call.
Since then, communication has contin-
ued to become more conversational, be
it voice-to-voice or social-media posts.
IBM
WATSON
By bringing a cognitive, learning
approach to the absorption of data, IBM
Watson has made it possible for com-
puter systems to understand spoken
language and the more natural, collo-
quial way we express ourselves in text.
However, language does not just
mean English. And, since the unique val-
ue of Watson lies in the ability to identify
context and nuance, mastering another
language is a far more complex under-
taking than loading up a new dictionary.
Salim Roukos is an IBM Fellow and
translation technologies CTO at IBMs
Thomas J Watson Research Center in
New York state. He has been focused
on helping computers understand hu-
man language for more than a decade.
Now, he is helping to bring Watson,
and the age of cognitive computing, to
ever more speakers across the world.
THE COGNITIVE DIFFERENCE
Rather than pattern matching, Watson
is taught to understand the structure of
languages, using a combination of nat-
ural language processing and machine
learning. The next stage after building
the language capability is to establish
domain expertise. Using Q&A pairs,
Watson learns the details of a specific
domain within the new language cur-
rently, Watsons domain specialisations
across multiple languages include insur-
ance policies, patent documentation,
news reporting and conversation.
Watson is now able to translate doc-
uments across multiple languages, but
can also bring the power of its under-
ILLUSTRATION: JOE SWAINSON; ESME MCKAY
standing of natural language to bear.
So, for example, Watson could use its
Speech to Text along with Language
Translation and English text analytics
to extract huge amounts of unstruc-
tured conversational information from
different languages in multilingual call
center operations to detect emerging
trends based on customer calls.

LEARNING JAPANESE
Working with Softbank, IBM Watson
made six cognitive services available in
the Japanese language. Thanks to IBM
Watsons corpus of a million Japanese
words, Softbanks partners are now able
to apply Watsons ability to understand
questions, recognise speech, hold con-
versations and retrieve information
relevant to their businesses, opening
up new possibilities for innovation.
INTERNATIONAL TRADE
Watson learned Spanish in the context
of foreign trades in a partnership with
Barcelona-based CaixaBank, to support
its customers in international markets.
In the future, one can consider the
scenario where a question asked in
Spanish may have an answer discovered
in English, which can then be returned in
Spanish using machine translation. This
cross-linguistic support has many
potential applications, such as cater-
ing to an increasing Spanish-speaking
population in the United States.
IBM WATSON HAS MADE IT
POSSIBLE FOR COMPUTER
SYSTEMS TO UNDERSTAND
SPOKEN LANGUAGE
AND THE MORE NATURAL,
COLLOQUIAL WAY WE
EXPRESS OURSELVES
BANKING IN BRAZIL
Banco Bradesco, one of Brazils largest
banks, has partnered with IBM Watson
to add cognitive applications to a range
of their departments and services, be-
ginning with its call centres. With a large
IBM research and development facility
outside So Paolo, Brazilian Portu-
guese was a natural choice for Watsons
expanding language understanding.
Initially, Watson is providing support
to call-centre workers, helping them
to access information and answer
customer queries more effectively. In
the longer term, Watson is intended to
interact directly with customers calling
Bradescos telephone services.
IBM / WIRED PARTNERSHIP
KOREA: THE NEXT STOP FOR WATSON
Following French, Italian and Arabic, IBM
Watson is learning Korean its particu-
larly challenging, as it combines multiple
concepts in a single word, and pronouns
are left out of written Korean, remov-
ing the number of clues Watson has.
Still, this will give one of the most so-
phisticated technological economies
in the world native-language access to
Watsons cognitive capabilities.
LEARNING HOW THE WORLD SPEAKS
With close to 7,000 spoken languages in
the world, there is certainly room to grow.
However, those Watson has learned and
is now learning, will represent more than
90 per cent of the worlds business com-
munications. When Watson launched in
English, it was accessible to 700 million
people. Now, Watson can reach over two
billion people in their native languages.
And, as the number of languages spo-
ken by Watson grows, new possibilities
for applications will emerge.
For more, see ibm.com/outthink/uk
 THE 50+ WIRED2016 SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

ANOUSHEH ANSARI MUSTAFA SULEYMAN THOR

The first privately Co-founder of Google BJRGLFSSON
funded female space DeepMind and head of The Icelandic investor
traveller, Ansaris applied AI, Suleyman who made billions,
family helped fund oversees projects to lost everything, then
the Google XPRIZE for simulate brain-like made it all back,
suborbital spaceflight. neural networks. shares his philosophy.

03-04.11.16
A TWO-DAY EVENT SHOWCASING THE BEST OF THE WIRED
WORLD THE GREATEST INNOVATORS, THE MOST RADICAL
DAVID HORNIK ANDREW MCAFEE ROYA MAHBOOB
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H E A D L I N E PA R T N E R S T I C K E T I N G PA R T N E R

H E A L T H | M O N E Y | 2 0 1 6 | N E X T G E N | R E T A I L | S E C U R I T Y | E N E R G Y
 EDITED BY OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS / 079

THROUGH
A GLASS,
DARKLY
WIRED meets Black Mirrors creator
Charlie Booker, and his producer
Annabel Jones, to discuss the shady
side of technology and people >
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX LAKE
Black Mirror (continued )

Black Mirror has an uncanny knack for premonition. Apps that ask you to Below: Annabel Jones, executive
rate everyone you meet; social-media startups bringing the dead back to producer on the new series of
life; alleged political-porcine dalliances all real-world storylines seemingly Black Mirror. Jones is a long-time
ripped from its darkly comic take on technology. After achieving cult status collaborator with Charlie Brooker
on Channel 4, the show was catapulted into the global zeitgeist by Netix
in 2014. Now, like so many of the most daring TV shows, Black Mirror is
going Netix-only, with six new episodes starting on October 21.
As a writer, Charlie Brooker digs up our dystopian fears, but he is just as
addicted to tech as the rest of us. The other day, there I am in my garden WIRED: Black Mirror is obsessed
with my kids, pushing one of them on a swing and Im trying to check with how technology is changing our
my phone, he says. My son is two and he wants daddy to push him, and lives, for better or worse. Is there an
Im like, Stop it, Ive got to look at this GIF! WIRED sat down with Brooker irony in your signing up with Netix?
and Black Mirror executive producer Annabel Jones to talk Silicon Valley, Charlie Brooker: Theres definitely
luddism, and what Twitter has done to our brains. James Temperton something tting. Theres all sorts of
fucking weird, wall-bending odd stuf
that you could do. Somebody watching
an episode of Black Mirror whos also
watched House of Cards, you could
show them a diferent scene.
080 / PL AY / FUTURE IMPERFECT

How is working with Netix different

from working with traditional TV?
CB: Id say its not hugely different.
Practically, there are a couple of
liberating things. One is you dont
feel beholden to ratings. Often in
broadcast television you worry that
maybe theres going to be a football
match on the other side. It feels like you
get one shot to make an impression.
Annabel Jones: Even though TV
networks in America admired Black
Mirror, they wouldnt have commis-
sioned it because its a very unusual
show. When Netflix finally picked it
up in 2014 we had a lovely gestation
period. Its a very word of mouth
show people want to talk about it.

Netix gives you a global audience.

How do you think it will be received?
CB: [Earlier seasons] went down
quite well in places like Spain. China
seemed to pirate us a lot.
AJ: The themes resonated with
people. We thought it was a very
British show, but actually everyone
around the world was experiencing
technology at the same speed we were,
and so it dramatised things that no
other shows were at that time.
CB: And a prime minister fucking a pig
is amusing in any nationality, evidently.

How did that episode go down,

particularly in America?
CB: Id say the reaction of Americans
was the most divided. Its not like
theyre appalled by it, its just they
PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEX LAKE

think its ridiculous which it is. Others

just get it and go with it. You tend to
nd that people overseas think Im like
the Unabomber or something this
angry anti-technology person shaking
his st at the internet, which Im not.
 Autonomy.
Not everyone who works here
knows what it means.

But theyre welcome to find out

any way they like.

We hire people and we give them problems.

Then we let them solve them in the best way they know.
Some people call it autonomy.
We call it common sense.

Were hiring for UX, BA, Front end, Back end, PM,
operations, support and beyond.
Right now.

Find out more at sndigital.springernature.com

Black Mirror (continued )
In this series, two episodes are set
on Americas West Coast. Was it
a conscious choice to place your
characters closer to Silicon Valley?
CB: There wasnt ever a thought
about placing it near Silicon Valley
or immersing characters in that
environment. We try not to look at the
tech pages and go: VR is a thing, what
can we do about that? With [series
two episode] Be Right Back, where
Domhnall Gleeson dies and Hayley
Atwell brings him back from his social
media prole, there was going to be a
beat where you realise what a money-
making scheme it is. There was a point
where she runs out of credit and has
to top it up. I think that was even shot,
but it felt a bit weird. I always shy away
from that side of things.
AJ: The show tends to tap into fears
we have about the modern world.
And technology just happens to be
the big driver of that. Take [series
one episode] National Anthem: it
dramatises the shifting powers of big
institutions, so police and government
suddenly feel powerless, and social
media is driving the narrative. Thats
a very global theme, rather than being
a specic tech company theme.
What are you trying to achieve when
you start writing an episode?
CB: My take is probably different to
the average viewer. I try to look at it as
quite a popcorn show thats a bit like
Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Tales of
the Unexpected. In my head Im writing
something mainstream and schlocky.
AJ: You want this to be fun and thrilling
and scary. Once the scripts come out, we
try to make it as grounded as possible.
BLACK MIRRORS REFLECTIONS
Despite only The National
having aired six Anthem (S1:Ep1)
episodes and a The UK Prime
special before Minister is
the third season, compelled to have
Black Mirror has a sex with a pig on
startling knack for TV. David Cameron
prescience laughs nervously
CB: Something like Be Right Back
is a ghost story, really.
AJ: Theres also the theme of a
discrepancy between your online
persona and who you actually are.
CB: Yes, and shes lucky in that. His
online persona is a bit bland when he
comes back and thats the problem.
But she couldve got a fucking maniac.
Or nothing but hot takes. Itd be insuf-
ferable. Shed bludgeon him to death.
One of the episodes in the new series
is quite touching. Are you going soft?
CB: That was the rst one written for
this season, so I was thinking: what
are people going to expect? Ive also
become a bit more confident about
writing. One thing people said about
the show was that they liked it, but
it was so fucking depressing: every
week a guy nds an app that kills him.
I thought, whats a more hopeful take?
Black Mirror often takes technology
to its logical conclusion, so what
happens when VR becomes better
than actual reality?
CB: Ten years from now it will just be
13-year-old boys committing war atroc-
ities while getting sucked of in VR. Itll
be that, constantly. Getting sucked of
and shooting. And well go: What the
fuck is happening to this generation?
Youre often accused of being
a bit of a luddite. How obsessed
with technology are you?
CB: I participate in social media to a
degree, but I dont really use Facebook
any more. Ive stepped back from
things like Twitter for the same reason
I stopped writing columns I just felt
Be Right Back The Waldo
(S2:Ep1) Moment (S2:Ep3)
A social-media A foul-mouthed
network raises the cartoon bear
dead; Facebook has ascends to political
enabled legacy power still, not
logins for relatives as outlandish as
of deceased users. Donald Trump
FUTURE IMPERFECT / PL AY / 083
like there was so much fucking yap
going on. Im playing No Mans Sky
at the moment and theres an idea for
the second season thats sprung from
a procedurally generated universe.
Its hilarious to me that people are
moaning about the game: Oh, its a
bit boring, this infinite universe
Fifty quid to fly around an infinite
fucking universe and its still not
good enough for them?
AJ: I find it increasingly hard to
engage with social media when making
this show. Once Im in, Im so sucked
in. Ifeel as if Im sacrificing my life
a little bit too much. What was that
lovely line in Be Right Back?
CB: She says its a thief.
AJ: I feel its a bit like that with my time.
Ithink we both love technology and we
both embrace it. The technology in the
show always tries to be as seductive as
possible and also as simple as possible.
The reason weve embraced technology
so much in our lives is because it makes
life easier, and it is like a drug.
CB: With Be Right Back I was thinking
a lot about how authentic people are
on social media. I found myself being
inauthentic on there and it reminded
me of writing columns for a newspaper.
Its gamied; you are rewarded for being
entertaining on a very surreptitious
level, in a way that afects absolutely
everyone. And if they say it doesnt,
theyre lying. So the contrast is turned
up. Its a bit like a pub near closing time,
where its all a bit emotional.
AJ: Its so emphatic. Everything has
to be: This is one of the best articles
Ive ever read! And you go: Really?
Is it really the best article?
CB: Youve won the internet!
The notion of turning up the contrast
is interesting. What effect do you
think thats had on politics?
CB: If you look at Corbyn or Trump,
it feels like a side effect of being
encouraged to heighten our own
opinions. Theres never been a point
in human history when this many
thoughts were being publicly expressed.
It reminds me of being a columnist: if
you wrote something, you had to stick
by it. It was humiliating to change your
mind because its a public U-turn. Now
everyones committing everything in
print in some way, its harder to roll
back. It feels like no one can retreat.
 oes this shot of Japans Mount Fuji look
familiar? Thats intentional. Taken by Bristol-
based photographer Charles Emerson, the
picture is a modern-day recreation of the
18th-century ukiyo-e (woodcut) art respon-
sible for some of Japans best-known imagery.
I wanted to pay homage to Hiroshige, a
FANCY A TRIP

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLES EMERSON. ILLUSTRATION: MARK LONG

woodcut master, says Emerson, 34, while

TO THE VIRTUAL trying to create a new kind of photography.

Emerson, whose photographs often play

MUSEUM? with layers and multiple exposures, shot the

If you're too busy to get to Tate
Moderns Switch House, or the V&A
is too far away, never fear virtual
reality has you covered. Not only are
big-name museums recreating their
exhibits in 360, but new, digital-only
VR venues are showcasing artists
old and new. Here are three galleries
worth the price of immersion.
(And no touching, please.) OF-W
Ichi Yama (One Mountain) project over
the course of three weeks. Each photograph
builds upon the Japanese concept of meisho
the inclusion of references to landmarks
associated with other artworks or literature,
just as Hiroshige did with his prints.
In ukiyo-e, prints are built up in layers on
paper; ink is applied using intricate woodcut
blocks. Emerson, using a 5 x 4-inch slide

THE MUSEUM OF
STOLEN ART

Created by
Israeli artist
Ziv Schneider,
this Cardboard-
viewable app shows pieces lost
to heists, or destroyed or looted
in conflict. An ongoing project,
the space hosts regular curated
exhibitions: from the FBIs stolen-
photograph archive to pieces lost in
the Afghan wars. mosa.ziv.bz

THE DIGITAL
MUSEUM
OF DIGITAL ART

Created in 2013 by
Alfredo Salazar-
Caro and William
Robertson, this space gives digital art
its own exhibition world. The fantastical
space shows newly commissioned
works from digital artists, including
Claudia Hart and Tim Berresheim.
digitalmuseumof.digital/art

INSTAMUSEUM

Created by 3D-
modelling startup
Sketchfab, this
app lets you turn
your Instagram
feed into its own digital museum.
Type in the account details and the
app will generate a virtual space,
hanging your snaps on the walls of a
trad or contemporary gallery. Better
get curating instamuseum.com

084 / PL AY / V-ART / MOUNTAIN MAN

 Charles Emerson spent three weeks taking photos of Japan
and then combined them into a single, multi-layered image

camera, similarly built up the images over
multiple exposures, overlaying elements
of traditional and contemporary Japanese
culture, he says. First he captured dozens of
frames of the mountain. The contemporary
scenes, from roller coasters to neon street
lamps, were then shot in low light over the
top, to avoid overexposure. I would have
to shoot cherry blossoms with a flashlight,
so I could just pick that out, Emerson says.
Several pieces in Ichi Yama play on
Hiroshige works; in another, a tsunami
defence wall references Hokusais famous
The Great Wave off Kanagawa. I found it
interesting weve had to build a concrete
wave to block the real waves, says Emerson.
The series will be shown in Shizuoka, Japan
in November. I wanted to use Fujifilm,
Emerson says. It would almost have been
rude not to. OF-W charlesemerson.co.uk
This scene looks like twilight, but it combines both
day and night shots. It will feature in an exhibition at
Shizuoka City Tokaido Hiroshige Museum of Art

PAINT:
A POTTED
HISTORY
Drying paint just
became more
interesting. In The
Secret Lives Of
Colour, out October
20, journalist
Kassia St Clair
outlines the weirdly
fascinating history
of your favourite
hues. From the
unwittingly deadly
arsenic-tinged
Scheeles Green
to Van Goghs
favoured chrome
yellow, St Clair
takes in art history,
chemistry and
anthropology
even as it doubles
for a Dulux swatch
book. The richness
in the histories
of black shades
surprised me, says
St Clair, 31. But the
biggest shock was
mummy brown:
who would guess
that for centuries
artists used a
pigment made
from powdered
human bodies?
Steve Fentiman
Cixin Liu, author of The Three-Body Problem: Chinas new generation has broader horizons

086 / PL AY / CHINESE REVOLUTION

hen Cixin Lius The Three-Body

Problem was published in English in 2015,
it became the rst Chinese sci- novel to
win a Hugo award. President Obama took
it on holiday. Mark Zuckerberg recom-
mended it on Facebook. Yet even as his
reputation spread, Liu, 53, continued to
work in a power plant in Shanxi Province.
Ive been working in that power plant for
nearly 30 years, he says. Im relatively
lucky, because my work is not busy
and Ive got lots of time for writing.
Set in post-war Communist China, The
Three-Body Problem tells the story of
an alien civilisation which learns of the
existence of Earth. Facing destruction,
the aliens invade (detailed in the
sequel, The Dark Forest). Deaths End,
the trilogys concluding volume, out on
September 20, explores the two societies
attempt to co-exist, despite apparently
irreconcilable differences. It covers
a time period that lasts until the death
of the universe, says Lius translator
who happens to be the award-winning
fantasy author Ken Liu (no relation).
Like many of his books protagonists,
Cixin Liu grew up during the Cultural
Revolution, when sci-fi was almost
unknown in China. His rst encounter
with the genre came via Jules Verne.
Ithought what was written was true,
he says. Later I knew that it was not,
but that made me fall in love with sci-.
Lius taste for hard sci- he often
says that his novels are poor imita-
tions of Arthur C Clarkes puts him
at odds with the genres recent trend
towards bleak, contemporary themes.
He attributes this difference to the
positivity of Chinas recent technology-
enabled acceleration. Chinas new
generation has broader horizons. They

WHEN ZUCK AND OBAMA view themselves as part of humanity

instead of being just Chinese, he says.
PHOTOGRAPHY: ZACHARY BAKO

They think over ultimate questions

concerning the whole universe. He adds:

WANT TO READ SCI-FI

Cixin Liu is leading a new wave of Chinese writers finding western fans
Todays western sci- has gradually lost
that vitality. RM Deaths End by Cixin
Liu (Head of Zeus) is out on September 20

NEW TECHNOLOGY
FOR A NEW DRIVE
THE ALL-NEW RENAULT MEGANE BLENDS SPORTY LOOKS
*AS STANDARD ON DYNAMIQUE NAV AND ABOVE. **AS STANDARD ON DYNAMIQUE S NAV AND ABOVE
WITH INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES INCLUDING FOUR-
WHEEL STEERING AND MULTI-SENSE TECHNOLOGY
After much anticipation, the All-New
Renaul t Mgane is f inall y here.
Renaults aim for its latest hatch-
back is simple: to create a landmark
in luxury and innovation that takes
driving pleasure to another level.
With its low and spor t y stance
the A ll-New Mgane s drama tic
exterior appears to strike a
balance between dynamic flair and
seductive design. The distinctive
front and rear lighting signatures
and thought fully craf ted interior
showcase the very best of Renaults
design ethos inside and out.
The official fuel consumption figures in mpg (l/100km) for the All-New Renault Mgane GT: Urban 36.2 (7.8); Extra Urban 57.7 (4.9); Combined 47.1 (6.0). The official CO 2 emissions are 134g/km. EU Directive Regulation 692/2008 test
environment figures. Fuel consumption and CO 2 may vary according to driving styles, road conditions and other factors.
This design upgrade gives the
All-New Mgane its unmistakable
on-road personality, making every
mile an exciting drive.
Beyond the aesthetics, the
All-New Mgane is equipped with
premium technology and driving
aids. Available at your finger tips,
these tools create an exceptional
driving experience for every journey.
With innovative 4 CONTROL four-
w h e e l s t e e r in g d e v e l o p e d b y
Renault Sport engineers the Mgane
GT offers poised agility and precision
handling, even around tricky corners,
R E N A U LT / W I R E D PA R T N E R S H I P
so you always feel youre in complete
control while on the road.
New and exclusive to this latest
Renault Mgane is MULTI-SENSE
technology *, which allows you to
feel connected to your drive like
never before. By using the 8.7-inch
illuminated touchscreen**, drivers
can engage one of the four indi-
vidual modes that are available. Each
offers a unique motoring experience,
as well as a distinct interior lighting
ambiance to suit the driving style.
Enjoy lighter steering in Neutral
mode, improved engine response in
Comfort mode, or the most dynamic
per formance in Sport mode the
choice is entirely yours.
Combining exquisite at tention
to detail with new, exciting tech-
nology, the latest Renault Mgane
is set to provide exciting journeys
on the road while redefining driving
expectations. Book your test drive
today to be one of the first to get
behind the wheel of the A ll-New
Renault Mgane, and feel the drive.
For more info, visit renault.co.uk
Above: the
All-New Mgane
on the road
Right: a light,
spacious interior
greets the driver
 SPEAKERS WILL INCLUDE:

MUZOON ED BARTON ALICE BENTINCK

ALMELLEHAN Barton co-founded Champion of young
An 18-year-old Syrian Curiscope, which founders and getting
refugee, now resettled creates immersive VR girls coding, Bentincks
in the UK, Almellehan is and AR experiences, Entrepreneur First
an activist and Malala such as Virtuali-Tee, helps build startups
Fund campaigner. an AR biology app. from scratch.

05.11.16
WIREDS ONE-DAY EVENT FOR 12- TO 18-YEAR-OLDS,
DESIGNED TO STIMULATE YOUNG MINDS AND INSPIRE THE
KRTIN SAMANTHA PAYNE TED NASH
ENTREPRENEURS OF TOMORROW. FEATURING HANDS-ON NITHIYANANDAM Paynes Open Bionics A serial entrepreneur
WORKSHOPS, Q&A SESSIONS AND EXCITING IDEAS At 15, Nithiyanandam
created an Alzheimers-
turns amputee children
into superheroes by
since the age of 12,
Nash founded the
BOOK YOUR TICKET NOW AT WIRED.CO.UK/NEXTGEN16 detecting test which building robotic hands Tapdaq ad exchange
won a prize at the inspired by movies and social platform
TOBACCO DOCK, LONDON Google Science Fair. such as Iron Man. Little Gossip.

E V E N T PA R T N E R T I C K E T I N G PA R T N E R

H E A L T H | M O N E Y | 2 0 1 6 | N E X T G E N | R E T A I L | S E C U R I T Y | E N E R G Y
 F IR
W

U D
E
L N
L
-O ES
MY

N S
SCIENTOLOGY
WESTWORLD MOVIE
Jonathan Nolan gives Louis Theroux takes on
Michael Crichtons 1973 the celebrity church.
Wild West theme-park E-meters, Thetans and
robots an existential BLACK MIRROR
Xenu? Now that is crazy.
angst upgrade. Charlie Brookers cult
Out on October 7
October, Sky Atlantic techno-dystopian
series moves to

T ST
J
Netflix with 12 newly

H
U

A O
T D
unsettling episodes.

S D
Netflix, October 21 TROLLS
A movie based on
the latest iteration
of the 60s toy? This
must have been the
influence of a curse
Out on October 21

R U
U
A S
N
T U
H A
E L
R
DOCTOR STRANGE
By the crimson bands of
Cyttorak! Marvel movies
are getting magical (and
we dont mean Benedict
Cumberbatchs eerily
high cheekbones).
Out on October 28
P

A CU
E
R
B LI
IT A

EVEN
R

STRANGER CLASS
spin-

THINGS The Doctor Who

off is set in the sc
that featured wa
y
hool
ILLUSTRATION: ROB PYBUS; JAMIE JONES

Upcoming pop culture, back in Whos first

ffy,
episode. Think Bu
ranked by weirdness e-
with added spac
Blame dark forces or a conjunction of the spheres, time weirdness.
ree
but the zeitgeist has turned rather occult of late. October, BBC Th
Netflixs gloriously nostalgic Stranger Things was
only the beginning pop culture is about to get
even more arcane: dimension bending! Dark magic!
Scientologists! Heres WIREDs guide. (Or is it?) OF-W

ODDIT Y SPACE / SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE / PL AY / 089

We Happy Few is an unusual survival game. Set in the fictional English village of Wellington Wells in a
parallel-history 1964, its retro details mini-dresses, egg chairs hide a crumbling society. Rather than face reality, the locals
have turned to a drug, Joy, which makes the present feel perfect. Our main character stops taking Joy, because he wants
to remember something, says narrative director Alex Epstein, 53. But if youre not taking your Joy, youre a Downer.
High on Joy, the grinning villagers will turn on anyone they suspect is of their meds. So, the player has to act like a
dosed-up denizen of the pharmaceutical paradise: greeting passers-by
and giving bouquets of owers to old ladies. We wanted to create a
survival game that uses social blending, says Epstein. Its not a zombie
game you arent attacked just because youre there; its if youre not
tting in. The unusual mechanic is a complex meditation on mental SMILE LIKE
health, addiction and happiness. One of our inspirations is Facebook,
says Epstein. All your friends seem happy and are doing wonderful
things. But really, they just arent telling you about the sadness.
YOU MEAN IT
We Happy Few turns survival into an
Daniel Nye-Griiths We Happy Few is released this autumn unlikely meditation on mental health
 090 / PL AY / MUSICAL STATUES / MUSICAL SHARES

up to a minute to scan, when we

Stop. Scanner time

New Movement Collective and ScanLAB are turning dance into 3D-printed still life
would ordinarily take half a second,
says ScanLAB Projects London-
based founder Matthew Shaw, 33.
You get these hypertrails. What came
out was always unexpected.
As Shaws team experimented with
the scanner or, as he calls it, our
PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY. ILLUSTRATION: OVADIA BENISHU

instrument the dancers worked with

slow, sweeping movements to produce
This sculpture depicts a dancer frozen in time. Collapse, a NMC describes Collapse as the finished works distorted, ghost-like
collaboration between 3D-scanning startup ScanLAB Projects celebrating the imperfect images. It was quite awkward to begin
and dance organisation New Movement Collective (NMC), uses and accidental in todays with as we got used to how the scanners
technology-dependent world
a technique called slow life scanning. Regular 3D scanning, worked and created a way of moving
which uses lasers to create a map of nearby surfaces, is typically that would allow the technology to
used for spaces, not movement. ScanLAB Projects previous capture the body effectively, says
works include mapping glaciers and reconstructing under- NMC choreographer Joe Walkling.
ground ruins for BBC One show Romes Invisible City. Using the scans, ScanLAB created six
To capture the materials for Collapse, NMCs performers sculptures, assembled using slices of
danced in front of a laser scanner. The movement takes MDF and 3D printers.
 Late-night server
crashes are rarely WANT TO BE
a cause for
celebration, but
FAMOUS FOR
Alex Zhu, the 15 SECONDS?
co-founder of
musical.ly, is
MUSICAL.LY
happier than
most about it.
CAN HELP
Its app, which
allows you to
record 15-second
snippets of you
miming along to site as musers) syncing to the
HOW SCANLABS pop songs and
share the results
including 14-year-
old Jacob
latest Meghan
Trainor hit, users
CAPTURES with friends,
has grown so
Sartorius, a
singer with 8.7m
can now record
their own audio.
ITS SUBJECTS prodigiously
it now has 100
fans on the app.
Zhu and
The app has set
up sections for
million registered co-founder question-and-
users that for Louis Yang, answer sessions,
the first half of 35, conceived and a comedy
2016 its server musical.ly as a zone, and has
architecture way to distribute also launched
couldnt keep up. short-form a separate live-
Its that educational streaming app,
committed user videos. That idea live.ly, which
base 75 per didn't take off, so Zhu hopes will
cent of whom the pair pivoted become an
are female, and and rebranded entirely new
54 per cent in 2014. It proved communication
THE DANCE aged under 24 an instant hit. platform.
The dancers choreographed which is the Now musical.ly He has global
slow moves to suit the secret to the is moving away domination in
3D scanners capture rate. apps success, from its roots mind: starting
suggests and has YouTube with expansion
Shanghai-based in its sights. into south-
Zhu, 37. They The average east Asia. The
have time, theyre age of users is good thing right
creative, and increasing now is we have
theyre social- showing growth momentum,
media addicts. beyond its teen he adds. Oh,
And they also core says Zhu, and a new set of
lap up videos and the types of servers that can
produced by videos musers cope with his
musical.ly's are creating are apps popularity.
own celebrities changing. In Chris Stokel-
(known on the addition to lip- Walker musical.ly

THE SCAN
Captured over 45 seconds
to several minutes, the
scans create surreal trails.
[They] gave us a new perspective
on what was actually happening
perfectly capturing, morphing and
stretching a particular moment in
time, giving it new meaning, says
London-based Walkling, 32.
The pieces debuted at the Southbank
Centre in London in August, accom-
panied by a live score from composer
and cellist Oliver Coates. We simul-
taneously created music, choreog-
raphy and structure, allowing each
to influence the other, says Walkling. THE SCULPTURE
The group plans to continue its The trails were translated
collaboration, with further live perfor- into slices using modelling
software and CNC-cut.
mances planned next year. We could
never have designed these sculp-
tures, says Shaw. You cant guess
what youre going to get. OF-W
newmovement.org.uk/collapse
 WIRED
INSIDERS
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November 5, 2016
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 CRICKET CLUB / PL AY / 093

SNACK SHACK
mergency shelters are mainly
designed to provide just that
protection. But the Cricket Shelter,
by New York-based design studio
Te r r e f o r m O N E , p r o v i d e s a n
additional benefit: We thought we
could combine shelter and food, This emergency-shelter-cum-urban-cricket-farm hybrid
says co-founder Mitchell Joachim, hums to the sound of tens of thousands of edible Gryllidae
44. The modular structure contains
224 22-litre chambers for producing
edible crickets the insects being an
increasingly fashionable source of dietary protein. We created a multi- has collaborated with local food entre-
layer structure based on the life cycle of the crickets, says Joachim. preneurs in Brooklyn, and is exploring
Terreform ONE, which specialises in environmentally friendly ways to spin the design into its own
projects including future city plans and tree-houses, created the company. This is a giant trend in
shelter for the nonprofit Artworks for Change. Built into the walls are cuisine, says Joachim of sustainable
sex pods for breeding, and seven birthing pods, where female crickets entomophagy. Im looking at making
lay their eggs. After hatching, the crickets move through tubes into the cricket bagels. OF-W terreform.org
mesh-lined living habitats, where they grow until ready for harvesting.
Wed get about 50,000 crickets within six weeks, says Joachim.
Designing the shelter had its challenges. If they have too many
friends near them, the crickets go into a frenzy and swarm, says After copulation
in the tubular sex
Joachim. We killed thousands of them by accident. However, the
pod (far left),
finished structure, he says, is far more humane than traditional sources
female crickets
of edible insects typically large industrial farms in countries such as lay eggs. The
Thailand. There has been interest from big cricket farms, he says. hatchlings live in
After harvesting, the crickets are ground up into powder. Terreform the mesh cones.
 Sleep playlists on Spotify are
SLEEPER HIT: LULLABIES becoming the go-to destination
FROM THE WIRED
LULLABIES PLAYLIST
for insomniacs: more than three 1 Four Tet Gillie
million people are listening to them Amma, I Love You
every night on the music-streaming service, making it one of its most popular genres. Such high demand for
2 Nils Frahm
soporific songs is prompting the creation of original works centred around sleep. From British composer Max Went Missing
Richters eight-hour composition Sleep (described by Richter as an experiment into how music and the mind
3 Max Richter
can interact in this other state of consciousness) to Thom Yorkes (pictured) recent Radiohead Bedtime Mix for
Path 5 (delta)
Radio 1 and Jon Hopkins 2015 Late Night Tales mix album, artists of all genres are embracing songs to snooze to.
And where theres a trend, theres money: countless insomnia startups have sprung up in recent years, 4 Brian Eno
An Ending (Ascent)
hoping to crack the issue from cognitive behavioural therapy options such as Sleepio, which has its own music
function, to wearables that vibrate when you snore and headphones with EEG brainwave sensors. Lets skirt 5 Luke Abbott
over the smartphones detrimental role: studies have shown that the blue light emitted from screens disrupts Dumb
the bodys circadian rhythms, making a good nights rest more elusive. Software such as Apples Night Shift 6 Chilly Gonzales
mode helps, but perhaps the real solution is an early bedtime for our devices. Ruby Lott-Lavigna Armellodie
Listen (and nod off)
to the WIRED Lullabies
playlist on Spotify

41.7 BILLION
The market for
1.8 MILLION
The number of
sleep aids in 2013, user-generated
according to BCC playlists on Spotify
Research. This is with the word
expected to rise to Sleep in the title
57 billion by 2019

094 / PL AY / ZEITGEIST EXPLAINER

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAMES DAY

TREND DECODER
ARE THE SMARTEST CITIES
THE MOST VULNERABLE
TO ATTACK?

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revolutionizing cybersecurity with artificial intelligence and machine learningfor advanced threat
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2016 Cylance, Inc. Silence the Threat


CONNECTED:
THE STORY OF HIVE
HOW ESTABLISHING A STARTUP MENTALITY
WITHIN BRITISH GAS HELPED HIVE GET AHEAD
IN THE RACE TO HOOK UP THE UKS HOMES
he connected home is fi nally taking
shape. Today, Hive lets you control your
heating remotely, monitor your home
from afar, and schedule lighting and
electronics to switch on or off automat-
ically. Plus, if you want to join the dots
and start connecting other products,
services and tools, you can, thanks
to If This Then That (IFTTT) support.
Hives ease of use and apparent
simplicity masks the huge task of its
development. Perhaps the biggest
surprise is how the UKs most popular
smart thermostat isnt from a hip new
startup, but from within British Gas.
But that doesnt mean Hive isnt
built on a startup ethos a strategy
supported by Kassir Hussain, director
of Connected Home at British Gas
(opposite page). Rather than situate the
brand in a tech park, Hussain pushed
to site the company in central London.
One of the best locations for talent
is London, he says from the offi ce.
We needed to have access to product
managers, developers, data scientists
people who love to play around with
open source technology.
The Hive workspace looks the part.
Littered with props from its T V ad
campaign, modular desks are clus-
tered in communal areas and on a hot
August day, staff juggle ice-creams
with mice and MacBooks.
Hussain began his career in the early
90s as a telecoms engineer, When
two per cent of people had mobile
phones and they were still classed as
a tool for yuppies. He spent time at O2
Telefnica, helping to launch Giffgaff,
and working on NOW TV at Sky.
It was in these roles that he found
creating ventures and businesses
within larger companies could be a
smart way of pivoting into new sectors.
Hive launched its first product the
Hive Active Heating Thermostat in
September 2013, a year after Hussain
joined the company. Seb Chakraborty,
Hives CTO ( below ), was hired at a
similar time when the vision had been
set, but Hive had yet to be created.
One of the things about develop-
ment and design is to not be frightened
to throw it away, even when it works,
says Chakraborty, discussing the first
year building Hive.
Both advocates of the fail fast
ethos, Chakrabor t y and Hussain
worked closely to build Hive as a
separate business and a product
development-centric organisation.
It was a brilliant move for British
Gas to say, OK, we understand that
this is a completely different space to
distributing electricity and gas to 12
million households, says Chakraborty.
Hives first thermostat the 2013
model enabled people to control their
heating and hot water remotely. The
next step was to iterate and improve the
experience, to help recognise the three
principles of Hive: beautiful industrial
design, frictionless UX and constant
customer feedback. To achieve this,
Hive required a total redesign from
the back end to the apps structure.
Moving from a single app experience
to a multi-product app is not trivial,
says Chakraborty. Customers might
have dozens of lights, motion sensors
and smart appliances. How to show
those in a way that makes sense and
is easy to navigate is infinitely harder.
The result works. The redesigned
app launched in summer 2015 with
the Hive Active Heating Thermostat,
which boosted Hives reputation signif-
icantly in tech and design allows for
users to move between managing their
Below: Seb heating, flicking on lighting and making
Chakraborty, sure appliances are switched off. The
Hive chief Honeycomb interface was created
technology oicer. to mirror what Hussain calls the Hive
Right: way an approach that informs the
Kassir Hussain, end-to-end experience, from the design
director of language of the products to how custom-
Connected Home, er-facing staff engage the public.
British Gas Our customer support team has
phenomenal NPS [net promoter score]
ratings, says Hussain. We ripped up
all the scripts and said, Your job isnt
to be reading off a screen and worrying
about a script; your job is to resolve
customers problems in a human way.
Continuing to do so will ensure
that Hive a perfect blend of startup
vigour and commercial and strategic
PHOTOGRAPHY: SUN LEE
ventures continues to thrive. Im
not advocating ours is the better way,
says Hussain. Im just saying its the
right way for the thing were doing.
For more info, see hivehome.com
HIVE / WIRED PARTNERSHIP
 20+ MAIN STAGE SPEAKERS WILL INCLUDE:

IDRISS AL RIFAI NICK BRACKENBURY JEFF CHAPIN

Al Rifai founded Dubai- The former Ogilvy Chapin co-founded
based Fetchr, an app account director Casper, a US
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geolocation to deliver London, connecting has embraced
packages in the Middle shoppers with nearby radical design and
East and North Africa. high street inventory. delivery methods.

16.11.16
WIRED RETAIL RETURNS TO EXPLORE THE EXCITING FUTURE OF
COMMERCE. ACROSS TWO STAGES AND A TECHNOLOGY TEST
RANDY DEAN MICHAEL FEINDT JODY MEDICH
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E V E N T PA R T N E R S T I C K E T I N G PA R T N E R

H E A L T H | M O N E Y | 2 0 1 6 | N E X T G E N | R E T A I L | S E C U R I T Y | E N E R G Y
 SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS / EDITED BY JOO MEDEIROS / 099

FROM CAVE WALLS

What is an emoji? We often think of these cute little characters as a
way to add a graphic element to a tweet or Facebook post, but these simple
images are powerful symbols. Emoji are, in fact, compact characters that,
ILLUSTRATION: MARC ASPINALL

TO SMARTPHONES
because of their visual nature, can communicate an amazing
amount of information, such as the subtleties of human emotion.
Its not just emoji: we use this type of graphic communication constantly
in our daily lives everything from a stop sign to the Christian cross all
are methods for conveying information (sometimes quite complex) using Paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger
simple abstract shapes. The reason this works is that, as a society, we explains where emoji fit into human evolution
 100 / R&D / CAVEMOJI / DNA DONORS
Experimentation with visual marks paved
the way for the development of writing
and, more recently, the creation
of modern symbols, including emoji
have created agreed upon meanings for these
symbols. So when we see one, we instantly know
how to interpret it, without even thinking.
And we certainly cant forget about symbolic
systems such as the written word or computer
coding. You could make a pretty good argument
that the making of graphic marks underpins the
foundation of modern society. But what people
dont often think about is how long ago this
practice was invented, or that if you go back far
enough, you will reach a point in our prehistory
where this ability did not yet exist. This time is
known as the Paleolithic, or Stone Age.
The Paleolithic was a time of great innovation
on many fronts new tools, new technologies,
new territories and, of course, a new species, Homo
sapiens, that appeared for the rst time on the
African landscape about 200,000 years ago. And
although these distant ancestors were similar to
us in terms of physical appearance and brain size,
what we dont know is when they started thinking
like us. Because when it comes to brains, its not
just the size; its also the wiring. In this case, the
wiring that allowed the development of cognitive
abilities such as abstract thought and imagination.
But how do you study something soft like the brain
that doesnt survive long in the archaeological
record? The answer is indirectly, through abstract
activities such as the creation of art.
Associated with the first arrival of modern
humans in Europe and dating to between about
10,000 and 40,000 years ago, the (Ice Age) cave
art of Paleolithic Europe is some of the oldest in
the world. This art is probably best known from
sites such as Chauvet in France, with its masterful
black horse and rhino paintings, or Altamira in
Spain, with its famous ceiling of bison. These
painted and engraved animal images account for
1. Some important exceptions to this oversight include
the work of French scholars such as Andre Leroi-
Gourhan and Georges Sauvet, who did recognise the
potential of the geometric signs; A. Leroi-Gourhan
(1992) Lart Parital. Langage de la Prhistoire.
Paris: Jrmee Millon; G Sauvet (1993).
Lart parital Palolithique. GRAPP: Techniques
et Mthodes dtude. d. du CTHS.
2. G von Petzinger (2016). The First Signs:
Unlocking the Mysteries of the Worlds Oldest
Symbols (Atria Books).
3. G von Petzinger and A Nowell (2011). A Question
of Style: reconsidering the Stylistic Approach to
Dating Paleolithic Parietal Art in France. Antiquity,
vol 85.4. S Ripoll; V Baldellou; F Munoz, P Ayuso
(2001). La Fuente del Trucho. Bolskan 18: 211-224.
the majority of gurative art (works that look like something
from the real world), along with a smaller number of human
representations. And then there are a large number of
non-gurative (abstract) images, known as geometric signs.
These include everything from dots and lines to circles and
triangles. At many sites these signs outnumber the animals
and humans and yet they have not received the same
amount of attention as their gurative counterparts.1
This is now starting to change, and the results are
intriguing. As described in my book, The First Signs, the
most startling discovery is how few types of these signs
there are. Barring a handful of one-ofs, there are 32 main
geometric signs used throughout the late Paleolithic in
Europe.2 Considering this spans 30,000 years of prehistory
and an entire continent, its a very low number.
And theyre not all being used in the same way each sign
Negative hands has a distinctive pattern of use making it unlikely that these
A stencil technique were doodles or random decorations. For example, negative
popular between
hands (those that were stencilled as opposed to having paint
20,000-40,000 BCE.
applied on them) appear at fewer than 20 per cent of
sites and they are at their most popular in the early part of
that time period between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago
before fading out of use towards the end of the Ice Age.3
On the other hand, we have a sign such as the tectiform
(roof-shaped in Latin), which only appears in the Dordogne
region of France between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago. Unlike
other signs that tend to move across the landscape, the
The tectiform
A geometric roof- tectiform seems to have been a local invention and may have
like or dwelling- belonged to the people in that region (some researchers
shaped symbol. suggest it is a clan sign). Except, that is, for one site 400km
to the south across the Pyrenees in Spain. This is the site of
Fuente del Trucho in the Huesca province, and here too we
nd the same tectiform shape made in the same manner.4
So how did it nd its way from the Dordogne to this one
other site but none in between? It may be that this sign
either moved with people (say, through intermarriage) or
there could have been trading between these groups. We
Lines and dots know there were already extensive trade networks in place
Not abstract marks, during the Ice Age in Europe everything from int to exotic
but precursors to goods like amber or obsidian so it would make sense that
written characters.
they also sometimes traded ideas or cultural information.
Even simple signs such as lines or dots appear less than
75 per cent of the time, suggesting that each sign on a cave
wall had a known meaning within that cultural group and
was being purposefully selected by the artist. Were not
talking about writing yet there are just not enough
characters at this point to fully represent a spoken language
the way early writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs or
Typology Sumerian cuneiform could (and alphabets dont come around
Ice Age signs seem
until even later), nor is it organised enough. However, the
chaotic, but an order
can be detected. repetition and patterns were seeing with the signs tells us
that there was denitely some sort of typology in place.
This is the kind of experimentation with visual marks that
paved the way for the development of writing and, more
recently, the creation of modern symbols, including emoji.
Those geometric signs from Ice-Age Europe may well have
been part of one of the oldest systems of graphic communication
in the world, as well as being the distant precursors to those
cute little symbols on your phone.
Emoji
A direct descendant Genevieve von Petzinger is a paleoanthropologist and author
of cave art, emoji of The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Worlds
are highly complex. Oldest Symbols (Atria Books)
 THE ILLUSTRATED EXPERIMENT PEER-RE
ER VI
E
H

IT

W
NE

ED
WIREDS
SCIENCE
SECTION

XENOTRANSPLANTATION O

N
R
RE E*
PLICABL

Muhammad Mohiuddin, a surgeon at the US National Heart, Lung and Blood

ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON. REFERENCE: MOHIUDDIN M, SINGH A, CORCORAN P, ET AL. CHIMERIC 2C10R4 ANTI-CD40 ANTIBODY THERAPY IS CRITICAL FOR LONG-TERM SURVIVAL OF GTKO.HCD46.HTBM PIG-TO-PRIMATE CARDIAC XENOGRAFT. NATURE COMMUNICATIONS. 2016

Institute in Maryland, explains how animals can end organ donation shortages

ALTERNATIVES INCLUDE DEVICES SUCH

SCARCITY OF ORGAN DONORS IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM. AS ARTIFICIAL HEARTS, BUT THEY DONT XENOTRANSPLANTATION IS THE TRANSPLANT OF
IN 2015, 7,000 PEOPLE WERE ON THE UK TRANSPLANT LAST LONG ENOUGH. ANOTHER POSSIBLE NON-HUMAN ORGANS, IN PARTICULAR PIGS
WAITING LIST. IN THE US, THAT FIGURE IS MORE THAN SOLUTION IS XENOTRANSPLANTATION. BECAUSE THEY GROW ORGANS QUICKLY AND TO
120,000. MANY DIE BEFORE GETTING A TRANSPLANT. A SUITABLE SIZE FOR HUMANS.

HOW CAN
WE SOLVE
THIS
PROBLEM?

WE KNOCKED OUT ONE PIG GENE, AND IN THE

XENOTRANSPLANTATION IS TRICKY BECAUSE SAME BREATH WE ADDED IN TWO HUMAN HUMANISED SWINES HEARTS WERE GRAFTED ON
OF TRANSPLANT REJECTION: OUR IMMUNE SYSTEM GENES THAT REGULATE IMMUNE REACTION AND TO THE ABDOMENS OF NON-HUMAN PRIMATES, SUCH
DESTROYS NON-HUMAN TISSUE. WITH PIGS, THE BLOOD COAGULATION RESPONSE. AS BABOONS, AND LINKED TO THEIR BLOOD VESSELS
THERE ARE ADDED PROBLEMS, TOO. TO SUPPLY THE TRANSPLANTED ORGAN WITH OXYGEN.
ANTIBODIES IN
HUMANS REACT
TO THE GAL GENE
THATS PRESENT
IN PIGS ORGANS,
WHICH WILL CAUSE
BLOOD CLOTS
AND DEATH AFTER
TRANSPLANT.
MOHIUDDIN TEAMED UP WITH VIRGINIA-BASED
COMPANY REVIVICOR. BY GENE-EDITING
EMBRYOS, REVIVICOR CREATED PIGS LACKING
THE DANGEROUS GENE.

THE FIVE MONKEYS THAT RECEIVED PIGS HEARTS WERE ALSO GIVEN EXPERIMENTAL
ANTI-REJECTION DRUG CD40, TO WEAKEN THEIR IMMUNE SYSTEMS REACTION.

AFTER ONE YEAR,

WE STARTED REDUCING
THE DOSE OF THE DRUG
UNTIL WE MANAGED TO
KEEP IT TO A MINIMUM.

THE SWINE HEART WAS PLACED IN THE

BABOONS ABDOMEN, AS IT DIDNT NEED THATS GOOD FOR TRANSPLANT
TO FUNCTION AS A PUMPING ORGAN TO RECIPIENTS: HIGH DOSAGES
REPLACE THE ORIGINAL HEART THE TEST THAT SUPPRESS IMMUNE SYSTEMS
WAS TO SEE IF IT WOULD BE REJECTED. COULD LEAD TO INFECTIONS.

THE SAME METHOD CAN

THE HUMANISED HEARTS WERENT REJECTED BE USED FOR OTHER
UNTIL MOHIUDDIN STOPPED ADMINISTERING THE ORGANS SUCH AS LUNGS,
DRUG ALTOGETHER. ONE BABOON SURVIVED PANCREAS AND LIVER.
WITH A PIGS HEART FOR 945 DAYS A RECORD. WERE GETTING EVER
CLOSER TO HUMAN
XENOTRANSPLANTATION.

THE NEXT STEP IS A COMPLETE PIG-TO-

BABOON HEART TRANSPLANT. IN THE
FUTURE, ORGANS FROM TRANSGENIC PIGS
MIGHT SAVE HUMAN LIVES.
 102 / R&D / SUPERPOSITION COMPUTER / 3D MICROTUMOURS / SIMUL ATED BRAINS
THE QUANTUM
MECHANIC
Googles John Martinis outlines how hes
building his qubit computer and what it will do
John Martinis, University of Santa
Barbara physics professor and head
of Googles quantum computing lab,
is less concerned with the well-being
of Schrdingers infamous cat than
with how he can train it to solve
complex maths problems.
Last year, Martinis achieved the rst
step towards building a quantum
computer with a working group of nine
quantum bits (qubits) able to perform
error-checking 1. Now hes begun
scaling this up, with the aim of
demonstrating a 100-qubit group
within the next couple of years. WIRED
talked to him to him about the
challenges involved. Kathryn Nave
WIRED: Just how powerful does the
kind of quantum computer youre
building have the potential to be?
John Martinis: Classical computation
is based on the storage and manipulation
of simple bits of information, which can
be either a 0 or a 1. With quantum
computing, we use the laws of quantum
mechanics to build bits that are both 0
and 1 at the same time. This allows us
to create a parallel processing machine
where, instead of an algorithm running
the case 0 and then running the case 1
and so on to get an answer, we can run
0 and 1 simultaneously. With a single
bit that parallelisation speeds things
up by a factor of two to the power of one
youve doubled the speed but this
power increases for every additional
quantum bit you add, so the speed
increase is exponential. So once you get
to 300 qubits, youve sped things up by
a factor of two to the power of 300,
which is greater than the number of
atoms in the entire universe. You cant
achieve that with a classical computer.
COMPUTING
Q&A
How are you building your qubits and
why did you chose that method?
We build ours out of superconducting
aluminium wires, cooled to 20
millikelvins (-273.13C), which are
oscillating at about five or six gigahertz
mobile-phone frequencies. Then you
can write wave functions such that
there is current flowing in the oscillator
wire in two directions at the same time.
That doesnt make sense under classical
mechanics, but quantum mechanically
it gives us a simultaneous 0 and 1 state.
The advantage is that we can use
microwave engineering concepts to
design and operate these, which ties
into existing technology. We can put
them into integrated circuits2, so once
we learn how to do this with a few
qubits, we can scale up using current
semiconductor fabrication.
How diicult is it to engineer qubits
that can maintain both 0 and 1 states?
You can build a classical computer so
that it has tiny error rates, but you
cannot build that stability into your
quantum bits. Take the energy decay
process, for example. The 1 state of the
qubit has more energy than the 0 state
and the difference in energy is very
small, so if the qubit loses a tiny bit of
energy it falls into the 0 state and youve
lost the information it held. Thats
called decoherence. Because imperfect
materials can absorb energy we have
to develop a whole new way of building
our qubits. Typical microprocessors
use silicon dioxide as an insulator
between wires for example, but its
really lossy at low temperatures, so we
cant use it. Instead, we have to make
a freestanding air bridge whenever
were crossing wires over, so theres
no materials to absorb the energy.
For how long have you been able to
maintain qubits in a coherent state?
About 50 microseconds or so. That
sounds small, but its the ratio between
coherence time and operation time that
matters. We can run an operation in
about ten nanoseconds, so the ratio is
about 5,000 quite a large number of
o p e ra t i o n s b e f o re w e l o s e t h e
coherence. That 50 microseconds is the
result of ten years of research in how
to build the integrated circuits. Next is
to learn how to properly control the
qubits to extend the lifetime further.
1. & 3. Kelly, J., Can you give an indication of the scale
Barends, R., Fowler, of the challenge that the errors caused
A. G., Megrant, A.,
Jeffrey, E., White, T. by decoherence pose in making
C., & Chen, Z. (2015). your quantum computer reliable?
State preservation As with classical computing, theres a
by repetitive error
detection in a
threshold for how often you can get an
superconducting error if you have too many, youre
quantum circuit. making errors faster than you can
Nature, 519.
2. Devoret, M.
correct them. You need 1,000 qubits to
H., & Martinis, store one bit of information, so you need
J. M. (2005). the error rate to be less than one error
Implementing
in 1,000 operations. For that, we need
qubits with
superconducting to improve the error rate by a factor of
integrated circuits. 1018 (a quintillion). Weve been able to
In Experimental show error checking with a factor of ten
Aspects of Quantum
Computing (pp. 163- improvement in two qubits, and were
203). Springer US. looking at scaling up to tens or hundreds
of qubits. So we can just add more and
more qubits and the error correction
should get better and better.3
 IMAGE OF THE MONTH

How many qubits are you working

with and how will you scale this up?
Were still working at about the nine
qubit level, but were building up the
infrastructure for 100 or 200 qubits.
The core problem is that you cannot
copy quantum information and
everything is tied up with everything
e l s e. S o, u n l i k e w i t h c l a s s i c a l
computing, you cant break up the task
among diferent groups of engineers
and put it all back together again.
Cancer cells on the move
This image shows microtumours seen as blue clusters of
metastatic cancer cells moving through a white thicket of
collagen. Instead of observing individual cancer cells, scientists
at MITs Koch Institute created these clusters, along with a 3D
matrix to move in, to study how metastases interact with cells
in the body. This lifelike environment enables realistic testing
of treatments such as drug-loaded nanoparticles. Emma Bryce

Youre developing a quantum annealer,

like the one built by Canadian startup
D-Wave that Google purchased in 2013.
What this does this do?
A quantum annealer allows you to solve
optimisation problems by nding the
minimum energy solution for a system,
given how the qubits are interacting
together. Thats going to be very useful
for machine learning, where youre
trying to find the minimum of some
function for a neural net that gives you
the best fit for a large data set. This
takes a long time with classical
algorithms; with quantum algorithms
we should be able explore the entire
possibility space all at once to nd this
minimum. Were taking a different
approach from D-Wave. Theyve built
up lots and lots of qubits without
worrying too much about coherence
time, so we think its not going to get BRAINS
much more powerful than a laptop.
NEURON POWER
What else are you working on? WITH A PURPOSE
ILLUSTRATION: RAY ORANGES; LIZZIE GILL. PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEXANDRE ALBANESE; JEFFREY WYCKOFF;

I view the quantum annealer as the

analogue approach, but were also Chris Eliasmiths Spaun is smarter
SANGEETA BHATIA; KOCH INSTITUTE AT MIT. MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

trying to create a digital quantum than your average simulated brain

computer you could theoretically
program any problem you wanted on Chris Eliasmith, actually capable of
it. Were also planning a quantum the director of doing something
supremacy experiment, which would the University of with them. Theres
Waterloos Centre been an attitude
involve performing a calculation on a
for Theoretical of scale for scales
quantum computer that would require Neuroscience, sake, Eliasmith
the biggest supercomputer in the world Canada, is trying explains. But
to check. Maybe no classical computer to build a brain. for us, the focus lacks biological explains. If you
could check it. A classical computer can Eliasmiths artificial was discovering plausibility. So this have a hypothesis
model, Spaun, how neurones year, Eliasmiths about the
compete up to about 40-45 qubits, so
currently has just can be organised team finished mechanism of
wed need at least that many with good 2.5 million neurons to produce upgrading the Alzheimers, you
coherence time. Then, in the next ve to the human behaviours, such models highly could test that,
to ten years, maybe longer, we hope to brains 100 billion. as solving simple simplified artificial and if you have a
to solve a useful real-world problem But unlike more intelligence tasks. neurons from just drug that you think
with it. Lots of people speculate on computationally Spaun is much two equations per would have some
demanding closer to actual neuron to 90. particular impact,
the timescale for this, and theres a
simulations, which brain structure Thats allowed us you can simulate it
lot of different numbers, but Im have run for only than a typical to start simulating to see the effects
actually trying to build it and thats a few simulated artificial neural the effects of drugs on the brain and its
a really, really hard thing to do. seconds, its network, yet it still and diseases, he behaviour. KN
 PHOTOGRAPHY: CAMERAPRESS
NEXT ISSUE: THE SOLAR IMPULSE PILOT ON HIS BIGGEST ADVENTURE YET
 ILLUSTRATION: INTERCITY. CREATED IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AND INSPIRED BY A TOPOGRAPHIC MAP. SEVEN LAYERS WERE LASER CUT INTO SHEETS OF CORK BEFORE BEING GLUED TOGETHER AND PHOTOGRAPHED

Its dangerous to think that space offers an escape from Earths problems. Theres no Planet B. Martin Rees, p106
LONG-FORM STORIES / 105
M A R T I N R E E S, A S T R O N O M E R R O YA L , I N T R O D U C E S A S P E C I A L 1 6 - PA G E P H O T O G R A P H I C E X P LO R AT I O N O F
N A S A S N E X T M I S S I O N S A N D R E F L E C T S O N W H A T S P A C E T R A V E L W I L L O F F E R O U R C Y B O R G S E L V E S

My favourite childhood reading was
a comic called the Eagle, especially
the adventures of Dan Dare Pilot of
the Future with the brilliant artwork
of Frank Hamson depicting orbiting
cities, jetpacks and alien invaders.
When space ight became real, the suits
worn by the Nasa astronauts (and their
Soviet cosmonaut counterparts) were
therefore familiar, as were the routines
of launching, docking and so forth.
My generation followed the heroic
exploits. The first orbital flight, the
first spacewalk, the iconic picture
Earthrise taken by William Anders
from Apollo 8, and of course the Moon
landings. And the near-disaster of
Apollo 13 reminded us just how great
the risks were and the precarious
dependence on technology that was
primitive by todays standards.
Only 12 years elapsed between the
rst Sputnik and Neil Armstrongs one
small step. And this was a long time
ago in 1969. Had that momentum
been maintained, there would surely be
footprints on Mars by now: thats what
our generation expected. But the Apollo
programme was a space race against
the Russians. Once that race was won,
there was no motive for continuing
massive expenditure. Its nearly 45
years since Apollo 17, the last lunar
mission, returned to Earth. Todays
young people know the Americans
landed men on the Moon. They know
the Egyptians built pyramids. But both
seem ancient history, motivated by
almost equally bizarre national goals.
PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON
Hundreds more have ventured into
space in the ensuing decades but,
anticlimactically, they have done no
more than circle the Earth in a space
station. The International Space
Station (ISS) is probably the most
107
expensive artefact ever constructed. space will be a better use of materials
Its cost, plus that of the shuttles that mined from asteroids than bringing
until recently serviced it, ran well into them back to Earth). Every man-made
12 gures. The scientic and technical object currently in orbit has had to be
pay-of hasnt been negligible, but its launched from Earth. But later this
been immensely less cost-effective century, giant robotic fabricators will
than unmanned missions. Nor are be able to construct, in space, huge
these voyages inspiring in the way that solar-energy collectors and other
the heroic pioneering Russian and US artefacts. The Hubble Space Telescopes
space exploits undoubtedly were. The successors, with huge gossamer-thin
ISS only makes news when something mirrors assembled under zero gravity,
goes wrong when the loo fails, for will further expand our vision of stars,
instance or when astronauts perform galaxies and the wider cosmos.
stunts, such as the Canadian Chris It is robots, and not humans, that
Hadelds guitar-playing and singing. will build giant artefacts in space, and
Space technology has of course
burgeoned: we depend routinely on
orbiting satellites for communication,
satnav, environmental monitoring,
and weather forecasting some of
these satellites are large, but there
is a growing market for cheap minia-
turised ones. Telescopes have beamed
back data from the remotest parts of
the cosmos; spacecraft have journeyed
to all the planets of our Solar System.
Nasas New Horizons probe beamed
back amazing pictures from Pluto,
10,000 times farther away than the
Moon. And the European Space
Agencys Rosetta has landed a robot
on a comet. These spacecraft took ve
years to design and build, and then
ten years journeying to their remote
targets. Were aware how mobile
phones have changed in the last 15
years so imagine how much more
sophisticated todays follow-ups to
these missions could be.
During this century, the entire
Solar System planets, moons and
asteroids will be explored and mapped
by flotillas of tiny robotic craft. The
next step would be space mining and
fabrication. (And fabrication in
 explore the outer planets. Moreover,
these robots wont be humanoid in size
and shape. Humans are adapted to the
Earths environment. Something more
spider-like would be better suited to the
weaker gravity of Pluto or the asteroids.
But what role will humans play? Theres
no denying that Nasas Curiosity, now
trundling across Martian craters,
108 may miss startling discoveries that
no human geologist could overlook. But
machine learning is advancing fast, as
is sensor technology, whereas the cost
gap between manned and unmanned
missions remains huge. The practical
need for manned space flight gets
ever weaker with each advance made
in robots and miniaturisation.
Nonetheless, I hope that some people
now living will walk on Mars as an
adventure, and as a step towards the
stars. But Nasa will confront political
obstacles in achieving this goal within
a feasible budget. The American public
is risk-averse. The Shuttles two
catastrophic accidents (out of nearly
140 launches) were national traumas
in the US each led to a three-year
stalling of the programme as near-futile
attempts were made to ensure even
greater safety. The US public regarded
a two per cent risk as unacceptable.
Thats why I think the best future
for Nasa is to share expertise and
collaborate with outts like SpaceX and
Blue Origin indeed, to let the private
sector front the missions. These
private ventures can tolerate higher
risks than a western government could
impose on publicly funded civilians;
they can thereby cut costs compared
to Nasa (or the ESA). There would,
nonetheless, be many volunteers
accepting high risks and perhaps
even one-way tickets driven by
the same motives as early explorers,
mountaineers and the like.
These opportunities should be
promoted as adventures or extreme
sports the phrase space tourism
should be avoided. It lulls people
into unrealistic condence.
y 2100, courageous pioneers in the
mould of (say) Felix Baumgartner, who
broke the sound barrier in free fall from
a high-altitude balloon (or Sir Ranulph
Fiennes, who, among many feats,
dragged a sledge to the South Pole in
the Antarctic winter), may have estab-
lished bases independent from the
Earth on Mars, or maybe on asteroids.
Elon Musk (aged 45) says he wants to
die on Mars but not on impact. Devel-
opment of self-sustaining commu-
nities remote from the Earth would
also ensure that advanced life would
survive, even if the worst conceivable
catastrophe befell our planet.
But dont expect mass emigration
from Earth. Nowhere in our Solar
System ofers an environment even as
clement as the Antarctic or the top of
Everest. Its a dangerous delusion to
think that space ofers an escape from
Earths problems. Theres no Planet B.
Indeed, space is an inherently
hostile environment to which humans
are ill-adapted. For that reason, even
though we may wish to regulate genetic
and cyborg technology on Earth, we
should surely wish the space pioneers
good luck in using all such techniques
to adapt to different atmospheres,
different g forces, and so forth.
This might be the first step towards
divergence into a new species: the
beginning of the post-human era.
To nd an environment as clement
as our Earth, we need to look far
beyond the Solar System to the
exoplanets orbiting other stars. But
the transit time to other stars, using
known technology, exceeds a human
lifetime. And it will remain so even if
futuristic forms of propulsion can be
developed and deployed involving
nuclear power, matter-antimatter
annihilation, or pressure from giant
laser beams. Interstellar travel (except
for unmanned probes, DNA samples,
and so on) is therefore an enterprise
for post-humans. They could be organic
creatures (or cyborgs) which had won
the battle with death, or perfected
the techniques of hibernation or
suspended animation. A journey
lasting thousands of years is a doddle
if you are near-immortal and are not
constrained to a human lifespan.
Th e re m u s t b e c h e m i c a l a n d
metabolic limits to the size and
processing power of wet organic
brains. Maybe were close to these
already. But fewer limits constrain
electronic computers (still less,
perhaps, quantum computers). And
theres no limit to how widely such
machines could spread. Earths
biosphere, in which organic life
has symbiotically evolved, is not
essential sustenance for advanced
AI. Indeed, it is far from optimal:
interplanetary and interstellar space,
a hostile environment for humans, will
be the preferred arena where non-bi-
ological brains may, in the distant
future, far surpass human capabilities.
Martin Rees has been Astronomer
Royal since 1995
 FUTURE DREAMS FROM PLANET EARTH
W I R E D T A K E S A N E X C L U S I V E T O U R O F N A S A S R O C K E T S A N D R O B O T S F R O M Y E S T E R D A Y T O T O M O R R O W

PHOTOGRAPHY: BENEDICT REDGROVE

110

ROCKET SCIENCE
DOCUMENTED
You are about to witness the
future of Nasa. WIRED has
been given exclusive access
to document the space
agencys next products
as well as some classics
that boldly took us here.
These never-before-seen
photographs are part of an
eight-year project that took
us deep inside its facilities.
They show that, although
shifts in funding priorities
and the rise of commercial
space travel are changing
Nasas focus, its Journey
to Mars project exemplifies
how it's as dedicated
as ever to pushing the
boundaries of space travel.
The photographs were taken
by Benedict Redgrove, who
visited three Nasa sites.
He uses Alpa MAX and 12
STC cameras, stitching
together multiple images to
create photographs with an
epic quality. I shoot about
40 images, he explains,
then layer them to achieve
the highest definition.
Redgrove's project wont be
complete until 2018, but for
now, immerse yourself in
WIREDs epic space journey.
Ruby Lott-Lavigna

OPENING PAGE

SPACE SHUTTLE
ATLANTIS STS-135
Responsible for delivering
supplies and parts to the
International Space Station
(ISS), Atlantis was the last
orbiter to be launched in
Nasas 30-year space shuttle
programme. It was also the
penultimate space shuttle
to be built; its final mission
was in July 2011. Atlantis
had exterior tiles that could
withstand temperatures
of up to 1,648C. The nose
cap, where the heat is
most extreme, consists of
reinforced carbon-carbon
coating, a material thats able
to withstand the extreme
conditions experienced
during launch, ascent,
re-entry and landing. The
orbiters surface is covered by
a low-cost thermal protection
system designed to be
reusable and lightweight.
PREVIOUS SPREAD
VEHICLE ASSEMBLY
BUILDING
The Vehicle Assembly
Building at Nasas Kennedy
Space Center in Florida is
home to these two rocket
assembly bays, 11.5 metres
long and weighing 150
tonnes apiece. The facility
was used to construct each
of the Apollo spacecraft
and is being extended to
accommodate the Space
Launch System and the
Orion spacecraft, both to
be used in Nasas Journey
to Mars mission. Its new
configuration will also
allow commercial space
companies such as SpaceX
to use the site. Were
upgrading fire systems and
data lines, says Nasa public
affairs specialist Lisa Fowler.
Platforms will correspond to
where workers need access
to assemble their rockets.
ABOVE 112
LUNAR ROVER
VEHICLE
Costing $38 million (28m
the equivalent of more spacesuit was designed and
than $225 million today) on
its completion in 1971, this
battery-powered rover is
one of the most expensive
vehicles ever built. It
weighs 210kg and was
designed to hold a payload
of 490kg when travelling
on the surface of the Moon.
Another Lunar Rover Vehicle
was transported into space
in the Lunar Module, and
is still sitting on the Moon
today. It was constructed
within just 17 months and
was used in three Apollo
programmes during 1971 To maintain a comfortable
and 1972. The wheels
are constructed of zinc-
coated woven steel strands
designed to withstand the
Moons unique atmosphere,
terrain and pressure.
RIGHT
NASAS CURRENT
SPACESUIT
Introduced in 1981, this
produced by ILC Dover (an
offshoot of the bra company
Playtex) in Frederica,
Delaware, and
its still being worn by
Nasa astronauts today.
Its weight (49.5kg) and
bulk makes looking down
impossible, so controls
mounted on the chest are
positioned in reverse and
can be viewed using a wrist-
mounted mirror. The helmet
has a visor coated in a
thin layer of gold to deflect
harmful rays from the Sun.
core body temperature, a
liquid cooling and ventilation
system circulates water
through 91.5 metres
of narrow tubing in a
layer beneath the suit.
LEFT
VALKYRIE
R5
Designed to work in
environments deemed too
hazardous for astronauts,
R5 is the third and
newest iteration of Nasa's
robonauts. Whereas the first
two, R1 and R2, are used to
perform repetitive tasks on
the ISS, Valkyrie with its
three fingers and thumb
is being developed to mine
resources, build habitats
autonomously on the
surface of Mars, complete
disaster-relief manoeuvres
and work alongside
astronauts. The electric
humanoid has on-board
computing and sensing,
a 1.8kWh battery, 44 degrees
of body freedom and is
currently being developed
at various universities
around the world to allow
collision-free movement.
ABOVE 117
ROBONAUT
1 MODULE
Looking like a futuristic
centaur, R1 is the first of the
three robonaut models to be
developed by Nasa. Available
in various forms (the part-
vehicle iteration is pictured),
R1 was completed in 2000
to carry out tasks usually
undertaken by humans, but
controlled by astronauts
via a telepresence control
system. It addresses the
issue of astronauts limited
movement in spacesuits,
with Nasas design brief to
build a robot with dexterity
exceeding that of a suited
human. Its helmet, unusual
in robot design, consists of
an epoxy resin created at
the Johnson Space Center
(where it currently resides,
having never travelled
to space) to strengthen
it against collisions.
PREVIOUS SPREAD
ISS DESTINY
The module shown here is
based at the Johnson Space
Center in Houston, Texas.
It's an exact replica of the
US laboratory on the ISS and
is used as a training facility
for astronauts before they
embark on space travel.
Measuring 8.5m by 4.2m and
weighing 14.5 tonnes, Destiny
was brought up to the ISS
during the STS-98 mission
and is continually being
developed (this photo doesnt
reflect recent changes to the
ISS version). When introduced
to the station, the lab
consisted of five International
Standard Payload Racks
shelf-like areas where
research projects would take
place. Over time these have
increased; there are now
several racks for experiments
and Earth observations.
LEFT
BOEING CST-100
STARLINER
Never mind the Lake
District why not holiday
in space? Designed by
Boeing in collaboration
with Bigelow Aerospace,
the CST-100 Starliner crew
capsule will for be the first
Nasa-associated craft to
be used for commercial
trips. Like the Orion, the
capsule is reusable, and
it will be able to hold up to
seven passenger en route
to private space locations
such as the proposed
Bigelow Aerospace
Commercial Space
Station. Comfort for paying
customers whilst travelling
will be a priority, so the CST
will offer Wi-Fi and LED Sky
Lighting. Its first crewed
flight is scheduled for 2018,
where it will transport two
astronauts to the ISS.
ABOVE
ORION CREW
MODULE
Currently in production, this
reusable capsule cell will
house four to six astronauts
in deep-space missions for
up to three weeks as part of
Orion's first manned mission
in 2023. The capsule will
be eight metres tall once a
cylinder providing water,
oxygen and power propulsion
is affixed to the crew
module. When complete, the
5m-wide module will weigh
about 8.5 tonnes and be
constructed from the same
aluminium-lithium alloy used
in the Delta IV and Atlas V
rockets, and will be covered
by Nomex thermal blankets
in areas not exposed to
ultra-high temperatures.
It is currently being built
by Lockheed Martin, an
American security and
defence company.
ABOVE 119

SPACE EXPLORATION
VEHICLE
This is Nasas newest
in-space transportation
vehicle. Used for traversing
the surface of solid planets,
the Space Exploration
Vehicle can house two
astronauts (or four in an
emergency) for up to 14
days, travelling at speeds
of up to 10kph. It can drive
forwards and sideways,
and, unlike the Apollo rover,
has a pressurised cabin,
dispensing the need for
spacesuits. With wheels
that pivot 360, the rovers
main function is exploration,
allowing astronauts to
inspect objects outside the
vehicle as well as pick up and
move items using attachable
tools such as cranes and
bulldozer blades. It is being
developed at the Johnson
Space Center in Houston.
PREVIOUS SPREAD
ATLANTIS REAR
ENGINES
These engines, along with
Atlantis's solid rocket
boosters, provide the
thrust needed to accelerate
the space shuttle from
4,800kph to more than
27,400kph within six
minutes. The small dents
on its tiles are created by
debris kicked up by the
force of the launch. In order
to reach the desired take-
off speed, its main engines
burn up more than two
million litres of propellant,
made up of liquid nitrogen
the second coldest liquid on
Earth, with a boiling point of
-195C and liquid oxygen,
which creates an exhaust of
water vapour. According to
Nasa, the rate of fuel use
would drain the average-
sized family swimming pool
within 25 seconds.
ABOVE
APOLLO-ERA
GLOVE
This glove, found at the
Johnson Space Center,
is detachable from the
spacesuit and comprised of
three parts: an inner comfort
glove and two pressurised
layers. It is reinforced to
allow interaction with sharp
rocks or tools which could
otherwise damage the
material, and has integrated
wire cables for extra support
without sacrificing flexibility.
The external material is
Chromel-R, a fabric made
from ultra-strong and
flexible chromium steel
fibre. A silicon dispersion
coating is applied to the
palm and fingers to help
astronauts grip objects,
and the hard shells on the
fingertips are made of high-
strength, silicone-rubber-
coated nylon tricot.
LEFT
CRAWLER-
TRANSPORTER
First used in 1965, it's the
Crawler-transporters job to
move completed shuttles
from the Kennedy Space
Center's Vehicle Assembly
Building to the launch pad.
Having transported rockets
such as the Saturn V, the
40m by 35m vehicles there
are two of them, called Hans
and Franz were mothballed
after the Space Shuttle
programme ended in 2011
but are expected to return
to work when the era of
commercial shuttles begins.
It takes a team of nearly
30 engineers, technicians
and drivers to operate the
vehicle at a steady speed
of 1.6kph when fully loaded,
and it uses hydraulic
suspension to maintain
a level platform when
transporting heavy loads.
ABOVE 123
SPACE SHUTTLE
TRAINER FLIGHT DECK
Every Space Shuttle
astronaut has operated
the Trainer Flight Deck in
their training programme.
Last used in the STS-135
mission in 2011, this cockpit
and lower storage area of
the flight deck was originally
found in the Space Vehicle
Mockup Facility in Houston
but, now decommissioned,
is now on display at the
Museum of Flight in Seattle.
Prior to deployment on a
mission, crews would spend
years training in the flight
deck the wear and tear
on the control stick and
main panel bear testament
to the thousands of hours
would-be astronauts spent
here. The cockpit holds five
people the two seats in this
photo accommodate the
commander and the pilot.
 ABOVE 124
an
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SATURN V STAGE over from Saturn V s first With than , R a ch el Kraft,
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metres. At this stage, the Brandi K D h ri es , Tr ent Perro
ly O. H u mp o rn er,
crafts velocity would increase Kel
riffin, Jen
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These five J-2 engine
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of the second stage of
Saturn 25,000kph. The motors Allison Ra Martin,
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lis o n Mitchell,
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Nasa's Apollo missions
between separated from the rocket, n a Pell,
1966 and 1973. It's the Moore, Ken assagne,
most after six minutes of driving Meridyth n , Ly n C h
powerful hydrogen-fue Rega
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deliver Used motors are jettisoned Victoria P n d
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AFRICA

B Y C L A I R M A C D O U G A L L

P H O T O G R A P H Y :
B E N E D I C T E VA N S & I L A N G O D F R E Y
THIS IS ROBERT SHAKA , AN IT WORKER IN UGANDA WHO WAS TRACKED AND
ARRESTED AFTER BEING SUSPECTED OF MOCKING HIS GOVERNMENT ON
FA C E B O O K . H E D E N I E S I T WA S H I M . B U T A S A F R I C A N G O V E R N M E N T S C O N F R O N T
O N L I N E D I S S E N T, T H E A C C U S E D A R E F I N D I N G T H E M S E L V E S C O R N E R E D

ROBERT
SHAKA
EDGED HIS MODEST WHITE
sedan through the dark alleyway.
He had switched of his car headlights
and scanned the scene as he crept away
from his home in Kampala and towards
his office. Shaka sensed something
was wrong as soon as he hit the main
road. A sports van was parked in
the shadows near some bushes; the
faint light from a security compound
revealed the silhouettes of seven men
inside, along with the outlines of their
Kalashnikovs. He had to move quickly.
It was a Monday morning in June
2015, and Shaka, a middle-aged
father of two, who worked in IT at
the US embassy in Kampala, knew
that his movements were being
monitored: in February 2015 he had
been charged with Issuing ofensive
communication a vaguely worded
violation listed in the Computer Misuse
Act thats used by the Ugandan
authorities to intimidate internet users
and placed on police bond.
Shaka was charged with being Tom
Voltaire Okwalinga, the name given to
an anonymous Facebook prole more
commonly known by Ugandans as TVO,
a widely read government dissenter.
The charge sheet accused him of
disguising as Tom Voltaire Okwalinga
between 2011 and 2015 and wilfully
and repeatedly using a computer, with
no purpose of legitimate communi-
cation, disturbing the right of privacy
of H.E. [His Excellency] Yoweri Kaguta
Museveni by posting statements as
regards his health condition on social
media, to wit, Facebook.
Shaka, along with other government
critics, had been accused of being
TVO as early as 2013. He dismissed
the allegations and initially didnt
ta k e t h e p o l i c e to o s e r i o u s l y.
Shakas official online pseudonym
is Maverick Blutaski, a careful
government critic with a more modest
following and ambition than TVO.
In August 2015, two months after
Shaka appeared in court, he received
a strange typewritten letter that he
says was given to him by a security
oicer at his workplace late one Friday
night, when no one else was around. It
read: An unspecied Ugandan oicial
has threatened your life in relation to
your suspected political activities.
Below this message was a yellow
handwritten note reading: Please
pass to Robert Shaka.
W H E N W I R E D I N T E RV I E W S S H A K A
in two long sessions over Skype, he
sits in his neat, grey-walled bedroom.
(He has asked us not to disclose his
location.) He has curly hair and a
thick moustache and recounts the
story of his arrest in a long-winded
fashion with a husky, rolling voice
and emphatic hand gestures. The
government still does not know his
whereabouts, he says. He is due to
make a court appearance in a matter
of days and is concerned about the
safety of those who are his sureties.
The IT specialist seems an unlikely
online hero. A quiet, middle-class
father of two young boys and a baby
girl, Robert Shaka is a man who can
stay indoors for days on end reading,
playing games on his PlayStation and
watching news and political debates
on television. Having been a diligent
worker for the US embassy for 15 years,
he is anything but revolutionary and
far from a radical figure. He simply
supports economic equality, liberty
and freedom of expression.
Shaka has a big personality and
a theatrical manner, and pays close
attention to intricate details when
he tells a story. But he can also come
across as a quiet guy who got caught
up in a paranoid governments
obsession with a controversial online
character. Shaka never imagined
that his arrest would become symbolic
of how repressive states throughout
the region are clamping down on
freedom of expression online.
Ugandan journalists liken TVO to
Edward Snowden, whereas Shaka
sees the former CIA contractor in
more basic terms an employee who
betrayed the trust of his employer,
rather than a patriot ghting for the
freedom and ideals of his home nation.
He sees TVO in a very diferent way: a
legendary rebrand who can break
news, break secrets and publish
anything that he can land on, in a
pseudo dictatorship whose western
allies have ignored the depredations
of its leader because he is an ally in
the so-called war on terror in Africa.
The evidence against Shaka is yet
to be presented in court, but many
theories about TVO have been posed:
that he is a government insider or a
composite group of activists with
high-profile sources rather than an
individual, for one. This is the case with
Baba Jukwa, a blogger well known in
Zimbabwe, who is said to be the work
of a group of defectors from Robert
Mugabes ZANU-PF party. Individuals
have been arrested in the hunt for
Baba Jukwa but, like Tom Voltaire,
the blog has continued. WIRED asks
Shaka whether he is TVO.
Im not TVO. A long, solemn pause.
Im not TVO.
Ugandas most bombastic and
audacious Facebook personality is
followed by more than 10,000 citizens,
politicians, members of the media and
the diaspora. Drawing on the irreverence
of Voltaire, the 18th-century French
philosopher known for his acerbic
attacks on the establishment, TVO leaks
Above: Shakas
lawyer Nicholas Opiyo
founded human-
rights organisation
Chapter Four
Above, right:
Ugandan security
services lunch
in Constitutional
Square, Kampala

state secrets, breaks corruption scandals
and airs wild rumours in a distinctly
Ugandan way: hes brash, vulgar,
no-holds-barred and very funny. He
openly attacks and mocks the Ugandan
political elite and calls for revolution,
and the overthrow of Museveni, a former
rebel leader and military strongman who
has been Ugandas commander in chief
for 30 years, and who recently extended
his mandate in widely disputed national
elections held in February 2016.
TVO is unabashedly pro-oppo-
sition. He writes in capitals, airs secret
recordings, unveils political plots and
posts mocking, home-made memes of
the nations most powerful oicials.
News teams trawl the page for leads as
it breaks stories before the mainstream
media and laugh when it routinely
humiliates government spokespeople.
The state has already arrested other
people for being TVO, but has released
them all due to lack of evidence.
According to Charles Bichachi, managing
editor of Ugandas leading daily
newspaper, the Daily Monitor, the fate
of the person behind TVO will be grim.
He will be dead, he tells WIRED. I dont
think he would survive even for one day
because he has stepped on a lot of toes.
129
USE OF THE INTERNET HAS
SKYROCKETED IN AFRICA ,
PA R T I C U L A R LY I N E A S T E R N A N D
southern regions. In Uganda, internet
penetration has increased fourfold
in the past ve years, growing from
7.9 per cent to 37.4 per cent and it
is expected to reach at least 50 per
cent in the coming years.
The widespread availability of the
internet, the low price of data and cheap
Chinese devices flooding the market
has made social media suddenly widely
accessible. This growth hasnt always
been greeted with enthusiasm by some
governments. Countries including
Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda
continue to assert control over the
burgeoning virtual space and silence
online dissidents. Weasel-worded laws
and computer misuse acts define
ofences in broad strokes, as does inter-
ception of communications legislation.
Governments say these laws have been
drafted to ght terrorism, cybercrime,
child pornography and encouragement
of genocide and political violence. But
many of the laws are vague, contain
loopholes and have little judicial or
independent oversight, giving govern-
ments the power to stie freedom of
expression, spy on opponents, arrest
pundits and oblige ISPs to block sites
and shut down social channels.
The State of Internet Freedom in
East Africa 2015 report, released in
September 2015 and sponsored by
the Collaboration of International ICT
Policy for East and Southern Africa,
found a pattern of laws being passed
that threaten the right to freedom
of expression, both online and oline.
It cited a rise in abuses and attacks
on internet freedom.
There has been a pattern of crack-
downs on social media during
elections in many African countries.
In two elections this year alone,
President Museveni ordered the
shutting down of social media, as
did 32-year-serving President Denis
Sassou Nguesso of the Republic of the
Congo, who issued a blanket blackout
o f c o m m u n i c a t i o n s, i n c l u d i n g
internet, telephone and SMS, due
to reasons of security and national
safety during the March 20 presi-
dential elections. Other nations, such
as Tanzania, Burundi and Kenya, have
passed repressive laws related to the
internet in the run up to elections.
Whereas real-world physical abuses
remain the focus for human rights
defenders, there is a growing legal
and moral recognition within insti-
tutions such as the United Nations
regarding the right to privacy and
freedom of expression and assembly
online. In 2015, the UN appointed
Joseph Cannataci as its first special
rapporteur on the right to privacy.
Activists point to a growing consensus
that censorship and abuses online
are often linked to broader attacks
on human rights and civil liberties.
Left: Robert Shaka,
who spoke to WIRED
via Skype from an
undisclosed location
W I R E D M E E T S S H A K A S L AY W E R
Nicholas Opiyo, a stern young man
who answers in complete sentences
as if he is in a courtroom speaking to
a clerk. He says he took on Shakas
case because the team saw it as a
watershed, trend-setting case for
free expression on social media,
one that violates the constitutional
right to freedom of expression.
On every occasion they have refused
to give us the basis of their case, he says.
In Uganda, the crackdown of
online dissidents comes off the
back of new legislation restricting
freedom of expression and assembly.
The Non-governmental Organisa-
tions bill passed in 2015, allows the
government to shut down organi-
sations that engage in acts preju-
dicial to the interests of Uganda and
the dignity of the people of Uganda.
The Public Order Management Act,
passed in 2013, requires that Ugandans
who gather in groups of more than
three to discuss political issues seek
permission from the government.
Ugandas presidential elections in
February 2016 sharply illustrated this.
The government tightly controlled and
shut down public gatherings. Soldiers
were camped out around Constitutional
Square in the capital city of Kampala,
where locals have gathered and voiced
dissent for decades. Now the square
is typically empty. Nearby is a lonely
sculpture of a man raising his arms to
the sky in an empty patch of concrete.
Ugandas leading opposition candidate
Kizza Besigye was denied access to
parts of the city and was arrested before
the inauguration, and his supporters
are routinely arrested and tear-gassed.
131
FOR ONLINE ACTIVISTS,
TH E INTE RNET
IS A REFUGE FROM THE REPRESSIVE
realities of the Ugandan political
sphere. But the regions governments
are increasingly buying surveillance
technology that is used without
adequate legal oversight. Reporters
a n d c i v i l s o c i e t y ex p e r ts h av e
SILENCING called into question the ethics and
CIVILIANS legality of the invasive surveillance
ACROSS AFRICA technology of companies such as the
UK- and Germany-based Gamma
ETHIOPIA International that sells software
In 2006, the called FinFisher, and Milan-based
government began Hacking Team, which sells what it
requiring internet describes as offensive security.
cafs to register Both companies have been investi-
the names and gated for selling their products to
addresses of their repressive governments Uganda
customers, and and Ethiopia to name but two.
submit the lists to Hacking Teams products can
the police. mine and export all data on devices
and gain access to webcams and
BURUNDI c a m e ra s to c o n d u c t re a l - t i m e
In 2010, Jean- surveillance. Once it is installed
Claude Kavumbagu, on a hard drive the software is
editor of Net Press, difficult to detect. In April 2016,
was arrested and the Italian government revoked
threatened with Hacking Teams export licence to
life imprisonment sell its technology outside of the
for reporting on EU following the disclosure that
terrorist attacks the company was selling to Egypts
in Uganda. president Abdel Fattah el-Sisis
government and other authori-
TUNISIA tarian regimes. This coincided with
In the wake of a rise in tensions between the two
social unrest in countries when, two months earlier,
2010, the Tunisian Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni was
government used found dead on the outskirts of Cairo.
malicious code His body showed signs of extreme
in an attempt to torture and Egypts security services
access the entire were suspected to be involved.
countrys online Spyware has long been used by
passwords. regimes in the Middle East and North
Africa, and is now gaining ground in
sub-Saharan Africa. An investigation
by human rights NGO Privacy Inter-
national was sparked by allegations
that the Ugandan government was
using FinFisher malware. According
to the groups report, For God and
My President: State Surveillance in
Uganda, the Chieftaincy of Military
Intelligence and the Uganda Police
Force acting on presidential orders,
used an intrusion malware, short
for malicious software, to infect
the communications devices of
key opposition leaders, media and
e s ta b l i s h m e n t i n s i d e r s, i n a n
operation known as Fungua Macho
open your eyes in Swahili
following a disputed election in
2011. Researchers also claimed
that the government issued bribes
to get access to the phones and
c o m p u te r s o f k e y m e m b e r s o f
the opposition and created fake
hotspots to ensnare others.
The Ugandan government denies
the allegations, and has threatened to
sue the BBC for publishing an article
on the findings. However, in a letter to
Privacy International, Gamma refused
to either confirm nor deny that it
had sold malware to Uganda, adding
that it does not supply in contra-
vention of UN sanctions nor did it
encourage misuse of its product.
The statement also stressed that
its p ro d uct had been effe ct iv e
against drug cartels, organised crime
and paedophile rings.
Invasive software that is diicult to
trace like that provided by Hacking
Team can be used to target dissidents
beyond national borders. Bill Marczak,
a senior research fellow at Citizen
Lab at the University of Toronto,
an organisation that focuses on the
relationship between technology,
human rights and global security,
uncovered the rst known case of an
African country attempting to access
digital accounts across continents.
According to Marczak, the Ethiopian
government made three attempts to
target the Skype and email accounts
of exiled journalists and human-rights
activists at a Virginia-based television
station, ESAT. Unlike most African
countries, Ethiopia has a monopoly
over the telecommunications network
and can easily tap lines and monitor
calls which could prove fatal for
on-the-ground sources.
SHAKA BECAME SUSPICIOUS
about his arrest and the fact that he had
to report to the Criminal Investigations
Division for more than six months, but
he kept quiet, hoping that it would go
away. But, after a tip-off from an old
school friend that a senior member
of the military intelligence unit was
trying to track down Shakas address,
Opiyo advised his client to go public
to protect himself. The evening before
Shakas arrest, broadcaster NTV Uganda
aired an interview with him in which
he denied being TVO and called on the
government to stop cracking down
on its online critics. Shaka expected
a backlash, but not to be ambushed
outside his house early one morning.
When that happened, he acted
decisively. He turned right and sped
of to a petrol station down the road.
He pulled up by a petrol pump, got out
of his car and folded his arms across
his chest to make sure his hands
were visible. Police oicers dressed
in plain clothes and armed with AK47s
informed Shaka that they would be
taking him to the Special Investiga-
tions Unit (SIU). The police searched
his car and found his mobile phone.
As the officers milled about, Shaka
took a second phone from the inside
pocket of his brown suede blazer and
sent an SMS to his brother, a work
colleague, a friend in London and a
friend in Washington: They have
taken me to SIU. Please come and
rescue me. Inform others.
At SIU he was escorted into a large
hall full of prisoners, many of whom
Shaka says had been detained without
charge: defectors from the Rwandan
army; terror suspects; people accused
of violent ofences. The grey cell blocks
had mats on the ground instead of beds.
The prisoners felt a sense of fatalism
many were held without the knowledge
of their family members and some said
they had been tortured. Shaka says that
one man in his late thirties who was
accused of stealing scrap metal from
his boss limped into the cells weeping
after what he said was a thrashing with
a metal bar that left bruises all over his
body. Shaka was afraid, but unlike the
other inmates his family, lawyer and the
US embassy at least knew where he was.
Within a few hours, news of Shakas
arrest broke, not on mainstream
media, but on the Tom Voltaire
Okwalinga Facebook page. You must
release Robert Shaka with immediate
efect He is not even TVO I advise
you to continue looking for TVO until
you grow grey hair, and by that time
it will be TVO looking for you, read
the post. At the time of writing,
the case has been under way for a
year, but the state has yet to make
public the evidence against Shaka.
132
J OS E P H OW I N O, A YO U N G W E B
DEVELOPER WHO HAS helped OFFICIALS
set up Twitter accounts, says he doubts
Below: the the government has any evidence
Kampala petrol against Shaka and whether it has
station where the capacity to unmask TVO. The
armed police government has written to Facebook
officers ambushed requesting the identity of Tom Voltaire
Shaka before Okwalinga. It denied the request. Owino
taking him to himself was arrested in October 2014
the Special and detained at SIU after being accused
Investigations Unit of hacking the presidents Twitter
account. He spent the night in jail and
was released without charge.
I see more efort to muzzle peoples
voices, says Owino, who adds that
messaging apps and social media
are spreading beyond the Kampala
middle class and elite. He believes
the governments capacity to conduct
surveillance is limited, but he is still
concerned by its appetite to monitor
online activity. During the elections,
the inspector general of police, Kale
Kayihura, ordered the Ugandan
Communications Commission to
shut down social media, citing undis-
closed security threats, by using black
holing, a technique whereby traic is
directed away from the IP addresses
of specied platforms. To get round
this, many Ugandans downloaded
virtual private networks to bypass the
system. Opposition party the Forum
for Democratic Change was able to
release its own tally of votes even
as its headquarters was tear-gassed
and blocked by police, and its leader
Kizza-Besigye was under house arrest.
During the 2011 elections, the
Ugandan government ordered mobile-
phone networks to intercept text
messages containing words associated
with the Arab spring, such as Egypt,
Tunisia, Mubarak and people
power. The same year, it also ordered
the shutdown of social media during the
Walk to Work demonstrations, orches-
trated by the opposition after security
forces killed nine bystanders. Back then,
many of the internet and mobile service
providers ignored the governments
request. In 2016, they complied.
James Saaka heads Ugandas National
Information Technology Authority,
part of the Ministry of Information
and Communication Technology.
He tells WIRED about the Ugandan
governments plan to build an IT park
that would create thousands of jobs.
Coverage of the court case contesting
the election results ashes across a TV
in the corner of his oice. WIRED steers
the conversation towards the social-
media blackout. Freedom of speech
doesnt mean that I should abuse you,
he says. We can have diferent views
but put them in a proper way.
The division that investigated
Shakas case is Ugandas Media Crimes
Department, part of the Criminal Inves-
tigations Directorate. The agency is led
by Simon Kuteesa an amiable man in
his fties and a former state prosecutor
who laughs like a jester. When asked to
dene what ofensive communication
is, he reads from his smartphone in a
playful sing-song tone, that it is illegit-
imate communication over a phone,
computer or other electronic device
that undermines a persons right to
privacy and also causes annoyance.
W h e n W I R E D a s k s f o r a m o re
detailed explanation, the response
is evasive and ambiguous. Ofensive
communication appears to have
no distinct definition; its whatever
the authorities decide it is.
ROBERT ALAI IS AN ONLINE
pundit in Kenya with 492,000 Twitter
followers. He has been arrested more
than 15 times in response to comments
he has made on radio, blogs and social
media. Alai is in many ways an unmasked
Tom Voltaire Okwawalinga: he says
outrageous things online and sometimes
his leaks are spot on. He was charged with
undermining the authority of a public
officer for calling President Uhuru
Kenyatta an adolescent president in
a tweet on December 13, 2015. Kenya
must hold elections before August
2017 and Alai is concerned that some
activists will have to leave the country.
If I see the president or a policeman
doing something wrong, am I going to Weve had a lot of issues with terrorism
be charged with undermining? he asks.
Alai is a necessary voice: we may
not agree with what he says, but he
has a right to say it, says Boniface
Mwangi, a photographer and human
rights activist as he sits in his office
in PAWA254. A collective of artists,
film-makers and photographers in
Nairobi, it works for social change.
Every society needs an Alai.
But Mwangi, who photographed
Kenyas post-election ethnic violence in
2007, is fearful that the government will
try to censor and shut down social media
in the lead up to next years elections.
His belief is that Kenyans, Africas most
tech-savvy and politically engaged
online community, wont let a social-
media blackout happen without a ght.
As internet penetration continues to
grow and social platforms become more
integrated in the lives of Kenyans, so
too does online surveillance. In 2013,
Citizen Lab found three BlueCoat
PacketShaper installations software
that monitors users interactions on
services such as Facebook, Twitter,
Google Mail and Skype in countries
including Kenya, Afghanistan, Bahrain,
China, Kenya, Malaysia, Qatar and
Russia. Publicly available information
on surveillance in Kenya is scarce.
The rise in terrorism since 2011 means
that security is a subject oicials dont
want to discuss on the record.
In March, WIRED met Joseph
Mucheru, the minister for information
communications who used to work for
Google in Kenya, at a Nairobi hotel.
and there are sensitivities in what we
do, he says. I dont want to comment
about what we are doing with security.
When asked about the governments
capacity to conduct online surveil-
lance, he replied: We are suiciently
covered. He refused to elaborate.
L I K E M A N Y UG A N DA N S W H O H AV E Below: Joseph
only known one president for 30 years, Owino helped
Robert Shaka blogs about government to streamline
repression and the need for change. Ugandan president
For him, the internet is a means by Musevenis social-
which citizens can fight back. He media profiles
says the governments tactics will before being
lead to more online critics setting arrested for hacking
up anonymous profiles. But online his Twitter account
dissidents can still be silenced if
the government develops greater
online surveillance capabilities.
More people are coming online,
he says. The government is feeling it
because it cannot win the propaganda
war on social media, thats why they
want to shut it down.
Hes optimistic, though, that online
African dissidents will win the battle.
It may not be in the next ve years,
but the conversation is so rich, is so
deep, is so pertinent, and nobody
wants to walk away from it.
Clair MacDougall is a journalist and
writer based in West Africa
 YP
H E

TWO COMPANIES ARE RACING TO BUILD ELON MUSKS HYPERLOOP.

WHETHER ITS PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE IS ONLY THE START OF THEIR WORRIES
BY OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS PHOTOGRAPHY: SPENCER LOWELL
 135
< HYPERLOOP v HYPERLOOP
TRANSPORTATION ONE
TECHNOLOGIES The team built
A wooden, life-size this pressure-
replica of a cabin outside reduced wind
its LA headquarters tunnel in ten days

MA N E
CHI
 On a cloudless morning in May, a man who is actually in the arena) before

IN
convoy of coaches drove out to a test site previewing the companys Kitty Hawk
belonging to the transportation startup moment the future date, named after
Hyperloop One. A sweeping, fenced-of the rst Wright brothers ight, when the
cluster of low container buildings, the company says it will demonstrate its
facility lies less than an hour north of Las rst fully operational hyperloop.
Vegas into the Nevada desert. Fighter But trouble was stirring. Unknown to
jets soared overhead. Sections of steel the audience, the generators to power
tubing, painted white, lay in the dirt. Next the test had failed with just minutes
door, a solar farm dazzled in the Sun. to go. (In a case of pre-show nerves,
As the coaches approached, kicking the team later surmised, an engineer
up dust plumes, the site thrummed with had turned them on early, causing
activity. Music blared over loudspeakers. them to overheat.) Now its rst demon-
Jumbo screens broadcast the company stration was in jeopardy.
logo (the company, formerly Hyperloop On stage, Brogan BamBrogan,
Technologies, had rebranded the night Hyperloop Ones co-founder and
2013, irked by the $68 billion
(51bn) cost of Californias
high-speed rail project, Elon
Musk proposed an alternative.
He called it the hyperloop:
levitating pods that would travel
in near-vacuum tubes at close
to the speed of sound. By his
calculations, a hyperloop from
Los Angeles to San Francisco
would take just 36 minutes at a
build cost of under $6 billion a
tenth of the trains cost. Short
of guring out real teleportation,
which would be awesome, Musk
declared, the hyperloop was the
only option for super-fast travel.
Musk being Musk, the internet
went crazy. Proponents argued
hyperloop routes could transform
economics in a way comparable HYPERLOOP before). Disembarking, the passengers
to air travel, turning far-flung ONE more than a hundred journalists,
cities around the world into / investors and dignitaries led up on
stops on a continental tube map. A visualisation of a to an observation deck erected for the
Others thought the idea a science- hyperloop station occasion. The event had the atmosphere
f iction fantasy. Either way, that predates of a rock concert: in fact, the audience was
Musk declared himself too busy
running SpaceX and Tesla to build
it himself, and instead invited
the companys
rebranding.
Before May 2016,
gathered to see a test of the propulsion
system that would power the companys
hyperloop design. The platform
MUSK DECLARED THAT
anyone ambitious enough to try.
Today, two startups Hyperloop
One and Hyperloop Transportation
Technologies are racing to be
it was Hyperloop
Technologies
overlooked a raised bank, topped
with 300m of steel track. At one end
waited a metal sled, rigged with sensors
and cameras. Beneath it, thick cables
THE HYPERLOOP IS
the first. Between them, they
employ hundreds of engineers
and have raised millions of dollars
snaked from the magnets that would
propel it down the line.
On stage, Shervin Pishevar, Hyperloop
THE ONLY OPTION FOR
in venture capital. They have met
world leaders, signed deals with
sovereign nations and partnered
with global engineering firms.
Ones venture capitalist co-founder and
executive chairman, welcomed the
audience. Among them sat partners
from engineering giants Arup and
SUPER-FAST TRAVEL.
Earlier this year, WIRED set about
to document their progress.
It did not go as we expected.
AECOM and the architect Bjarke Ingels.
Pishevar has dark, thinning hair and a
wide smile, and was dressed casually
MUSK BEING MUSK, THE
in a navy blazer and jeans. He quoted
Teddy Roosevelt (It is not the critic
who counts The credit belongs to the INTERNET WENT CRAZY

chief technology oicer, took over. As
BamBrogan a former SpaceX rocket
engineer with a handlebar moustache
and a cap hanging from his belt stalled,
his team rushed to find a solution.
They hurriedly wrote new param-
eters to run the demonstration using
one generator. It wouldnt reach the
speeds planned, but it might save the
presentation. A public failure for such
a basic piece of its technology could be
disastrous for a nascent startup.
With the hurried solution in place,
BamBrogan signalled the control room.
After a dramatic ten-second countdown,
the electric motor kicked in. It worked:
the sled red down the track at 186kph,
into a bank of sand. (Like much of the
Hyperloop technology, the company
hasnt perfected brakes yet.) In the
control room, the engineers embraced;
the audience whooped and applauded.
Id really love to note that all of that
happened on purpose, BamBrogan said.
The technical glitch went unmentioned.
In the distance, telephone poles
stretched into the scrub, marking an
approved route for a test hyperloop,
Devloop, that the company plans to
build by early 2017. Although the rst
commercial route has yet to be decided,
BamBrogan said, it hopes to have hyper-
loops moving cargo by 2019 and people
by 2021. The test generated headlines
around the world. Hyperloop, it seemed
to say, isnt just real its almost here.
But generators werent the only things
failing within Hyperloop One. Weeks
later, BamBrogan would resign, and the
two co-founders would nd themselves
locked in a $250 million legal battle.
Still, for now, they put their arms
around each others shoulders and
smiled for the cameras.
Shervin Pishevar was born in Iran in the any of its designs
early 70s. When he was six, the Pishevar
family ed the revolution and developing
Iran-Iraq war to live in Washington, DC.
His father found work as a taxi driver
(the inspiration, Pishevar says, for his
later investment in Uber). His mother
was a housekeeper. I saw them working
really hard, he recalls. After graduating
from Berkeley, he launched a series of
internet startups. In 2011, he sold one of
them, Webs.com, to Vistaprint for $117.5
million, and moved into investment.
He joined Menlo Ventures where
he was involved with Tumblr, Warby
Parker and Uber before co-founding
his own rm, Sherpa Capital.
In Silicon Valley, Pishevar built a
reputation as a networker and socialite.
He would often post pictures partying
with celebrity acquaintances: Miley
Cyrus, Justin Bieber, Kanye West. An
earnest sharer, he has been known to
post his own poetry. He could get a
hug out of anybody, instantly, says
BamBrogan. He always leads with
that. He is also politically engaged: a
campaigning Democrat, he sits on the
board of the Fulbright scholarship.
When George and Amal Clooney hosted a
$353,000-per-couple private fundraiser
in San Francisco for Hillary Clintons
campaign, they did it at Pishevars house.
HTT One friend who shares Pishevars
HYPERLOOP political interest and nancial means
/ is the actor Sean Penn. In 2011, the pair
A concept ew to Egypt to witness the protests in
illustration for Tahrir Square. During the Libyan civil
the HTT hyperloop war, they ew into Benghazi to meet
cabin. It is yet the rebels who had liberated the city.
to publicly This was during the bombing of Sirte,
demonstrate says Pishevar. We had to get the NATO
general to allow us to y in, because all
commercial flights were cancelled.
One ghter gave Pishevar a Libyan ag
wristband, which he later passed on to
President Obama at the White House.
I t w a s t h i s L i b y a s to r y t h a t
convinced another friend, Elon Musk,
to join the pair on a trip to Cuba in
January 2013. (Musk declined to
comment for this story.) The group
had hoped to negotiate the release of
an American prisoner. It was on Musks
jet, en route to Cuba, that they first
discussed the hyperloop. He said,
you know, Im a little busy trying
to get to Mars and doing Tesla, and
raising ve boys. I think Im going to
137
open-source it. Pishevar who, like
many in the tech industry, idolises
Musk volunteered. He pushed Musk
to make his plans public.
That August, Musk released his
proposal in a white paper. The hyperloop,
he wrote, would be a steel tube, with
most of its air removed. With drag
reduced, passenger pods propelled by
electric motors could travel at speeds of
over 1,200kph. The remaining air would
be compressed beneath the pods, like an
inverted air-hockey table, letting them
levitate inside the tube. It would be
powered by solar panels and, because it
was so lightweight, could be elevated on
concrete pylons along existing highways,
reducing the cost of acquiring land.
Newspapers quickly proclaimed
that the hyperloop would heal regional
divides. Some argued that the hyperloop
would transform the economy, moving
packages across continents in hours.
Others were more sceptical. Theres
a concept in mathematics, which is
known as trying to prove too much,
says transportation blogger Alon Levy,
who wrote a widely cited post disputing
Musks cost projections. Its such a
pointless idea its not worth print space
or even talking about, Rod Smith, an
engineering professor at Imperial
College London, tells WIRED.
But generally, engineers were
cautiously optimistic. I didnt agree
with his figures, but I found myself
closer to his ideas than I expected,
says John Miles, an engineer at Arup
and a Cambridge University professor,
who is now consulting for Hyperloop
One. It could be done. Pishevar just
needed an engineer to build it.
000

TRUST ME, IF YOU BUILD AMUSEMENT PARKS?

HYPERLOOP, ITS EASY BIBOP GRESTA, COO, HYPERLOOP TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES
139 WE DONT WANT THIS TO BE
A ROLLERCOASTER JOSH GIEGEL, PRESIDENT OF ENGINEERING, HYPERLOOP ONE

W
hile Pishevar searched, another
entrepreneur launched into the race:
Dirk Ahlborn, a plain-speaking German
with a wave of dark hair and the chin
of Mr Incredible. Ahlborn, 39, had run
pellet stove and barbecue businesses
in Italy before moving to Los Angeles,
where he worked for the Girvan Institute,
a non-profit business incubator once
funded by Nasa but which by then,
he says, was struggling a little bit.
Ahlborn proposed an idea for a new,
online-only incubator. The project, called
JumpStartFund, would let individuals
suggest business ideas; the crowd could
then volunteer its time and invest.
Ahlborn drove for Uber part-time as he
worked to get the idea of the ground.
When Musk released the hyperloop
paper, Ahlborn posted it on the website.
Hundreds of believers signed up.
They began sharing pod designs in
forums and on Facebook, discussing
the physics and suggesting potential
routes. Ahlborn formalised the group
into a company: Hyperloop Transpor-
tation Technologies (HTT).
He was joined by an Italian entre-
preneur and investor who calls himself
Bibop Gresta. (His real first name is
Gabriele.) An exuberant showman with
a Tony Stark beard and a Muppets
rhythmic laugh, Gresta had aspired
to be a rapper in his youth, and
toured briefly as a stage performer
with the popular Italian dance group
Mato Grosso. After a short TV career
presenting on Italian MTV, where
colleagues remember him rollerblading
around the office, he moved into
startups. The pair met at a tech event
in Los Angeles, where Ahlborn pitched
his idea. I said, Youre completely
crazy, just to think about this, says
Gresta, now HTTs chief operating
officer, chairman, and chief Bibop
oicer. This will change humanity
if you do it well. But you need my help.
HTT now lists more than 400 volun-
teers, including engineers from Nasa
and Boeing. Unlike most startups,
its employees are not paid, instead
dedicating at least ten hours a week
contributing to the project remotely
suggesting materials, building simula-
tions, designing marketing materials
in exchange for stock options. Ahlborn
and Gresta were soon travelling the
world, pitching their vision: Germany,
Slovakia, Dubai. Companies began
to sign up as partners, offering
patents or suggesting manufacturing
techniques. Its big enough and crazy
enough to be a viable solution, says
Lloyd Marino, one volunteer.
Ahlborn puts it another way:
We realised that we had to build a
movement, not a company.
Asking around at SpaceX, Pishevar
found his engineer: Kevin Brogan.
(BamBrogan fused names with his wife
Bambi Liu in 2013.) A gregarious Burning
Man devotee from Michigan, BamBrogan
had helped design the space startups
Falcon 1 rocket and Dragon capsule. A
brilliant guy, according to two former
SpaceX colleagues, if a little eccentric.
He ew to San Francisco, where Pishevar
pitched the idea: BamBrogan would
build the technology, Pishevar would
take care of the money. They called
the startup Hyperloop Technologies,
HYPERLOOP and set up shop in BamBrogans garage
ONE on a leafy street in Los Feliz.
/ BamBrogan quickly approached a
Top: a security former SpaceX colleague and friend,
camera image of Josh Giegel, then working at Virgin
Afshin Pishevar Galactic. Pishevar, meanwhile, used
Below: Brogan his connections to line up $8 million in
BamBrogan Series A funding and an all-star board
with the knotted of executives, including former White
rope found on House deputy chief of staf Jim Messina,
his office chair XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis and
Snapchats Emily White. Joe Lonsdale,
an investor and co-founder of big-data
firm Palantir, signed on as deputy
chairman. Pishevar used a private
audience at the White House to pitch
the idea to President Obama.
Around this time, Pishevar s
18-year-old nephew Abraham died
in a plane crash. Pishevar flew in
to help collect the body. Afshin
Pishevar, Abrahams father, was
racked with grief. I felt like I was
going to lose my brother, Pishevar
recalls. He encouraged Afshin, a
lawyer in Maryland, to move to the
141
West Coast and join Hyperloop One.
He thought this could be a legacy for
Abraham, Pishevar says. He messaged
BamBrogan to ask if Afshin could stay
with him in LA. While the BamBrogans
visited friends over Christmas, Afshin
lived in their guest room.
The company moved into a former
factory space and began construction,
replicating the industrious culture
Musk preached at SpaceX: Build
fast, test faster. Pishevar meanwhile
stayed in San Francisco, working at
his VC firm. To run Hyperloop One,
he appointed Rob Lloyd, a Canadian
former Cisco executive, as CEO. The
pitch, by text, was typical Pishevar:
Come change the world with me.
But there was trouble from the start.
BamBrogan and Afshin didnt work well
together. Although BamBrogan was
popular among the engineers, others
found him intimidating, quick to anger.
Meetings could descend into shouting
matches. Some thought Pishevar wasnt
taking the company seriously. When he
did drop by Hyperloop One, he would
bring guests: Katy Perry, will.i.am.
In early July this year, WIRED visited
Hyperloop Ones headquarters in
a gentrifying neighbourhood in
downtown LA (Soho House is moving
in a block down, opposite a strip
club). Retro train posters lined the
walls. Staf at standing desks worked
on simulation models. The company
has grown to more than 150 employees;
in reception, an engineer sat waiting
for a job interview.
One noticeable absence: BamBrogan.
In late June, the company announced he
had resigned, citing personal reasons.
Giegel was appointed president of
engineering in his stead. (He was
also, belatedly, made co-founder).
Its been a difficult couple of weeks
for the company, Lloyd said. Our team
is much closer together than it was.
In the yard, engineers were pouring
concrete inserts to guide the test pod
down the tube. Others were redesigning
the motor. The hyperloops low
pressure and high speeds can stretch
physics in bizarre ways, so the site
includes a low-pressure wind tunnel,
for testing against its digital simula-
tions. I called up a place and said, We
want a wind tunnel that can do this,
recalled Giegel. They said, We can
get you a design in 90 days. Instead,
the team built it themselves in ten.
 Hyperloop Ones design now difers
substantially from Musks proposal.
For one, it has ditched air bearings
for passive magnetic levitation.
(Unlike Japans maglev trains, which
require super-cooled, supercon-
ductive magnets, passive systems
are considered cheaper: levitation is
created by the pods movement.) Air
bearings have tiny clearances. With
this new maglev system, were riding
somewhere between 25 to 40mm,
which is more sustainable, Giegel said.
It has also dropped the solar panels.
That limits the amount of through-put,
because if you wanted more pods, you
dont have more solar panels, he
said. He added that a grid-powered
hyperloop would be far more energy
eicient than high-speed rail.
Building a hyperloop still presents
major engineering challenges. Acceler-
ating and braking at such high speeds
requires vast distances. Any route
would need to be as straight and level
as possible, in order to avoid uncom-
fortable g-forces. We dont want this to
be a rollercoaster, said Giegel. Were
aiming to keep the experience similar
to what youd feel on a plane: take-of,
landing, banked turns. One way to
address this is to tunnel underground.
Another is to build underwater. Both
would add to the hyperloops cost.
Much of Hyperloop Ones work is
focused on reducing that expense.
Inside its robot training school, a
machine was being programmed to
weld tube joints way faster and more
repeatably than humans can, Giegel
enthused. In another, it was stress-
testing alternative materials to cut the
cost of steel tube and concrete pylons.
Theres an engineering challenge
in getting the system to work, but I
dont see why we couldnt overcome
it, said Miles. Besides, he said, the risks
are worth it: Even if hyperloops cost
escalated to the cost of high-speed rail,
its performance is in a diferent league.
One cost proved too high: both
companies have abandoned the idea of
a hyperloop from LA to San Francisco.
The land is simply too expensive
and even Musk couldnt work out a
way to build stations close enough to
the cities centres. Hyperloop One is
instead exploring an LA-Vegas route,
but more likely the first hyperloop
will be outside America, in emerging
markets, or somewhere with a long
stretch of privately held land.
H
yperloop Transportation Technologies
headquarters, a 30-minute drive away
in LA traffic, has a more homespun
feel. A small hangar with an upstairs
office, it is filled with promotional
posters and models of its design. When
WIRED visited, two workmen were
knocking together a life-size hyperloop
capsule from wood. What looked like
car seats stood in for the real thing.
Gresta, dressed in a waistcoat and tie
over leather trousers and high-tops,
showed WIRED around. At one point he
produced a metal tube and a puck-sized
magnet to demonstrate magnetic
levitation. He dropped the puck, which
slowly hovered down the tube. Wow,
right? he enthused. Magic.
Gresta is a gifted entertainer
with infectious enthusiasm. HTTs
hyperloop, by his telling, sounds
almost too good to be true: in addition
to using solar panels, its hyperloop
the real hyperloop, he says will also
harness wind, kinetic energy and, where
relevant, geothermal power. This
combination generates up to 30 per cent
more than we consume, says Gresta.
Its pylons will be vertical gardens, he
says, designed by the biggest Chinese
vertical garden company.
It will be so transformative that
landowners will welcome hyperloop
routes across their property. All the
critics who say how difficult it is to
take the right of way? Yes, if you are
disrupting everything and not giving
a shit, like we are building our roads
and highways, he says. You are the
farmer. I come to you and say listen:
I put one pylon every 200ft on your land,
OK? In exchange I give you electricity,
water, and I give it to you, and you can do
whatever you want and make a prot of
it. You can collect dew from the air, and
its almost a pity to use it to farm because
you can bottle and sell it thats how
pure it comes. I can give you bandwidth.
Its completely silent. And its beautiful
to see not a pipeline, as you saw in
the middle of the desert. HTT is
considering offering tickets for free,
instead monetising passengers through
advertising. He says the company will
build its rst hyperloop by 2018.
HTT has yet to demonstrate any of
this. Its design lab, Gresta says, is of
limits. They are copying everything,
Gresta says, referring to Hyperloop
One. Whenever we disclose it, it will
be too late to copy.
He sounded bitter. They copied the
name they were Hyperloop Technol-
ogies, if you remember. They copied the
logo, Gresta says, angrily. Every time
we announce something, every nation
we go and speak with the government,
they go there. So the strategy is very
clear. (Pishevar denies this and says
the name was inspired by Uber Technol-
ogies Id never heard of them.)
Some of HTTs technology is public:
its hyperloop will also use maglev,
via a patent licensed from Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, and will
use vacuum pumps supplied by Leybold,
the manufacturer that supplies CERN.
Other elements sound almost fantas-
tical: HTT says its pods will be coated
with Vibranium, a touch-sensitive
carbon bre made in Slovakia and named
after the ctional metal that makes up
Captain Americas shield. (The Marvel
fandom runs deep: in emails, Gresta uses
an AI assistant called J.A.R.V.I.S., like
Tony Starks in Iron Man.)
Very honestly, the technology is
not very difficult, said Ahlborn.
Everything is existing. You have to
put everything together and they have
to work well together. We are now
m o s t l y f o c u s i n g o n p a s s e n ge r
experience, new business models,
alternative monetisation strategies.
The company has already signed a
deal with the government of Slovakia
to explore potential routes in the
country. HTT has also agreed a contract
with Deutsche Bahn, the German rail
company, to develop an innovation
train using hyperloop features such as
augmented-reality windows (these were
also not available for demonstration).
As for Hyperloop One? They did a
stunt on a rail. Gresta shrugged. They
created a rollercoaster. Good luck.
The morning after WIRED visited
Hyperloop One, BamBrogan and three
former senior employees Knut Sauer,
then-VP David Pendergast, and William
Mulholland led an explosive lawsuit
against the company. In it, they alleged
that those in control of the company
continually used the work of the team to
augment their personal brands, enhance
their romantic lives and line their
pockets (and those of family members).
Among their most remarkable claims:
that Pishevar had begun dating an
employee of the Pramana Collective, a
PR rm employed by the company. They
later became engaged. During this time,
the suit claims, Pishevar increased
her salary from $15,000 to $40,000 a
month, more than any employee in the
company, terminating the contract
when the engagement fell through.
(Hyperloop One and the Pramana
Collective say the increase reflected
a change from a discounted rate to its
standard retainer, and call the claim
sexist and demeaning.)
It alleges that Pishevar pressured
potential Hyperloop One investors
to do so via Sherpa Capital (Pishevar
denies this), and that Pishevar and
Lonsdale hoarded control over the
company by issuing themselves shares
with 20-to-1 voting rights.
They also claim employees were
m a d e to s i g n c o n t ra c ts w h i c h
stipulated that the company could buy
back their shares at below market rates
and to cancel un-exercised options
if the rm was ever acquired.
Days later, Hyperloop One responded
by ling its own lawsuit. The 46-page
document reads like an airport thriller:
BamBrogan, Pendergast, Sauer and
Mulholland are referred to throughout
as the Gang of Four. Their suit is
rebranded the Sham Complaint.
BamBrogan, the company now says, is
a slightly below average engineer, an
egomaniacal and greedy and sexist
man who often appeared inebriated
at the oice. (BamBrogan denies this.)
The company angrily denounced the
allegations made against it. Instead,
it said, the Gang had been secretly
plotting a coup and planning to launch a
rival company, Hyperloop Two. Alleging
numerous breaches of contract, it led
for damages in excess of $250 million.
HYPERLOOP The legal battle revealed inghting
ONE going back months. Just days after the
/ test in Nevada, 11 senior employees,
The sled that was including BamBrogan and Giegel,
demonstrated in signed a letter to Pishevar and Lloyd,
the Nevada desert demanding that Pishevar step down as
in May 2016. It chairman and grant employees voting
reached a speed control of Hyperloop One. Over weeks of
of 186kph tense negotiations, the company agreed
to several demands, including adding
engineers to the board and removing
the share buyback clause in its contracts.
But Pishevar refused to step down.
Over the following days, according to
Hyperloop One, the Gang considered
leaving to form a rival hyperloop
company. The signatories of the letter
met back at BamBrogans garage to
discuss their options. There, the lawsuit
alleges, they discussed how to get around
Hyperloop Ones patents, and drew
up a list of potential hires on a white-
board, if Pishevar stayed. At one point,
the company maintains, BamBrogan
registered the domain hyperlooptoo.
com. This, BamBrogan now says, was
143
part of a joke among colleagues. If I was
going to start another Hyperloop
company, he says, I sure as hell
wouldnt call it Hyperloop Too!
Hyperloop Ones lawyers also assert
that hyperloop2.com and hyper-
looptwo.com have also been purchased,
p r e s u m a b l y b y B a m B r o g a n .
BamBrogan denies this. And the timing
is odd: those addresses were registered
on May 9 and May 11. Hyperloop One
announced its rebranding on May 10.
(Asked to confirm that neither it nor
anyone working on its behalf had
actually registered the addresses,
Hyperloop One said: No current oicer
of the company directed that those
domain names be purchased.)
The breaking point came in mid-June.
BamBrogan was scheduled to travel to
Russia to meet high-prole investors,
including the billionaire Ziyavudin
Magomedov. The trip also involved
an event with President Putin. But,
with Pishevar still in control of the
company, BamBrogan told the investors
he wouldnt be coming. Pishevar went
alone. When he arrived, the investors
alarmed by what BamBrogan had
told them expressed their concern.
What happened next is a matter of
legal dispute. This much is clear: while
Pishevar was in Russia reassuring the
investors, Afshin, upset by BamBrogans
actions, procured a length of rope with
a slip knot tied at one end, went back
into the oice late at night, and left it on
BamBrogans chair, to send a message.
Discovering the rope the next
morning, BamBrogan took the message
to be a death threat. Believing the rope
to be a noose, he called the police. He
had lived with my family. Still had a key
to my house. I was extremely fearful.
Ive got a pregnant wife at home, and
my life is being threatened, BamBrogan
says. Hyperloop One maintains the rope
was a lasso intended for someone
acting like a cowboy. Either way,
Afshin Pishevar was immediately red.
Meanwhile, Shervin Pishevar was in
St Petersburg at the citys Economic
Forum, an annual gathering for the
global elite hosted by President Putin.
Ahlborn was also in town, talking up
HTTs hyperloop: the event, hosting
billionaires and world leaders, is a
potentially lucrative one for infra-
structure startups. In a grand ballroom
at the Konstantinovsky Palace, Pishevar
pitched the hyperloop to Putin and
the heads of China, Saudi Arabia and
Qatars sovereign wealth funds, collec-
tively worth trillions. Putin cracked
jokes about the hyperloop. He actually
said he believes hyperloop will funda-
mentally change the global economy
and the world, Pishevar says. The two
posed for a picture together.
Back in Los Angeles, BamBrogan
was incensed. The group gathered
with their families at the companys
WE REALISED
oice for emotional showdown talks.
Pendergast, accused by Hyperloop One
of undermining the companys position
with investors, was red in front of his
WE HAD TO BUILD
wife and daughter. During the meeting,
the four former employees allege, the
company threatened economic and
A MOVEMENT,
NOT A COMPANY
legal warfare by millionaires with
extensive networks. Seven signa-
tories of the letter, including Giegel,
stayed with the company. BamBrogan,
Sauer and Mulholland resigned.
DIRK AHLBORN, CEO, HYPERLOOP
TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES

H
yperloop Transportation Technologies
says its working towards its 2018
opening. The company has announced
plans to build an 8km route in Quay
Valley, a proposed new urban devel-
opment in Kings County, California. We
start construction this year, Gresta
says. We are not building a test track in
the middle of nowhere. We are building
a full-scale hyperloop in a city that will
have ten million people riding on it.
The Quay Valley hyperloop is
projected to cost between $100 million
and $150 million. How will HTT pay for
it? The money is not really an issue,
says Ahlborn. The moment we pull
the trigger, the money will be there.
Gresta explains that HTT has several
offers on the table from investors,
and that some volunteers have also
invested money. One German company
has committed $1.7 million.
Pushed for more specifics, Gresta
becomes unsettled. You can say the
company has $70 million in assets,
he says counting land, engineering
and its vacuum pumps. (The manufac-
turer, Leybold, says the pumps are
on loan.) Again pressed, he says $30
million amounts to engineering talent
that is, the value of the time being
donated by its volunteers in return for
stock options. (Ahlborn and Gresta are
paid a salary through JumpStartFund.)
Grestas theatrical tendencies are
entertaining, but his comments can
occasionally overstretch reality. For
example, he said that he made his name
in Italy through selling a 40 per cent
stake of an online media company,
Bibop Research, to a subsidiary of
Telecom Italia. I sold it for 11 billion
lira, Gresta said, repeatedly boasting
this amounted to $50 million. Except:
at 1999 exchange rates 11 billion lira
was worth just over $6 million. And,
according to financial statements,
the actual figure was four billion lira.
(Responding to this, Gresta says that
HYPERLOOP the contract included an additional
ONE seven billion lira in services, but
/ that shortly after, the company which
Below: a 3D had acquired the stake began not
topographic model honouring the contract and sold it
of the proposed on. He continues to use the 11 billion
West Coast route figure in company statements.)
Gresta also said that prior to joining
HTT he worked for an company called
ClearLeisure, which owns amusement
parks. Looking how to create crazy
engineering projects, not killing anyone
that was my job, Gresta said. Trust
me, if you build amusement parks?
Hyperloop, its easy. Except: according
to company filings, Gresta only worked
there as a non-executive director for 13
months, during which time the company
had no parks under construction.
In mid-August, the Kings County
planning department told WIRED it
had yet to receive a completed planning
application from the company for the
Quay Valley project, and that approvals
can take six months to several years.
At one point, unsettled by WIREDs
questioning, Gresta seemed to snap.
You want to talk out of your ass and do
some sensational title? Do it! he said,
angrily. But you are not doing a service
to your community or to humanity.
Whatever you write, its bad for me
now, but it will be bad for you in a year.
145
He calmed down a few minutes later.
Everybody who is working here is
really passionate about what we are
doing, he said. We dont give a shit
they dont take us serious. They will.
As this story went to press, the
Hyperloop One lawsuit was making
its way through the courts. By
email, Giegel says the company is
stronger than ever. Construction on
the Devloop is under way in the
desert, with a public demonstration
planned for early 2017.
BamBrogan remains distraught.
He has made no future plans, but says
the experience helped him clarify
his personal ethos, to build rad
shit with rad people, that changes the
world for the better.
Its bigger than Shervin, its bigger
than Brogan, its bigger than Rob, Josh
Giegel had said, back at Hyperloop One.
Something else he said: We dont fly
on Wright brothers airlines. After they
were the first ones, they spent their
time litigating, suing people they
thought were stealing their ideas.
Elon Musks idea still inspires belief.
Hyperloop projects are springing up
from Germany to Canada. SpaceX is
building a track for university students
to test their pod designs. It can be built,
says John Sullivan, an engineering
professor at Purdue University, home
to one competing team. But on the
scale of decades, not years.
Perhaps the hyperloop will be
built on day. Perhaps not. Perhaps we
just want to believe it.
As Dirk Ahlborn says: We have been
in meetings with David Cameron, with
Angela Merkel, with princes and kings.
Just before WIRED left HTT, Gresta
decided, at his assistants urging, to
perform a magic trick. He produced
two matchsticks, which he crossed
lightly between his two forefingers.
Staying perfectly still, he paused
for dramatic effect. Then, all of a
sudden, the uppermost match leapt
dramatically into the air of its own
accord. It clattered on the table.
How is it possible? Gresta laughed.
He didnt seem to have done
anything at all.
Oliver Franklin-Wallis is WIREDs
assistant editor. He wrote about
Bjarke Ingels in issue 10.16.
Additional reporting by Gian Volpicelli
BY

ROWLAND MANTHORPE
VISUALISATION:

HIGH FIDELITY
PHOTOGRAPHY:

JASON MADARA
 Nine months later, on August 1, 2012, a 148
19-year-old named Palmer Luckey posted a VR
headset on Kickstarter using the same gyroscope
Rosedale had been testing. Oculus VR raised $2.4
million; in March 2014, it was acquired by Facebook
for $2 billion. The VR revolution was ready to roll.
Today, however, almost everything about VR
remains unclear. What is its best use? What is it
for? Rosedale believes it should be for as much
as possible. His new world, High Fidelity, which
launched its open beta on April 27, 2016, is like
Second Life, only more realistic and much, much
bigger: As big as Earth and beyond, he predicts.
We are about to leave the real world behind.
High Fidelity has rivals. Chief among them:
Linden Lab, the company Rosedale himself founded
in 1999 (and in which he retains a large stake), and
which to this day owns and maintains Second Life.
Under new CEO Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab is
building a VR world which goes by the name of
Sansar. Whereas High Fidelity is radically open,
ne day around Thanksgiving 2011, Philip Rosedale had a vision of a not only in its code but also in its player, Sansar is
virtual world. He was sitting in the San Francisco oices of Cofee and closed-source, built for stand-alone experiences.
Power, the job-listings startup hed co-founded the previous year, playing Open vs closed. Creation vs control. This is how
with a circuit board attached to a gyroscope. Such sensors are an integral the future of VR turns on a decade-old debate
part of virtual reality (VR) headsets: by following head movements, about a world called Second Life.
they help give a wearer the impression of being inside a computer-
generated environment. Rosedale, 48, has been dreaming of VR his entire
life. He knew that, to be efective, gyroscopes must have extremely low
latency for the lag between movement and response to feel natural.
Holding the tiny circuit board between his ngers, Rosedale tilted it
back and forth, watching the output on his MacBook screen. The latency
was almost non-existent. When VR had last attracted attention, back in
the late 80s, the headsets contained trackers, but they were jittery and
expensive. This modern, $15 (11) sensor traced Rosedales movement
faster and more accurately than the naked eye.
All at once, Rosedales VR dream came ooding back: a virtual world
made up of millions of connected spaces, like a three-dimensional
version of the internet. A world which he would build.
For Rosedale, this was no idle consideration. In 2003, his company
Linden Lab launched Second Life, an online world which its residents
could alter in any way they saw t. He believed he was creating the next
internet and, as Second Life thronged with a million avatars, building
everything from jazz lounges to full-scale cities, it seemed he might be
right. Ford, Sony and Dell invested in real estate. Reuters appointed a
Second Life correspondent. At its peak, the sites GDP residents traded
in Linden Dollars was bigger than that of many small countries.
Then, in 2006, Second Life stopped growing. No matter how many
people registered, the number of users remained stuck at around a
million. In 2008, Rosedale stepped down. The following year he left.
Now, as Rosedale examined the output from the gyroscope, the hopes A BIG PART OF OUR
hed had for Second Life resurfaced. He called over the seven employees of
Cofee and Power, the stretching exercise hed embarked on to cleanse FOCUS IS TO MAKE IT
himself from his disappointment at Linden Lab. Together, the team POSSIBLE FOR PEOPLE
stared at the output uctuating on the screen. Look at this, Rosedale
told them. Weve got to shut the company down and go back into VR. TO BUILD ANYTHING
Philip Rosedale

Above right: Inside High Fidelitys clubhouse-style games room

The demo room at Rosedales oice is a large, open
space on the less salubrious side of San Franciscos
trendy South of Market district. The room is set
up for HTCs Vive headset, with motion sensors in
each corner and pistol-shaped controllers on the
desk. Rosedale boots up High Fidelity, which opens
in a VR games room. Inside, Chris Collins, High
Fidelitys director of product development, is
showing of his basketball skills to me. Look, he
says. Im passing the ball behind my back.
As Collins speaks, his voice comes from his
location, bouncing of surfaces as it would in the
real world. His avatar a handsome young man
named Matthew moves its lips in time with the
words. He waves. Our eyes meet. Contact.
In VR, this feeling of being there is called
presence. Presence is made up of a thousand tiny
details the way a basketball bounces, the way
leaves rustle in the wind, the way skin glows as
light passes through it and each one comes with a
specic technical x. Skin, for example, is simulated
by a subsurface scattering efect. The way a face
moves is recreated by an algorithm trained on
thousands of videos of actors speaking to camera.
One day, headsets will be packed with sensors
able to detect facial expressions directly. For now,
these approximations have to do the trick. But the
thing about presence is that you know it when you
see it. High Fidelity has presence. It isnt lifelike
exactly but its not so far away.
When Second Life stopped growing, Rosedale
could see from the user analytics what the people
who stayed had in common. There was something
about them, he says. The one thing they all
had was a huge amount of time to invest in it.
Second Life was a retreat for escapists, an outlet
for pent-up creativity a place, as Rosedale once
put it, for smart people in rural areas, the disabled, people looking for
companionship. But for less motivated visitors, with limited time and
patience, it was hard, confusing and alienating.
Inside High Fidelity, Rosedale enters, wearing the same Matthew
avatar as Collins. My avatar appears as a ghost-like alien. We head outside
to a garden to have a go at Tetherball. The movements for the game come
easily, if a little clunkily. One of the things thats cool about our system
is that the physics of it allow us to interact naturally, says Rosedale.
VRs ease of use, says Rosedale, is perhaps the most important thing
about it: A big part of our focus is to make it possible for people to
build anything. He had the same goal for Second Life but there, it took
users 40 or 50 hours to become familiar with complex keyboard-mouse
commands. In VR proper, you do more or less what youd do in real life.
For Rosedale, the diference is fundamental. That is the only reason
why Second Life has a million people using it today and not a billion.
Still, the experience is far from perfect. High Fidelity may have hands,
but it isnt able to simulate the movement or feeling of ngers. To pick up
an object, you shoot a laser-beam at it, then manoeuvre it clumsily into
range, where it oats weightlessly on your palm as if it were made of gas.
For Rosedale, this is a problem. Without true dexterity, how would
people build things? High Fidelity has 26 full-timers and $15 million in
funding, but it cant do everything, so it is forced to leave many crucial
details to third parties. Still, Rosedale is certain a solution will arrive:
Somebodys going to gure out how to build rapidly in here. Once they
do that, the skys the limit. His belief in virtual worlds is absolute.
Hesawone, in a vision, and he has believed in it ever since.
Above: This cinema is one of Sansars many small-scale destinations
 As a boy, Rosedale dreamed of virtual worlds. Born in
1968 in San Diego, California, the son of an English teacher
and a Navy pilot, his parents moved six times before he was 13.
When they divorced in 1981, he returned to San Diego, where,
PHILIP as a shy, technology-obsessed teenager, he built custom,
ROSEDALES pre-internet networks and sold them to car dealerships. He
AVATARS imagined himself floating in virtual space, his toolkit on his
belt, calling structure into being with a wave of his hand.
Aged 16, his fantasy took a more concrete form. Sitting
with a friend at his aunts Windows computer, he pulled
up an image of a Mandelbrot set, a never-ending intricate
pattern created by a few mathematical rules. He began to
zoom in, following starfish and curlicues until he ran out of
resolution. He had gone so far, he calculated, that the screen
Second Life he started from was now the size of the surface of Earth. A
version one, 2003 thought struck him: if a computer could contain a world,
it could also make a world. That was the thing that drove
me, he says. This obsession. Ive got to see that place.
Rosedale realised how he would make his world in
1994. After studying physics and computer science at
the University of California, San Diego, he moved to San
Francisco and discovered the internet. He instantly saw
its potential, not only for communication, but also for
Second Life a single vast space, created by the processing power of
version two, 2010 millions of connected computers. But this place would have
to be in 3D, which computers couldnt do yet, so instead he
founded a video compression startup, which he sold in 1996
to streaming firm RealNetworks (then known as Progressive
Networks). It was cash plus stock, and the stock ended up
being quite valuable, says Rob Glaser, CEO of RealNetworks.
Rosedale was a millionaire by the age of 28; in 1998 he
was made RealNetworks CTO. But the lure of virtual reality
High Fidelity, was ever-present. Philip talked about the idea the first
2016 time I met him, says Glaser. In 1999, Rosedale went with
a group of friends to see The Matrix. Afterwards, while
his companions gushed over the films brilliance, he was
slumped in a corner, depressed. That was my dream, he
told them. I wanted to build that. A few months later, he
took $1 million of his own money and started Second Life.
Rosedales obsession animates every aspect of High Fidelity
above all its ambition. Whereas Second Life ran on servers
owned and run by Linden Lab, High Fidelity is peer-to-peer. By
downloading its Sandbox software, anyone with a computer
can host their own VR domain. The company plans to make
money by charging a fee for domain registration, making it
what Rosedale calls a GoDaddy for VR. More importantly,
this software allows High Fidelity to tap into a vast pool of
processing power enough, Rosedale claims, to have all
the worlds internet users in-world at the same time. High
Fidelity is not simply a cool way of interacting in VR; it is a
connected server system, built for huge virtual worlds. As
Rosedale puts it: High Fidelity is the internet. High Fidelity
is not a company or a thing. High Fidelity is the net.
High Fidelitys structure is intended to resolve two of
Second Lifes most persistent problems: scale and latency.
Because Second Life was built on Linden Labs servers, there
Left: Philip Rosedale in the real world. Right: Public meetings are different in
High Fidelity. This one takes place in a Burning Man-style desert landscape
was often a lag between action and response, and 151
no more than 40 or so avatars could be in one place
at any time. But Second Life was built before cloud
computing. Why doesnt High Fidelity use Google
Cloud or Amazon Web Services? Because these
giant server farms are too small for what Rosedale
has in mind. In the next ten years well see the
internet become VR, he says. Thats not a hosted
service. The internet is not a hosted service.
High Fidelitys investors like its ambition.
Every now and then there is a longer-term, riskier
but bigger-vision bet that has a hundred-billion
potential, and this is clearly one of them, says
Steve Hall, managing director of Vulcan Capital,
the lead investor in its $11 million Series B round.
So do its hundred or so beta testers. At a virtual
public meeting in June, they discuss their hopes
for the platform. The problem I had with Second
Life is you can build there, but if you want to
build big, it costs a fortune, says a man whose
avatar has large, dark rabbit ears protruding
from the side of his head. Michelle, a former
Second Life player with a brown-haired avatar,
sums up the mood. We saw what we could do
before, and we want to do more.
HIGH FIDELITY IS NOT A
COMPANY OR A THING.
HIGH FIDELITY IS THE NET
Philip Rosedale
But openness comes at a price. High Fidelitys
meeting is being held on the Playa, a Burning Man
homage littered with shipping containers and neon
signs, including one reading Rosedale. It is very
artful, but amid the intentional mess are signs of
genuine disarray. One user is running a script that
summons ghosts to float across the sand. Another
has added a herd of cows to the plains. Like Second
Life before it, High Fidelity is distinctly strange.

The physical home of Second Life is a large, wood-framed oice
near the old dock area of San Francisco. Altberg, the companys third
CEO since Rosedale stepped down in 2008, meets WIRED outside the
VR demo room. Inside, the walls are covered with framed press reports
from the glory days of Second Life: Philip Rosedale in the Washington
Post, Philip Rosedale in Newsweek, Philip Rosedale on the cover of
Inc. Altberg is tired: hes been in New York on a Linden Lab awayday.
Still, he perks up quickly. Earlier, he promised: Without trying to
sound harsh or anything like that, but you havent seen the best yet.
When Altberg, 52, arrived at Linden Lab in early 2014, Sansar
consisted of three or four people futzing with some low-level stuf out
of frustration with Second Life. The game still has a sizeable community
and a GDP of half a billion. Using the proceeds from this money-
generating machine, Altberg has invested heavily, building the team up
to 75, more than a third of Linden Labs staf. The moment he committed
completely to VR was when he heard that Facebook had bought Oculus.
As soon as that sold, we were just like, Sansar is going to be fricking
awesome for VR. We knew that people were going to want to create
content in massive quantities right now its too damned diicult.
WIRED dons an Oculus Rift headset and Sansar starts up in a landscape
borrowed from the lm The Martian. Bjorn Laurin, Linden Labs VP of
product, is waiting there, wearing an avatar of a cuddly green dinosaur
with a womans face. Youll notice the lips moving in time with our
voices, he says with pride. WIRED looks down. Instead of hands, Oculus
controllers oat in mid air. Were getting round to hands, says Altberg.
Realism, it seems, is less of a priority here than at High Fidelity.
Above, top: In Sansars immersive world, players don
dragon and robot avatars. Above bottom Despite falling
out of the public eye in recent years, Second
Life still attracts around 900,000 monthly players
Right: Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg: High Fidelity is some
geeky shit; its incomprehensible to normal human beings
We cycle through a series of small scenes
created by Linden Labs team an Egyptian tomb;
a 3D surng video; a at lled with IKEA mock-ups.
Each is beautiful, impeccably produced and very
empty. With the Second Life players apt to get
twisted around in knots about what it means, as
Altberg puts it, Linden Lab has kept Sansar under
strict wraps before its 2017 release.
A burly, forthright Swede who was a champion
slalom skier in his youth, Altberg started his
career at Microsoft, where he remained
throughout the 90s. He worked on Word, Word
2.0, Word 6.0, Word 95, Word 97. When I left
Microsoft, we were dominating Earth, he says.
In 2000, he went to a startup ofering a market-
place for telephone services, before moving to
Yahoo! in 2008, where he ended up running media
engineering. He makes products that consumers
like to use, he says, in contrast to Rosedales
geeky style: Philip is taking a technology
approach, not a consumer-facing approach. That
was true with Second Life as well.
Like High Fidelity, Sansar is intended as a place
for players to create their own VR content. Yet
its scenes will be replicated, not connected. One
school group visiting the Egyptian tomb wont
bump into another they will be in separate,
identical spaces. These spaces, Altberg expects,
will be largely owned by big corporations, just
as they are online. There will be Facebooks and
Amazons and all these diferent things, he says.
For Rosedale, this segmentation makes Sansar
something less than a virtual world. Linden is still
providing curated hosted experiences, he says.
So Sansar will still be kind of a game world. He
means that it will be articial, not in its interaction,
but in the scope it provides for novelty and unpre-
dictability. It will even be more of a game world
unless its editable like Second Life, he adds.
Unlike in High Fidelity, editing in Sansar wont
be in-world: instead, players will make changes in
a separate mode. According to Altberg, by keeping
editing separate, Sansar can optimise content to
reduce memory usage, scaling up quickly and easily
without the need for complicated server struc-
tures. You install a server, he says incredulously
of High Fidelity. Who the fuck installs servers?
Besides, in his view, only professionals want to
edit. Most people are just consumers of experi-
ences as opposed to creators, he says. Its the
same in VR as it is in any other medium, especially
when you come to creating quality content.
The biggest diference concerns openness. High
Fidelity is radically open, from its code base to its
server structure. Sansar is not, and Altberg doesnt
care who knows it. You will have the freedom
people, the anarchists, whoever, who will say
I want 100 per cent control and it should be open,
he says. Then you will have the vast majority of
users that obviously dont give a shit because how
many billions of them are on Facebook every day?
For years, Second Life ran what I would call
organisational anarchy, he continues. Philips like,
Open source, involve everybody. The idea was that
everybody could work from anywhere and partic-
ipate in this thing. Yet Ive seen that you can, with
a small team, impact billions if you do it right.
Rosedale and Altberg meet regularly to discuss their projects. 153
Were frenemies, says Altberg. What we agreed to do is just kind
of have a friendly competition, says Rosedale, who still holds lots of
stock in Linden Lab, which in turn is one of the small investors in
High Fidelitys $2.4 million seed round, along with Google Ventures,
Kapor Capital and lead investor True Ventures. THE VAST MAJORITY [OF
The two companies can coexist. I dont believe there will be a
single VR platform, although there will certainly be market leaders,
SANSAR PLAYERS] WONT
says Jason Jerald, author of The VR Book. Apple iOS versus Google GIVE A SHIT IF ITS OPEN
Android is very much the model here, adds Jamais Cascio, a San
Francisco-based futurist who has written extensively on virtual BECAUSE HOW MANY
worlds. Android is more open, more exible and more extensible BILLIONS OF THEM ARE ON
but also less consistent, less reliable and less secure because of the
mish-mash of conicting open and controlled aspects. FACEBOOK EVERY DAY?
Ebbe Altberg

Perhaps none of these diferences will matter.

After all, it is far from certain that VR will ever
reach a mass audience. (To date, around a million
headsets have been sold, according to Forrester
Research, a sign of low interest or budding enthu-
siasm, depending on your perspective.) Both
Sansar and High Fidelity are operating under
a very shaky premise, says Wagner James Au,
author of The Making of Second Life. Theyre
gambling their whole companies futures on the
premise that theres going to be a large market
consisting of tens of millions of VR owners.
At High Fidelitys oice, its easy to forget the
ambition and urgency of the project. The grey-
carpeted room, its curtains drawn to keep out the
summer Sun, has an air of stillness. Developers
work quietly at wire-tangled desks, slipping on
headsets to gesture unintelligibly in VR. During
WIREDs week-long visit, a group of four or ve
play Overwatch during their lunch break.
To the outside observer, it is sometimes hard
to tell where the whole project is heading. Theres
a sense of looseness, of enquiry for its own sake.
One developer, a pale man who comes in every day
wearing a Slytherin Quidditch Team Captain
T-shirt, is building a scale model of the Tardis in
High Fidelity. Another has constructed a realistic
representation of his at. All of us within the VR
community are fumbling around right now, says
High Fidelity co-founder Ryan Downe Karpf. Its
analogous to the early days of the web. Its hard
to even know what were what we will become.
Towards the end of the visit, WIRED asks
Rosedale what he thinks could go wrong with
High Fidelity. He pauses, considering the question.
One of the points Ive always made about Second
Life is that it was well named in a way, in that it
was fundamentally competitive with real life. If
the real world for your human life, for your love
and play, if the real world is there for you if you
live in London, or New York, or San Francisco
why wouldnt you enjoy all this?
It seems a good question, but for Rosedale it is
merely a passing consideration. In the darkened
oice, there are tasks needing his involvement.
And out there, in a land beyond the horizon, there
are virtual worlds, waiting to be built.

Rowland Manthorpe wrote about co-living in 06.16

 THE
DIGITAL
JUSTICE
LEAGUE
 000

GOOGLE IS
ON A MISSION TO
PROTECT THE
INTERNETS MOST
VULNERABLE
BUT DOING GOOD
IS HARDER THAN
DONT BE EVIL
By Andy Greenberg
Illustration: Merijn Hos
 AROUND
156
MIDNIGHT
ONE
SATURDAY
IN
JANUARY,
Sarah Jeong was on her sofa,
browsing Twitter, when she sponta-
neously wrote what she now bitterly
refers to as the tweet that launched
a thousand ships. The 28-year-old
journalist and author of The Internet
of Garbage, a book on spam and online
harassment, had been watching Bernie
Sanders boosters attacking feminists
and supporters of the Black Lives
Matter movement. In what was meant
to be a hyperbolic joke, she tweeted
out a list of political caricatures,
one of which described the typical
Sanders fan as a vitriolic crypto racist
who spends 20 hours a day on the
internet yelling at women.
The ill-advised late-night tweet
was, Jeong admits, provocative and
absurd she even supported Sanders.
But what happened next was the kind
of backlash thats all too familiar to
women, minorities and anyone who
has a strong opinion online. By the
time Jeong went to sleep, a swarm of
Sanders supporters were calling her a
neo-liberal shill. By sunrise, a broader,
darker wave of abuse had begun. She
received nude photos and links to
disturbing videos. One troll promised
to rip each one of [her] hairs out and
twist her tits clear of .
The attacks continued for weeks.
I was in crisis mode, she recalls. So
she did what many victims of mass
harassment do: she gave up and
let her abusers have the last word.
Jeong made her tweets private,
removing herself from the public
conversation for a month. And she
took a two-week unpaid leave from
her job as a contributor to the tech
news site Motherboard.
For years now, on Twitter and
practically any other freewheeling
public forum, the trolls have been
out in force. Just in recent months:
Trumps anti-Semitic supporters
m o b b e d Je w i s h p u b l i c f i gu re s
with menacing Holocaust jokes.
Anonymous racists bullied African
American comedian Leslie Jones on
Twitter with pictures of apes and
Photoshopped images of semen on her
face. American blogger and Guardian
columnist Jessica Valenti quit Twitter
after a horde of misogynist attackers
resorted to rape threats against her
ve-year-old daughter. Its too much,
she signed of. I cant live like this.
Feminist writer Sady Doyle says her
experience of mass harassment has
induced a kind of permanent self-
censorship. There are things I wont
allow myself to talk about, she says.
Names I wont allow myself to say.
M a s s h a ra s s m e n t o n l i n e h a s
proved so efective that its emerging
as a weapon of repressive govern-
ments. In late 2014, Finnish journalist
Jessikka Aro reported on Russias troll
farms, where day labourers regur-
gitate messages that promote the
governments interests and inundate
opponents with vitriol on every
possible outlet, including Twitter and
Facebook. In turn, shes been barraged
daily by bullies on social media, in the
comments of news stories and via
email. They call her a liar, a NATO
skank, even a drug dealer, after digging
up a ne she received 12 years ago for
possessing amphetamines. They want
to normalise hate speech, to create
chaos and mistrust, Aro says. Its just
a way of making people disillusioned.
All this abuse, in other words, has
evolved into a form of censorship,
driving people offline, silencing
their voices. For years, victims have
been calling on clamouring for
the companies that created these
platforms to help slay the monster
they brought to life. But their
solutions generally have amounted
to a Sisyphean game of whack-a-troll.
Now a small subsidiary of Google
named Jigsaw is about to release an
entirely new type of response: a set
of tools called Conversation AI. The
software is designed to use machine
learning to automatically spot the
language of abuse and harassment
with, Jigsaw engineers say, an accuracy
PHOTOGRAPHY: BENEDICT EVANS
far better than any keyword lter and
far faster than any team of human
moderators. I want to use the best
technology we have at our disposal
to begin to take on trolling and other
nefarious tactics that give hostile
voices disproportionate weight, says

Jigsaws Jared Cohen: I want us to feel the responsibility of the burden were shouldering
Jigsaw founder and president Jared
Cohen. To do everything we can
to level the playing eld.
Conversation AI represents just
one of Jigsaws wildly ambitious
projects. The New Yorkbased think
tank and tech incubator aims to build
products that use Googles massive
infrastructure and engineering muscle
not to advance the best possibilities of
the internet but to x the worst of it:
surveillance, extremist indoctrination,
censorship. The group sees its work, in
part, as taking on the most intractable
jobs in Googles larger mission to make
the worlds information universally
accessible and useful.
Cohen founded Jigsaw, which now
has about 50 stafers (almost half are
engineers), after a brief high-prole
and controversial career in the US State
now used in more than 100 countries.
Department, where he worked to focus
American diplomacy on the internet
like never before. One of the moonshot
goals hes set for Jigsaw is to end
censorship within a decade, whether
it comes in the form of politically
motivated cyberattacks on opposition
websites or government strangleholds
on internet service providers. And if
that task isnt daunting enough, Jigsaw
is about to unleash Conversation AI on
the murky challenge of harassment,
where the only way to protect some
of the webs most repressed voices
may be to selectively shut up others.
If it can find a path through that
free-speech paradox, Jigsaw will have
pulled of an unlikely coup: applying
articial intelligence to solve the very
human problem of making people be
nicer to each other on the internet.
J
igsaw is the outgrowth of an earlier
effort called Google Ideas, which
Googles then-CEO Eric Schmidt and
Cohen launched in 2010 as a think/
do tank. But aside from organising
conferences and creating fancy data
visualisations, Ideas didnt actually
do much at first. People would
come around and talk a bunch of
bullshit for a couple days, one
Google Ideas conference attendee
remembers. Nothing came out of it.
But slowly, the groups lofty
challenges began to attract engineers,
some joining from other parts of Google
after volunteering for Cohens team.
One of their rst creations was a tool
called uProxy that allows anyone
whose internet access is censored to
bounce their traic through a friends
connection outside the firewall; its
Another tool, a Chrome add-on called
Password Alert, aims to block phishing
by warning people when theyre
retyping their Gmail password into a
malicious look-alike site; the company
developed it for Syrian activists
targeted by government-friendly
hackers, but when it proved efective,
it was rolled out to all of Googles users.
In February, the group was renamed
Jigsaw to reect its focus on building
practical products. A program called
Montage lets war correspondents and
non-prots crowdsource the analysis
of YouTube videos to track conflicts
and gather evidence of human rights
violations. Another free service called
Project Shield uses Googles servers
to absorb government-sponsored
cyberattacks intended to take down
the websites of media, election-moni-
toring, and human rights organisations.
And an initiative, aimed at de-radical-
ising ISIS recruits, identies would-be
jihadis based on their search terms,
158 then shows them ads redirecting them
to videos by former extremists who
explain the downsides of joining an
apocalyptic cult. In a pilot project, the
anti-ISIS ads were so effective that
they were 70 per cent more likely to
be clicked than typical search results.
The common thread that binds
these projects, Cohen says, is a focus
on what he calls vulnerable popula-
tions. To that end, he gives new hires an
assignment: draw a scrap of paper from
a baseball cap lled with the names of
the worlds most troubled or repressive
countries; track down someone under
threat there and talk to them about
their life online. Then present their
stories to other Jigsaw employees.
At one recent meeting, Cohen leans
over a conference table as 15 or so
Jigsaw recruits engineers, designers
and foreign policy wonks prepare to
report back from the dark corners of the
internet. We are not going to be one of
those groups that sits in our oices and
imagines what vulnerable populations
around the world are experiencing,
Cohen says. Were going to get to know
our users. He speaks in a fast-forward,
geeky patter that contrasts with his
blue-eyed, broad-shouldered good
looks like a politician disguised as a
Silicon Valley executive, or vice versa.
Every single day, I want us to feel
the burden of the responsibility
were shouldering, he says.
We hear about an Albanian LGBT
activist who tries to hide his identity on
Facebook, despite its real-names-only
policy; an administrator for a Libyan
youth group wary of government inl-
trators; a defectors memories from the
to some of those far-flung places to
meet their contacts face-to-face.
Theyll hear stories about people
being tortured for their passwords or of
state-sponsored cyberbullying, Cohen
tells WIRED. The purpose of these eld
trips isnt simply to get feedback for
future products. Theyre about creating
personal investment in otherwise
distant, invisible problems a sense
of investment Cohen says he himself
gained in his twenties during his
four-year stint in the State Department,
and before that travelling in the
Middle East and Africa as a student.
Cohen reports directly to Alpha-
bets top execs, but in practice, Jigsaw
functions as Googles blue-sky, human
rights-focused skunkworks. At the
groups launch, Schmidt declared its
audacious mission to be tackling n September 2015, Yasmin Green,
the worlds toughest geopolitical then head of operations and strategy
problems and listed some of the for Google Ideas, the working group
challenges within its remit: money that would become Jigsaw, invited
laundering, organised crime, police ten women who had been harassment
b r u ta l i t y, h u m a n t ra c k i n g a n d victims to come to the oice and discuss
terrorism. In an interview in Googles their experiences. Some of them had
New York oice, Schmidt (now chair of been targeted by members of the
Alphabet) summarised them to WIRED anti-feminist Gamergate movement.
as the problems that bedevil humanity Game developer Zo Quinn had been
involving information. threatened repeatedly with rape,
Jigsaw, in other words, has become and her attackers had dug up and
Googles internet Justice League, and it distributed old nude photos of her.
represents the notion that the company Another visitor, Anita Sarkeesian, had
is no longer content with merely moved out of her home temporarily
not being evil. It wants as difficult because of numerous death threats.
and even ethically fraught as the At the end of the session, Green and
impulse may be to do good. a few other Google employees took

Jigsaws projects
digital black hole of North Korea. Many
of the T-shirt-and-sandal-wearing
Googlers in the room will later be sent

The incubator is dedicated to geopolitical moonshots, tackling issues from online

censorship to violent extremism. Here are a few of its efforts. Gregory Barber

uProxy Project Shield Montage Password Alert The Redirect Conversation AI Digital Attack Map
A Chrome browser Free protection Crowdsourced Warns people Method A filter for online A real-time
buddy system that for media, election analysis of when they type a Identifies would-be discussion that visualisation of
lets any censored monitors, and YouTube videos to Gmail password jihadis based on uses machine DDoS cyberattacks
internet user human rights help journalists into a phishing search terms and learning to around the world,
route around the groups to and humanitarian website mocked redirects them to automatically including those
firewall by using a defend against groups document up to look like one anti-ISIS videos detect insults where freedom
friends unblocked cyberattacks conflict and human of Googles. featuring former or hate speech. of expression is
connection. aimed at taking rights violations. extremists. being limited.
down websites.
a photo with the women and posted
it to the companys Twitter account.
Almost immediately, the Gamergate
trolls turned their ire against Google
itself. Over the next 48 hours, tens of
thousands of comments on Reddit and
Twitter demanded the Googlers be red
for enabling feminazis.
Its like you walk into Madison
Square Garden and you have 50,000
people saying you suck, youre horrible,
die, Green says. If you really believe
thats what the universe thinks about
you, you certainly shut up. And you
might just take your own life. To
combat trolling, services including
Reddit, YouTube and Facebook have
for years depended on users to flag
abuse for review by overworked
staffers or an offshore workforce of
content moderators in countries such
as the Philippines. The task is expensive
and can be scarring for the employees
who spend days on end reviewing
loathsome content yet often its
still not enough to keep up with the
real-time ood of lth. Twitter recently
introduced new filters designed to
keep users from seeing unwanted
tweets, but its not yet clear whether
the move will tame determined trolls.
The meeting with the Gamergate
victims was the genesis for another
approach. Lucas Dixon, a wide-eyed
Scot with a doctorate in machine
learning, and product manager
CJ Adams wondered: Could an
abuse-detecting AI clean up online
conversations by detecting toxic
language with all its idioms and
ambiguities as reliably as humans?
To create a viable tool, Jigsaw rst
needed to teach its algorithm to tell the
difference between harmless banter
and harassment. For that, it would
need a massive number of examples.
So the group partnered with The New
York Times (NYT), which gave Jigsaws
engineers 17 million comments from
NYT stories, along with data about
which of those comments were agged
as inappropriate by moderators. Jigsaw
also worked with the Wikimedia
Foundation to parse 130,000 snippets
of discussion around Wikipedia pages.
It showed those text strings to panels of
ten people recruited randomly from the
CrowdFlower crowdsourcing service
and asked whether they found each
snippet to represent a personal attack
or harassment. Jigsaw then fed the
massive corpus of online conver-
sation and human evaluations into
Googles open source machine learning
software, TensorFlow.
Machine learning, a branch of
computer science that Google uses to
continually improve everything from
Google Translate to its core search
engine, works something like human
learning. Instead of programming an
algorithm, you teach it with examples.
Show a toddler enough shapes
identied as a cat and eventually she
can recognise a cat. Show millions of
vile internet comments to Googles
self-improving articial intelligence
engine and it can recognise a troll.
In fact, by some measures Jigsaw
has now trained Conversation AI to
spot toxic language with impressive
accuracy. Feed a string of text into
its Wikipedia harassment-detection
engine and it can, with what Google
describes as more than 92 per cent
certainty and a ten per cent false-pos-
itive rate, come up with a judgment
that matches a human test panel as to
whether that line represents an attack.
For now the tool looks only at the
content of that single string of text. But
Green says Jigsaw has also looked into
detecting methods of mass harassment
based on the volume of messages and
other long-term patterns.
Wikipedia and the NYT will be the
first to try out Googles automated
harassment detector on comment
threads and article discussion pages.
Wikimedia is still considering exactly
how it will use the tool, while the NYT
plans to make Conversation AI the
rst pass of its websites comments,
blocking any abuse it detects until it
can be moderated by a human. Jigsaw
HE TYPES IN
WHATS UP,
BITCH? AND
CLICKS. THE AI
INSTANTLY
RATES IT A 63
OUT OF 100 ON
THE ATTACK SCALE
will also make its work open source,
letting any web forum or social media
platform adopt it to automatically
ag insults, scold harassers, or even
auto-delete toxic language, preventing
an intended harassment victim from
ever seeing the offending comment.
The hope is that anyone can take
these models and run with them, says
Adams, who helped lead the machine
learning project.
W h a t s m o r e , s o m e l i m i t e d
evidence suggests that this kind of
quick detection can actually help to
tame trolling. Conversation AI was
inspired in part by an experiment
undertaken by Riot Games, the video
game company that runs the globes
biggest multiplayer world, known as
League of Legends, with a claimed 100
million players. Starting in late 2012,
Riot began using machine learning to
try to analyse the results of in-game
conversations that led to players
being banned. It used the resulting
algorithm to show players in real time
when they had made sexist or abusive
remarks. When players saw immediate
automated warnings, 92 per cent of
them changed their behaviour for the
better, according to a report in the
science journal Nature.
WIREDs own hands-on test of
Conversation AI comes one summer
afternoon in Jigsaws oice, when the
groups engineers show me a prototype
and invite us to come up with a sample
of verbal lth for it to analyse. Wincing,
WIRED suggests the rst ambiguously
abusive and misogynist phrase that
comes to mind: Whats up, bitch?
Adams types in the sentence and clicks
Score. Conversation AI instantly rates
it a 63 out of 100 on the attack scale.
Then, for contrast, Adams shows the
results of a more clearly vicious phrase:
You are such a bitch. It rates a 96.
In fact, Conversation AIs algorithm
goes on to make impressively subtle
distinctions. Pluralising the trashy
greeting to Whats up bitches? drops
the attack score to 45. Add a smiling
emoji and it falls to 39. So far, so good.
But later, after weve left Googles
oice, WIRED opens the Conversation
AI prototype in private to try out the
worst phrase that had haunted Sarah
Jeong: Im going to rip each one of
her hairs out and twist her tits clear
off. It rates an attack score of ten,
a glaring oversight. Swapping out
her for your boosts it to a 62.
Conversation AI likely hasnt yet been
taught that threats dont have to be
addressed directly at a victim to have
their intended efect. The algorithm, it
seems, still has some lessons to learn.
160
or a tech executive taking on would-
be terrorists, state-sponsored trolls,
and tyrannical surveillance regimes,
Jigsaws creator has a surprisingly
sunny outlook on the battle between
the people who use the internet and the
authorities that seek to control them.
I have a fundamental belief that
technology empowers people, Jared
Cohen says. Its hard for me to imagine
a world where theres not a cat-and-
mouse game. But over time, the mouse
might become bigger than the cat.
That sense of digital populism, as
Cohen tells it, was instilled in him
during his travels through Iran, Syria,
Lebanon and Iraq in the early 2000s
as a Rhodes scholar. He recalls the two
internet-savvy young Syrian women
in Homs who acted as his hosts and
wore make-up and short-sleeved shirts
amid the burkas. Unlike their mothers,
these girls know what theyre missing
out on, hed write in a book about his
travels, Children of Jihad. Society has
changed and technology has opened
their eyes in ways that their parents
cannot begin to understand.
When Cohen became the youngest
person ever to join the US State Depart-
ments Policy Planning staff in 2006,
he brought with him a notion that the
internet could be a force for political
empowerment and even upheaval. And
as Facebook, then YouTube and Twitter,
started to evolve into tools of protest
and even revolution, that theory earned
him access to oicials all the way up to
secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice
and later Hillary Clinton. Rice would
describe Cohen in her memoirs as an
inspired appointment. Former Policy
Planning director Anne-Marie Slaughter,
his boss under Clinton, remembers him
as ferociously intelligent.
In June 2009, when Twitter had
scheduled downtime for maintenance
during a massive Iranian protest against
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
Cohen emailed founder Jack Dorsey and
asked him to keep the service online.
The unauthorised move, which violated
the Obama administrations non-inter-
ference policy with Iran, nearly cost
Cohen his job. But when Clinton backed
Cohen, it signalled a shift in the State
Departments relationship with both
Iran and Silicon Valley.
Around the same time, Cohen began
calling up tech CEOs and inviting them
on tech delegation trips, or techdels
to inspire them to build products that
could help people in repressed corners
of the world. He asked Googles Schmidt
to visit Iraq, a trip that sparked the
relationship that a year later would
result in Schmidts invitation to Cohen to
create Google Ideas. But it was Cohens
email to Twitter during the Iran protests
that impressed Schmidt. He wasnt
following a playbook, Schmidt says.
He was inventing the playbook.
The story Cohens critics focus on,
however, is his involvement in Haystack
software intended to provide online
anonymity and circumvent censorship.
Cohen, it is claimed, helped to hype the
tool in early 2010 as a potential boon
to Iranian dissidents. After the US
government fast-tracked it for approval,
however, a security researcher revealed
it had vulnerabilities that put users in
grave danger of detection. Today, Cohen
disclaims any responsibility, but two
ex-colleagues say he championed the
project. Former boss Slaughter describes
his time in government more diplomat-
ically: At State there was a mismatch
between the scale of Jareds ideas and
the tools the department had to deliver
on them. Jigsaw is a much better match.
But inserting Google into thorny
geopolitical problems has led to new
questions. Some have accused the group
of trying to monetise the sensitive issues
theyre taking on; the Electronic Frontier
Foundations director of international
free expression, Jillian York, calls its
work a little bit imperialistic. For all
its altruistic talk, she points out, Jigsaw
is part of a for-prot entity. And on that
point, Schmidt is clear: Alphabet hopes
to someday make money from Jigsaws
work. Why would we try to wire up
Africa? he asks. Because eventually
there will be advertising markets there.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has
accused Cohen of being a de facto State
Department employee, quietly advancing
the US governments foreign policy
goals from within Google, and labelled
him the companys director of regime
change. When we raise that quote with
Schmidt, he rejects the notion. Were
not a government, he says slowly and
carefully. Were not engaged in regime
change. But if it turns out that empow-
ering citizens with smartphones and
information causes changes in their
country you know, thats probably a
good thing, dont you think?
Despite Cohens optimistic digital
interventionism, technology has
unintended consequences. Haystack
was meant to help Iranians, but could
have put them in danger. Twitter, with
all its revolutionary potential, enabled
new forms of abuse. And Conversation
AI, meant to curb that abuse, could take
down its own share of legitimate speech.
During her worst days of targeting
by misogynists last year, feminist writer
Sady Doyle would get 100 new Twitter
notifications an hour, many of them
attacks. But when WIRED presents
Conversation AI as a solution, she
hesitates. People need to be able to
talk in whatever register they talk, she
says. Imagine what the internet would
be like if you couldnt say Donald Trump
is a moron. (This scores 99 out of 100.)
The example highlights Conver-
sation AIs potential for false positives
or suppressing speech. Even without
automated agging, last year Twitter
banned Politwoops, a feed that collected
the deleted tweets of political gures to
catch damning of-the-cuf statements.
Sarah Jeong, the Motherboard writer
who was silenced by Bernie bros, says
she supports the notion of Conversation
AI, in theory. The internet needs moder-
ation, she says. [But] these are human
interactions. Any x for the worst of
those interactions, she says, will need to
be human too. Automated detection can
open the door to the delete-it-all option,
adds Emma Llans, director of the Free
Expression Project at the non-profit
Center for Democracy and Technology,
rather than spending the time and
resources to identify false positives.
WIREDs tests of Conversation AI
produces outright false positives: You
are a troll the go-to response for troll
victims gets an attack score of 93.
Throwing out well-intentioned
speech that resembles harassment
IMAGINE WHAT
THE INTERNET
WOULD BE
LIKE IF YOU
COULDNT
SAY DONALD
TRUMP IS
A MORON
could be a blow to the open civil society
Jigsaw has vowed to protect. When we
ask Conversation AIs inventors about
its potential for collateral damage, the
engineers argue that its false positive
rate will improve as the software
continues to train itself. But on the
question of how its judgments will be
enforced, they say thats up to whoever
uses the tool. We want to let commu-
nities have the discussions they want to
have, says Conversation AI co-creator
Lucas Dixon. And if that favours a
sanitised internet over a free-wheeling
one? There are already plenty of nasty
places on the internet. What we can do
is create places where people can have
better conversations.
On a muggy morning in June, WIRED
joins Jared Cohen at one of his favourite
spots in New York: the Soldiers and
Sailors Monument, a tomblike dome
of worn marble in sleepy Riverside Park.
When Cohen arrives, he tells us the place
reminds him of the quiet ruins he liked
to roam during his travels in rural Syria.
Our meeting is in part to air the criti-
cisms weve heard of Conversation AI.
But to the potential for false positives to
actually censor speech, he answers with
surprising humility. Weve been asking
these exact questions, he says. And they
apply not just to Conversation AI but to
everything Jigsaw builds, he says. And,
for now, Conversation AI remains an
experiment. When youre looking at
curbing online harassment and at free
expression, theres a tension between
the two, he acknowledges. We dont
claim to have all the answers.
And if the tool ends up harming the
exact free speech its trying to protect,
would Jigsaw kill it? Could be, Cohen
answers without hesitation.
We start to ask another question, but
Cohen interrupts, unwilling to drop the
notion that Jigsaws tools may have
unintended consequences. He wants
to talk about the people he met while
wandering through the Middle Easts
most repressive countries.
It wasnt until after Cohen returned to
the US that he realised how dangerous
it had been for them to help him or
even to be seen with him. My very
presence could have put them at risk,
he says, with what sounds like genuine
throat-tightening emotion. If I have
a guilt I act on, its that. I never want
to make that mistake again. Ten years
from now Ill look back at where my head
is at today too, he says. What I got
right and what I got wrong. He hopes
hell have done good. 
Andy Greenberg is a New York-based
senior writer for WIRED US
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 164 / INFORMATION / WE SOURCE EVERY THING SEE RIGHT

The average
decline in fruit and
vegetable intake

1.47 TRILLION
of divorced British
men, compared
to when they
The number of instructions per second that can be were married,
processed by the Kilocore, a new 1,000-core microchip according to a
designed at the University of California, Davis. study published
in Social Science

$101 MILLION
& Medicine.
Womens diets
do not appear
Amount cybercriminals stole from the Bank of to change
Bangladeshs account at the US Federal Reserve significantly after
Percentage of Greenlands territory where the night sky is adversely through the SWIFT network, in February 2016. a break up.
affected by light pollution, according to an international study that is
researching artificial skyglow, published by Science.
23.86 PER DAY
The average
16 YEARS
The duration of
number of the hunger strike
US patents undertaken by
3,628 overall Indian human
granted to IBM rights activist
from January Irom Sharmila,
to May 2016. which ended on
In June, the August 9, 2016.
Armonk-based Sharmila had
companys patent been repeatedly
count was ahead arrested and
of Googles, force-fed, as

WORDS: GIAN VOLPICELLI. ILLUSTRATION: GIACOMO GAMBERINI. SOURCES: LATESTPATENTS.COM; SCIENCEDIRECT.COM; ADMIN.CH; ADVANCES.
SCIENCEMAG.ORG; ARCHIVE.ORG; GKING.HARVARD.EDU; ARXIV.ORG; SCIENCE.HOUSE.GOV; LE.AC.UK; REPEALAFSPA; RAND.ORG; UCDAVIS.EDU
Apples and suicide is illegal
Facebooks. under Indian law.

Percentage of Singapores territory affected by severe light pollution.

The paper says the sky over the city-state is so bright that the eyes
of people living there cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision.
23.1%
The percentage
of Swiss voters
who voted in
favour of the
Universal Basic
TERABYTES Income (UBI) of
The size of the 1,800 a month
file containing for all adults, in
the maths proof a referendum
to the Boolean held on June 5,
Pythagorean 2016. Finland
triples problem. will be trialling a
Computer UBI on a limited
scientists found scale in 2017,
the solution in as will Utrecht in
May 2016 for the Netherlands.
the first time The amount of energy in joules per second The number of years that it has taken for an Easter
ever using unleashed by Supermans Super Flare attack, egg, hidden within the 1983 Apple II video game
the University first seen in Superman #38. This is according to a Gumball, to be found. The feature a secret message
of Texas seven-year-long research effort by University of from the games creator, Robert A Cook was finally
supercomputer, Leicester students, who created assessments of discovered by the pseudonymous game cracker
Stampede. superheroes powers from a scientific perspective. known as 4a.m., and revealed on June 8, 2016.
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Leveraging the ledger
UNLOCK THE
BLOCKCHAIN
Bitcoin isnt just reinventing money its underlying platform is
being used to build a huge and versatile trust network
Its easy to think weve reached peak
Bitcoin, but the blockchain at the
heart of cryptocurrencies contains
the seeds of something revolutionary.
The blockchain is a giant decen-
tralised electronic ledger with
duplicate copies on thousands of
computers around the world. This
ledger cannot be altered retro-
spectively, thereby allowing asset
ownership and transfer to be recorded
without external verication.
Investors have now realised the
blockchain is bigger than Bitcoin.
In the rst quarter of 2016, venture-
capital investment in blockchain
startups overtook that in pure-play
Bitcoin companies for the rst time,
according to industry researcher
CoinDesk, which has tallied $1.1
billion (840m) in deals to date.
Even governments have taken an
interest. Sir Mark Walport, the UK
 Stephen Armstrong
governments chief scientic adviser,
published a report on the block-
chain in January this year, outlining
how the massively distributed
shared ledger is a database that
tracks who owns a nancial, physical
or electronic asset. But it could
also, say, monitor driverless cars.
A u to n o m o u s v e h i c l e s a re
becoming a reality cars are
increasingly part of the internet
of things, Walport explains. You
dont want your connected vehicle
to be tampered with. So blockchains
distributed ledger has the potential
to monitor car operating systems,
sensors, doors. You can baseline the
known state of the devices congu-
ration and then check for tampering.
Many firms are already using
the blockchain to trace and record
ownership, and to cut out middlemen.
In the first group, theres London-
004
based Everledger, which uses
the distributed ledger to track
individual diamonds from the mine
to the consumer, helping identify
conflict diamonds and combat
insurance fraud. More than 980,000
diamonds have been registered
since Everledgers 2015 launch. The
company plans to expand into the
art world, bringing it into compe-
tition with Berlin-based Ascribe,
launched to help artists claim
ownership of their work as it spreads
online. Stampery, meanwhile,
ofers creatives and startups an IP
protection service as well as ofering
a document-stamping service to
the legal world, allowing lawyers to
certify documents without expensive
court fees. Stamperys next step is
system and critical infrastructure
security, working with Microsoft
to allow developers to embed the
blockchain in their systems and
thus record the history of every le.
If the NSA had the blockchain
in the heart of its system it would
have been able to follow Edward
Snowdens trail and identify exactly
which les hed accessed and stolen,
explains Stampery co-founder and
CTO Luis Ivn Cuende. Snowden
was able to access files, then, as
an administrator, remove his
details. The blockchain would have
prevented that its immutable.
Stampery is now working with the
THE BLOCKCHAIN
CAN CONFIRM
IF A PRODUCT IS
INDEED AUTHENTIC
Estonian government and Telefnica
on secure, tamper-resistant systems.
These businesses work best,
explains Provenance founder and
CEO Jessi Baker, when they lock in to
systems or markets where some sort
of record already exists. Provenance,
for instance, uses the blockchain to
ensure supply chains are sustainable

and trustworthy: We can conrm a
product is indeed authentic, where
things were made, or if its got a certi-
cation, or if it actually is organic,
she explains. Its about helping to
bring trustable facts to retail.
The peer-to-peer potential of the
blockchain is at the heart of Arcade
City the so-called Uber killer
launched in New Hampshire in 2015
by disgruntled Uber driver Chris-
topher David, and the noisiest of
the cut-out-the-middleman pack.
David resented Ubers control over
pricing, and founded Arcade City as
an open marketplace where riders
and drivers can negotiate trips
directly, cutting out middlemen
from Silicon Valley or the city
council, says David. Its already
aiming to ll the void left by Uber
and Lyfts withdrawal from Austin,
Texas, in May this year. Asimilar
project, Israel-based LaZooz,
operates ride-sharing based on a
kind of digital karma. Each ride you
give earns tokens, which you spend
on rides for yourself.
This may sound like an insurance
nightmare, but the blockchain inevi-
tably could be the perfect solution.
Based in Canada, Plex.ai is a car-in-
surance startup using an automotive
telematics platform combining
blockchain variant Ethereum,
machine learning and artificial
intelligence to give insurance
companies real-time, remote
diagnostics on a car and its driver.
Some urge caution. Cornell
University professor and crypto-
currency expert Emin Gn Sirer
points out that services such as Uber
and Airbnb handle security checks,
vetting of drivers and landlords and
a variety of other safety issues that
Guy Shields
The blockchain require human judgement. These
can authenticate are not things we should trust to
the provenance market forces, he argues.
of artworks The blockchains potential for
or ownership removing the middleman has found
of shipping enthusiastic supporters in the music
containers and industry. Singer-songwriter Imogen
even diamonds Heap released her lastest single,
Tiny Human, on Ujo Music, which
has its own currency and digital-
rights registration, as well as song
tracking and feeding back data to
artists. Bittunes, meanwhile, uses
Bitcoin to buy and share music,
ofering artists increased earnings
and buyers a form of cashback as
songs become more popular.
The wealth-creating aspect of
Bittunes excites MIT Media Lab
director of digital currency Brian
Forde, who is investigating the
blockchains possible social impact
on developing-world economies.
Capitalism took of in countries
such as the US with small-business-
owners borrowing against property
equity, he says. Where people
dont have a formal property title,
as in Egypt, all this capital is tied
up. But if you create a property title
on the blockchain, even if there is a
change of government, its proof:
the government cant say you
dont own the property. In Egypt
alone, that unlocks $400 million
(304m) in capital overnight.
The idea that the blockchain could
possibly add billions of dollars to the
$1.1
global economy is just the start, says
Amos Meiri co-founder of Tel Avivs
Colu, which ofers blockchain-sup-
ported local currencies. The block-
chain brings safety to everything
from online purchases to opening
the front door of your holiday home,
BN
he explains. Its not just a new way
of thinking about money its a new
way of thinking about trust.
There are problems, of course
the technology may not scale up
to handle an enormous number of
frequent trades or updates. Theres
also a very uneven response from
Total VC regulators. And although to date
investment to hackers have struggled to break
date in startups into the widely distributed network
that use the itself, recent high-prole attacks on
blockchain, dependent websites and services
as opposed indicate that the more value stored
to the bitcoin on the blockchain, the greater their
cryptocurrency incentive to access it.
BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP
INSIDE THE
RADHUB
SESSIONS
The BMW Group radhub in
London was an event to
explore the future of mobility
The BMW Group radhub took place on
June 16-17, 2016 in London. An eclectic
mix of 95 innovators took part in the
event both from within the BMW Group
and beyond to discuss Digital Cultures
and four satellite trend topics, from
human augmentivity and autonomous
multi-modal mobility, to clean transpor-
tation and new consumption models.
Taking over Londons Roundhouse,
the overall aim of the day was to
uncover the routes to reinventing
mobility and meeting the complex
and multidimensional needs of the
future. It began with an introduction
from Peter Schwarzenbauer, member
of the board of management at BMW
Group. The future of mobility couldnt
be more exciting! he enthused.
Digitalisation, in particular, has more
and more impact on virtually all areas
of our daily lives. And it will revolu-
tionise the auto sector.
The attending radinfluencers
then explored the BMW Groups VISION
Vehicles, with concept cars from
BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce. These
future-facing speculations seek to
define tomorrows driving tech, with
features such as self-driving, artificial
intelligence, reactive design, car-to-
driver communication and much more.
Later in the day, WIREDs deputy
e d i t o r G re g W i l l i a m s c h a i re d a
question-and-answer forum with
Schwarzenbauer, handing the floor to
the assembled radinfluencers. Topics
included Uberisation of services to
what the BMW group anticipates the
impact of autonomous vehicles will be,
Left: radhub sessions explored
public and private transportation,
additive manufacturing,
collaborative consumption,
multi-modal mobility, augmented
reality and the human role.

and shared ownership models to arti-
ficial intelligence, as well as the rapid
increase of city sizes and individual
finance. When quizzed about the future
of safety, Schwarzenbauer commented:
We have to see that around 90 per cent
of the accidents that occur today are
from human errors. If you eliminate the
human error, streets will become much
more safe than at present.
Attendees were then split into eight
groups to discuss future scenarios, such
as human augmentivity, digitisation,
and the potential mobility needs and
products of tomorrow. Similarly, access
between rural cities and urban envi-
ronments was addressed, in the hope
that tomorrows populations would have
more time to do the things that we love.
FOCUSED ON THE FUTURE
A conversation about innovation in motion
fter the radhub, WIREDs product
editor Jeremy White met BMW
Groups Peter Schwarzenbauer
to discuss topics such as vehicle
personalisation, shared ownership
and driverless modes of transport.
With the MINI VISION NEXT
100 we tried to foresee how
this will happen, explained
Schwarzenbauer. Over time,
the car learns your moods, what
settings you like, the colours you
like and when you like them and
then it adapts immediately as
soon as you approach the car.
While the BMW Group has
attempted to predict the sectors
future, shared ownership models
have emerged as a key topic.
It doesnt matter which MINI you
enter, or where it will be always be
your MINI, said Schwarzenbauer.
This is totally possible.
Although the vehicle will be
shared, factors including facial
recognition and behavioural
analysis can be utilised by in-car
assistants such as those in the
Rolls-Royce and BMW VISION NEXT
100 vehicles. But, as the BMW Group
dips its toe further into emerging
technologies including driver
recognition and personal AI will
it emerge as a tech company
that manufactures cars, or a car
company that manufactures tech?
We need to become a tech
company, said Schwarzenbauer.
Theres no alternative. So, this is
our challenge. The other challenge,
though, is for tech companies to
learn to build cars.
The next 25 years will be
fascinating, with huge changes
expected in connectivity, propul-
sion and artificial intelligence. The
BMW VISION NEXT 100 is just the
beginning. See next100.bmw
BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSH
PARTNERSHIP
JUTTA JULIANE MEIER
Founder & CEO, berzeugend-einfach
ince creating the marketing innovation
consultancy company in 2009, Munich-
based Meier has been explaining the
communicative potential of new tech-
nologies to executives and civil servants.
She now spends at least six to eight
weeks in Silicon Valley every year and
has pivoted from pure marketing to areas
such as the building industry, customer
experience, education and mobility.
Innovations of today and tomorrow
are able to disrupt all kind of industries,
she says. So, from my point of view, we
should all start thinking interdisciplinary
PETER
SCHWARZENBAUER
MEMBER OF
THE BOARD OF
MANAGEMENT, BMW
The future of mobility
will arrive in four ways,
says BMW Group board
member Peter
Schwarzenbauer. All
that you need to do is
remember ACES or
autonomous, connected,
electrical and shared.
At the radhub,
Schwarzenbauer argued
we need to bring a new
perspective to how we
view mobility and
transport, predicting
that in the next decade,
the industry will undergo
greater transformations
than in the last century.
Were standing before
the biggest
transformation the
automotive industry has
ever seen, he said.
Individual mobility will
still play a major role. But
how does this mobility
look? Who will provide
this mobility?
To help, Schwarzenbauer
promised to digest ideas
suggested by the
and from any perspective available. That
radinfluencers, taking
is why I loved to be part of the radhub. advantage of their
I worked in an inter-modal mobility hub, insight to shape the
together in a team with Ron Garan, a strategy of the BMW
former astronaut who completely opened Group. At the radhub,
WIREDs deputy editor
up my mind. Since then, my vision on
Greg Williams chaired a
future mobility has changed. Q&A with the influencers,
The extent of this change of vision fielding questions on
can sound rather drastic. She hopes subjects as diverse as
we will all have access to any kind of autonomous vehicles,
mobility from earthbound transport software integration
and new ownership
to extra-planetary experiences.
models. The future, he
Meier stresses that mobility is already concluded, is connected.
undergoing significant disruption,
especially at the hands of the sharing
economy and Uber-like companies.
I use DriveNow, Uber, Airbnb and
several other great services, but theres
still a lot of opportunity in adding value to
under-served communities, she says.
ILLUSTRATION: AISTE STANCIKAITE
But Im also a proud car owner.
I love driving around in my convertible
and I love using all kinds of integrated
tech and driving assistance tools. Id also
like to drive autonomously some day;
to retain the option to still drive myself
would make the most sense to me.
Digital agriculture
TECH TO TABLE
FARMS
GO ROBOTIC
How precision farming is optimising our food supply
The SPREAD vegetable farm,
currently under construction on a
science park about 25km outside
Kyoto, Japan, will occupy some
4,400m 2 all enclosed in a vast,
low-rise warehouse-like building.
Inside, under LED lights, shelves
will rise from oor to ceiling, each
one a soil bed full of lettuces. The
workforce will transplant seedlings,
water and trim plants, and pick
30,000 lettuce heads every day.
The striking thing, besides the
scale of the operation, is that none of
those workers will be human: people
will plant the seeds, but after that,
robots will tend the crops, control
the temperature, humidity, light and
CO2, and sterilise the water supply.
This is not a vision of agriculture in
the distant future: SPREADs
controlled-environment farm
will begin shipping lettuce in 2017.
To feed a world population forecast
to hit 9.6bn by 2050, global food
production must increase by 70 per
cent. The nite nature of land is the
most obvious barrier to that, but
theres also a serious rural labour
shortage; across the world, people are
moving from the countryside to towns
and cities. By 2017, its estimated that
even less-developed countries will
have majority urban populations.
In the UK, a 2013 government report
put the average age of farmer at 59.
 Richard Benson
Much land is already precision
farmed monitored by sensors,
data-analysis and satellite mapping,
and cultivated with machines that
use that data and GPS technology to
plant, spray and harvest more
eiciently. Driverless tractors are
already in use in Europe and the US,
but at John Deere the agricultural
machinery manufacturer the
talk is of sensors and the internet
of things enabling whole farms to
run almost entirely unmanned.
The application of fertiliser, for
example, will be carried out not by
large tractor-like machines whose
weight increases soil compaction,
but by eets of drones. And forget
broad use of dangerous herbicides
weed-recognition software could
enable robotic devices to travel
elds applying a laser, or single dots
009 David Doran
o f c h e m i c a l s d i re c t l y to t h e
offending plant. A prototype
robo-weeder is currently being built
at Harper Adams University, a
specialist provider of agricultural
education, in Shropshire.
Livestock handling is also being
automated. Robotic milkers the rst
robots to make inroads on farms are
now afordable to even small-scale
producers, and are able to imitate the
milking action of a human. Dairymas-
ters MooMonitor sensors detect
when a cow is in heat and ready for
insemination, and alerts the farmer
via text message. Irish shepherd Paul
Brennan, of Carlow, uses a drone to
replace sheepdogs for round-ups.
Of course, some of this farming
technology will be redundant if
lab-grown meat becomes a more
affordable and appealing option.
With Tel Avivs Modern Agriculture
Foundation currently developing a
process for growing chicken breast
from stem cells thats indistin-
guishable from the real thing, that
if may soon become a when.
Does all this mean that our green
and pleasant countryside will
become depopulated and tended
only by droids, much like the Lars
family farm on Tatooine? Simon
Blackstone, head of engineering
at Harper Adams, believes there
will still be plenty of employment
for humans as Agricultural robots
will replace semi-skilled drivers,
but many new, highly skilled robot
engineers will be needed.
You dont need to And according to Ian Bell, chief
be in a warehouse executive of the Addington Fund,
to precision which supports farming families
farm drones struggling to adapt to changing
can plant, weed conditions, there could even be
and water with new opportunities for those with
pinpoint accuracy old-fashioned and traditional skills.
In reality, the more mechanised
farming becomes, the more
urbanites fetishise traditional
farming and country living, Bell
says. I think were already seeing
a growing market of wealthy rural
incomers willing to pay a premium
for craftsmanship and artisanally
produced foods. If you can work
out how to use technology to
minimise your overheads while
providing services in that area,
you can make a lot more money
than you will growing lettuce.
BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP
MAX MHRING
Founder & CEO, Drop
ax Mhring is a self-styled biohacker
and serial entrepreneur whose interests
span messaging apps, music, payment
systems and, crucially, the future of
transport. Which explains why he was
such an enthusiastic participant at the
radhub on June 16-17, 2016.
With the event, the BMW Group has
started to form a community of open
innovation and to cultivate a digital
mindset for a company formerly exclu-
sively focused on engineering, Mhring
says. Working in interdisciplinary groups
on topics like the future of green public
JEN HYATT
FOUNDER,
BIG WHITE WALL
Hyatt has founded and
helped to found over 30
companies, many of which
bridge digital technology
and social impact. Her
venture Big White Wall is
an online platform that
ofers mental health
support and is used by the
Ministry of Defence and
the NHS. In the future, she
reckons our vehicles could
recognise our mental
state and current moods,
using facial and
behavioural analysis. This
would allow tomorrows
cars to adapt their settings
to better suit our physical
and mental states.
transportation, or the next generation
off cities,
ii h
shows h the
that h BMW G Group
is preparing itself to break out of their
purely physical garage.
Mhring values bringing people
together to discuss relevant topics. The
29-year-old recently founded Drop a
RENE RICHARDSON
messaging app that allows the creation
GOSLINE
of guarded groups. These forums can SENIOR LECTURER
only be joined by people who have certain AND RESEARCH
personality characteristics, gauged SCIENTIST, MIT SLOAN
via a quiz, a screenshot, a text upload, SCHOOL OF
MANAGEMENT
location or gender, for example.
In this way, Drop aims to sort the wheat Exploring how technology
of competent arguments from the chaff inuences decisions and
of online trolling. The same concept how humans oload tasks
informs Mhrings other venture, Year to machines, Gosline
believes This is changing
of the X. This annual festival requests
the way we make choices
attendees challenge their prejudices and and what we perceive as
inhibitions and join a wider community rational or irrational, and
ILLUSTRATION: AISTE STANCIKAITE
of change-makers to discuss the future. asks if this leads us to
New technology can lead us in two make better decisions.
directions: empowering us or limiting If we understand that,
we can then program
ourselves, says Mhring. To ensure
for people to take better
its real pluralism in enriching our life, it advantage of machines
is key that we form new habits that make when suitable, she says.
sure behaviour guides us towards this. Thats smart and safe.
Smarter city streets  Luke Dormehl 011

THE ROADTO
TOMORROW
Its not enough for future vehicles to be shared and self-driving
a smart upgrade of our cities and streets is also required

Flying-car enthusiasts may plan to
make roads redundant, and virtual
telecommuting evangelists seek to
do away with the need to travel at all
but for now, its self-driving lorries
or the smaller autonomous vehicles
currently being tested in parts of the
UK, including Greenwich, Bristol,
Milton Keynes and Coventry, at the
transportation vanguard.
Autonomous vehicles promise
to have a much bigger efect on our
roads than simply giving individual
drivers an easier commute. We are
very interested in how autonomous
cars could have an impact at the city
scale, says Carlo Ratti, director
at MITs SENSEable City Lab, and
co-author of The City of Tomorrow:
Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the
Future of Urban Life. Our position is
that they promise to have a dramatic
impact, because they could blur the
distinction between private and
public modes of transportation,
he says. Your car could give you a
lift to work in the morning and then,
rather than sitting idle in a parking
lot, give a lift to someone else in your
family, your neighbourhood, your
social-media community, or city.
How much of an impact would
this have on city congestion? More
than you think. One recent paper
published by MIT suggested that
the mobility demand of a city such
as Singapore could be met with 30
per cent of its existing vehicles, were
there a publicly accessible fleet of
Smarter city streets
self-driving cars. That number could
be slashed a further 40 per cent if
passengers on similar routes shared a
vehicle. This implies a city in which
everyone can travel on demand
with just one-fth of the number of
cars in use today, Ratti says.
But whether or not families
are willing to give up the status
symbol of multiple cars in favour
of a vehicular sharing economy (and
over the next ten years this seems
unlikely), there are still smart
technologies which can and will
drastically reduce traic levels.
Think of the street as a very
complicated version of musical
chairs, says Anthony Townsend,
a researcher whose work explores
the intersection between technology
and cities. An urban street is the
most scarce, expensive piece of land
and resource. Everybody wants to be
on it and they dont want to share
with anyone. Theres only so much
of it, so the more you can co-ordinate
it, the more benets you can get.
Right now, Townsend points
out, 30 per cent of traffic in cities
is caused by people driving around
looking for parking. That is a
problem that the Alphabet-owned
Sidewalk Labs hopes to solve. It
recently ofered Columbus, Ohio
the winner of a recent $50 million
(37m) Smart City Challenge,
organised by the US Department of
Transportation the use of camera-
equipped vehicles similar to Googles
Street View cars, to count the
number of available parking spaces
in the city, as well as reading relevant
parking signs. Aggregating this with
data from Google Maps, it will then
help direct drivers to empty spaces.
Just like the internet of things
through which the combined
AN URBAN STREET
IS THE MOST
SCARCE, EXPENSIVE
RESOURCE
 Luke Dormehl
smarts of various simple devices
working together represent the most
exciting possibilities so too will
the ability of vehicles to commu-
nicate with the world around them
transform the next decade.
The idea is pretty simple, says
Dean Pomerleau, an AI researcher
who built one of the worlds
first neural-network-powered
self-driving cars (and drove it
across America), all the way back
in 1995. The notion is that every
car will be equipped with short-
range communication technology
that allows it to learn about other
vehicles in its vicinity as well as
upcoming construction zones or
other road hazards that have either
been programmed in or reported
by other vehicles.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communi-
cation will ensure our roads run
more smoothly. One idea being
explored by the SENSEable City Lab
is for sensor-laden vehicles to pass
through intersections by commu-
nicating and remaining at a safe
distance from each other, rather than
grinding to a halt at traic lights. In
other terms, you move control from
the traic ow level to the vehicle
level, says Ratti. Doing that, you
can create a system that is much
more eicient and can signicantly
reduce queues and delays, because
then you can make sure the vehicles
get to the intersection exactly when
they have a slot. This system will
became possible when there is a
certain level of intelligence in every
car and it will be a natural conse-
quence of the driverless revolution.
As these technologies gain
momentum, expect to see another
new norm: smart roads. Like smart
vehicles, smart roads will use a
variety of embedded sensors,
Wi-Fi connectivity, AI algorithms
and other technologies that a
traditional dumb road lacks.
At present, were only beginning
to see cities factoring this kind of
smart infrastructure into their plans.
For example, the city of Copenhagen
has undertaken a number of pilot
schemes to investigate the efects of
smart roads with a slew of environ-
mental, safety and other benets.
Smart street lighting, for instance,
becomes brighter when cyclists
012
are crossing busy road junctions:
making motorists more aware of
their presence, while saving power
at other times by not having illumi-
nation running at full capacity.
A system set up by the Copenhagen
Intelligent Transport Systems,
meanwhile, features Wi-Fi access
points which anonymously detect
road users mobile phones as they
pass along the Copenhagen street
on which they are located. By trian-
gulating multiple access points,
the position of road users phones
can be pinpointed in a way that lets
streets be mapped for mobility,
safety and CO2 emissions.
Another demonstration of smart
roads is evidenced in Songdo, South
Korea, where millions of sensors
are deployed in the citys streets,
electrical grids and other key
infrastructure elements. This allows
the flow of people to be continu-
ously tracked in a way that lets the
city make smart decisions. There
has also been investigation into
technologies such as smart cameras
equipped with algorithms for
spotting pedestrians, or scanning the
licence plates of passing cars with
a view to both controlling features
30%
such as street lights, and monitoring
and predicting traic ow.
These notions of smart lighting
which can adapt intelligently to
traffic will become increasingly
popular. Monitoring the collective
batteries of electric vehicles opens
up possibilities such as building
Percentage of charging points at exactly the right
traffic in cities location or even incorporating
that is actually special lanes into certain roads so
just drivers that electric vehicles can be charged
searching for as they travel along them.
an available This ability to draw on data
parking space gathered by smart vehicles will also
begin to dictate the work of town
planners as they construct new
roads or modify old ones. Last year,
the Google-owned traic app Waze
teamed up with the city of Boston to
reduce local traic. In exchange for
advance notice from city author-
ities about planned road closures,
Waze agreed to share data gathered
from its users with Bostons traic
management centre. In the short
term, the collaboration made Waze
a more valuable tool to Bostonians
by letting them plan routes to reach

their destinations quickly and
more eiciently. Longer-term, this
data exchange will help Boston to
ne-tune its traic light timings and
urban planning.
The mass adoption of new
technology has always impacted
the development of cities and will
continue to do so. The success of
Henry Fords Model T car intro-
duced in 1908 helped replace
convoluted medieval or Victorian
roads with gleaming motorways and
dual carriageways equipped for fast
car travel. Expect to see a similar
transition for the age of big data:
one which will be cleaner, safer and
more pedestrian friendly.
Thats not to suggest that there
wont be challenges. The big
changes on our roads whether
its 2016, 2026 or further forward
will force governments, as well
as private enterprise, to embrace
truly smart vehicles and the
possibilities they promise.
Giovanna Giuliano
Smart cars will As Anthony Townsend points
need smart roads out, Its policy thats going to
that share data affect these changes. Cars didnt
on traffic, parking take over the city until cities put
and recharging rules in place that allowed it. It was a
choice that city governments made.
Thats one of the things thats often
uninformed about speculation thats
coming out of Silicon Valley now.
They think theyre going to solve
all the problems the car created by
just putting in some software. Its
a lot more complicated than that.
Nasas sci-fi habitats Ruby Lott-Lavigna

In the 1970s, we earthlings bemoaned our overcrowded, polluted planet.

So Nasa planned an alternative: colonies in space.
Here are its artists original designs for our new Earth-orbit-based homes
015 Rick Guidice
Nasas sci-fi habitats
For as long as overpopulation of
Earth has been a concern, space
colonies have been punted as
the solution. These illustra-
tions, developed by Nasas Ames
Research Center and illustrated by
Don Davis and Rick Guidice, depict
how setting up home in space might
have looked, had the mindset
(and funding) that brought us the
Apollo missions continued.
The illustrations were created
by Nasas team in the 70s to
explore what Earth-orbit-based
living might look like, if techno-
logical progress continued and
resource extraction from mining
the Moon or nearby asteroids
became a reality. Earlier in the
century, John Desmond Bernal
envisioned a space colony 16km
in diameter that could house
20,000 to 30,000 people. Although
the design gave little scientific
description, it pre-empted the
model on which the Stanford Nasa
Ruby Lott-Lavigna
summer school would develop the Previous spread:
spherical Island One colony, in Interior of an
which humans would live around ONeill Cylinder.
the equator. Along with physicist Strips of human
Gerard ONeill, the team also habitat alternate
designed Island Three a counter- with strips of
rotating dual-cylinder colony that glass allowing
created its own gravity. In 1975, starlight in.
as well as those models, they
also envisioned a hubcap-shaped Above:
rotating habitat called the Stanford Despite the
Torus (or Island Two) that would impracticalities,
be able to house 140,000 people. visualisations
The three stations remain icons of often included
speculative space design, but theyre landscaped
no closer to reality now than when wilderness and
they were conceived. Transport of water features.
materials, weightlessness, radiation
and life support still pose a few Right:
minor challenges (not to mention Island Three and
the huge expense). However, with its two ONeill
Nasa planning to travel to Mars cylinders. The
in the 2030s, and firms such as outer rings,
Elon Musks SpaceX developing 16km in radius,
re-usable rockets, space colonies hold dedicated
might not remain out of this world. agricultural areas.
017 Don Davis; Rick Guidice
Nasas sci-fi habitats Ruby Lott-Lavigna
019 Don Davis; Rick Guidice

Far left:
Astronaut
workers install
mirrors around
the Island One
colony. This
sphere would
rotate 1.9 times
per minute to
create gravity.

Above:
The interior of the
1.6km-diameter
sphere Island
One. The habitat
would run around
its equator.

Left:
The Stanford
Torus was
envisioned as a
circular habitat
that would rotate
once per minute.
Makers move up
THE NEW WAVE
OF ADDITIVE
MANUFACTURING
3D printing is moving from the hackspace to the production line
It may have reinvigorated the
maker movement, but beyond the
hackspace, large-scale consumer
uses for 3D printing have proved
limited. But designers and inventors
are expanding the boundaries of
additive manufacturing beyond
pushing plastic through a nozzle.
Gerard Rubio, CEO of London-
based Kniterate, built his first 3D
printer in 2009, cobbled together with
motors, drivers and parts from old
paper-fed printers. That experience,
plus an art project involving
3D-printing small figurines of
passers-by on Barcelonas La Rambla,
led to Kniterate, an on-demand
garment printer that knits clothes
across two decks of 125 needles. I
call it additive manufacturing,
says Rubio, but its not melting
anything. You knit the garment
with instructions from a computer.
 Chris Stokel-Walker
Kniterate, the initial prototype
of which was itself 3D printed, can
produce a sweater in a matter of
hours and has the potential to upend
fashion processes. We want to ofer
a better experience, says Rubio,
31, who launched a Kickstarter for
Kniterate in September. It makes a
garment to your measurements, in
your pattern and design, on demand.
This is what excites Rubio the
most: that the next generation of
additive manufacturing can now
produce a nished product, rather
than just a model. And its what Kirk
Phelps, a former Apple engineer
who worked on the first-gener-
ation iPhone, sees as the diference
between rst-generation 3D printing
and the new wave of additive
manufacturing. When we look at
3D printing up to this point, it hasnt
changed consumers lives because
its largely used for prototyping,
he explains. We founded a company
to make 3D printing not just about
prototyping, but about production.
Phelps works for Carbon3D,
which has developed a machine
that uses continuous liquid interface
production (CLIP) to create objects
100 times faster than standard 3D
printers, and to a higher, more
durable standard. All 3D printers
work layer by layer, building up an
object by extruding materials on to a
surface at increasing height, Phelps
explains. Layers can be brittle, and
break under pressure which is why
3D-printed objects are usually proto-
types, rather than nished products.
So, we got rid of the layers.
The underlying science behind
CLIP has been known for 30 years,
but Carbon3D is the rst company
to realise its potential for additive
manufacturing. The machine
controls both light and oxygen input
using complex physical modelling.
This ensures a gradated change
between liquid resin as it comes
out of the machines nozzle and the
solid state it will eventually set as.
End products made of the most
durable resin Carbon3Ds printer uses
can withstand 55,000kPa of pressure
a durability thats caught the eye
of the automotive industry, which
has contacted Carbon3D to make
mesh structures that make a cars
plastic parts stronger but lighter.
From whole- Phelps is bullish about 3D print-
garment knitting ings future, believing it will become
to printing three- a mainstream way to produce
dimensional everyday items within three years.
electronics, But its not only big parts for cars
manufacturing is and aeroplanes that could soon be
undergoing built by additive manufacturing
a transformation machines: the humble printed circuit
board is being upended by advances
in 3D printing technology.
The two-dimensional thinking of
printed circuit boards is limiting the
development of electronics, argues
Michael Bell of Voxel8, a startup
spun out of a Harvard University
research laboratory. Everything
is flat: flat-screen televisions; flat
smartphones; flat laptops and
tablets. With our process, you can
put the electronics in and wire them
up in three dimensions, which frees
you up from the constraints of at
printed circuit boards, he explains.

Voxel8 prints electronics in
a similar method to the way 3D
printers make trinkets. A process
called sheer printing turns
microparticle silver from a peanut-
butter consistency in a nozzle, to
liquid as it is extruded, then back
to a thicker state when needed. This
allows the Voxel8 printer to lay out
precise circuits in three dimensions,
forming wires that can be as narrow
as 50 microns (0.05mm) thick.
Bell, 26, wont disclose how many
machines have shipped, but did say
that demand has been healthy, and
the first production run of machines
has all sold. The feedback helps
Voxel8 hone its technology, helping
us find the billion-dollar use-case
markets and enabling us to tailor
our development to that, Bell says.
Even on its home turf of prototype
production and model making, 3D
021
printing has its downsides namely
speed and cost. At ETH Zurichs
department of computer science,
Christian Schller is reviving an
old-school process for truly rapid
prototyping: thermoforming.
Long used in the production of
packaging items and chocolate-
box trays, thermoforming had
previously been limited to the
production of simple and flimsy
single-colour items. By running
highly detailed designs through a
computer simulation of the therm-
oforming process first, Schllers
process allows the deformations
that occur when the thin sheet
of plastic is pressed around a
mould to be accurately modelled
and accounted for. Colours and
details such as the numbers on
a remote-controlled car chassis
can be printed in anticipation of the
Oriol Vidal
changes thermoforming will make
them undergo, meaning the end
product looks perfect.
If you want to do 20 or 30 copies
of an object with a 3D printer, it
will cost you a lot of money, says
Schller. Thermoforming is much
cheaper, particularly at scale. On
top of that, with 3D printers the
surface finish is just not as good as
we can get with thermoforming.
So how excited should we be by the
developments in additive manufac-
turing? Very, argues Voxel8s
Michael Bell. You see Boeing and
Airbus starting to print many of the
parts in their aircraft engines, and
already the next generation of 3D
printers are upending automotive
and consumer electronics, he says.
Theres so much work in 3D printing
going on that theres never been
a better time to get into the field.
Reinventing the wheel  Richard Benson 022 Jordan Cheung

When Nasa began developing its

daringly experimental X-planes
during the Cold War, it was with a
focus on high-altitude, high-speed
flight with missile and reconnais-
sance technologies. As the world has
changed, so have Nasas priorities,
and when administrator Charles
Bolden announced the New Aviation
Horizons (NAH) series of X-planes in
April 2016, the aim was not military
capabilities but eco credentials.
New Aviation Horizons is the
centrepiece of the Environmen-
tally Responsible Aviation (ERA)
project, which aims to develop
technologies that allow the aviation
industry to y more people longer
distances, while using less fuel
and producing fewer emissions
and noise. A tall order, Bolden
concedes, but a challenge that he
believes will inspire a truly revolu- The space agency is applying its engineering know-how to
tionary era of aviation, unlike kick-start a faster, quieter and cleaner era of aviation
anything seen since the dawn of
the commercial jet age in the 60s. reducing energy use by a factor speeds over land, rather than having Nasa plans
Nasas scientists claim that by 2050, of five and cutting costs for small to wait until was over the sea. to build five
new aircraft could be using half as planes by up to 40 per cent. Will we really see these sorts of X-planes between
much fuel, emitting 75 per cent less After this, other experimental ideas crossing over into everyday now and 2026,
pollutants, and making just 12 per craft Nasa plans to build five life? Thats certainly the intention, each exploring
cent of the noise of 2016s models. X-planes between now and 2026 says Rich Wahls, a Nasa aerospace new propulsion
All that could save airlines $250bn will explore more propulsion possi- engineer and strategic technical systems and
(190bn) between 2025 and 2050. bilities, software systems and new advisor for Nasas Advanced Air radical shapes
The f irst NAH X-plane, the composite materials. These new Vehicles Program, which is part of and materials
battery-powered X-57 Maxwell, is materials will reduce weight, and ERA. Whether were looking at
due to appear in 2017. An experiment therefore fuel efficiencies, and technologies for adaptive trailing
in the distribution of propulsion, its also allow for radical new shapes. edges, hybrid electric propulsion
14 electric motors will be integrated Wings will have very high aspect technology or lighter weight
into the long, thin wings, powering ratios which is to say they will be fuselages, our goal, in part, is to
a large propeller at each tip for long and thin and fuselages will support companies in producing
use when cruising, and 12 across be completely transformed, as products that will benet the public,
the leading edges for take-of and the new materials can withstand he explains. The aim is to develop
landings. Whereas in conventional high pressure without the need for technology to a point that it reduces
aircraft the greatest fuel eiciency is rounded shapes. One of the planes the risk to a level at which that
obtained by ying below top speed, is likely to have a body integrated industry can incorporate it into their
electric propulsion allows pilots to with its wings, so that it resembles designs. Its meeting the markets
cruise both eiciently and quickly, a huge airborne blade. need to produce better aircraft.
Such shapes and materials are

BY 2050, AIRCRAFT
likely to feature in the QueSST (Quiet
Supersonic Technology) jet, perhaps
the most attention-grabbing of
the mooted planes. The QueSST,
being developed with Lockheed
Martin, is intended to be a new,
low-boom supersonic craft, that
COULD BE USING
could eventually ll the gap left by
Concorde. Its engineers will seek to
replace the severe sound-pollutant HALF AS MUCH FUEL
sonic boom with a soft thump, or
supersonic heartbeat, which
would mean it could attain its top AS 2016S MODELS
 BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

VISIONS
OF FUTURE
MOBILITY
A century since its founding, the
BMW Group continues to innovate

MINI VISION NEXT 100 Rolls-Royce VISION NEXT 100

BMW VISION NEXT 100

n 100 years, BMW has grown from

its humble roots as a small Bavarian
business entity, evolving into an aircraft
engine and motorcycle manufacturer, and
finally becoming an automotive icon. Its
centenary marks an important milestone
for the BMW Group and finds it looking
to the future, analysing the present, and
giving a whole new meaning to forward
thinking. Encompassing BMW, MINI,
Rolls-Royce and its motorcycle arm,
BMW Motorrad, heres how the group
is aiming to make the next 25 years all
about connected technology, efficient and
pleasurable transport, and moving people.
 BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

A grand arrival, a

ROLLING bespoke build and

ultimate sanctuary.

WITH THE
TIMES
The ultimate luxury vehicle for
the ultra-wealthy passenger

hat will luxury look like in the future?

Thats the question posed by the VISION
NEXT 100, created by the brand for the
BMW Groups centenary celebrations.
For the creators of this machine, the ulti-
mate luxury which we never seem to have
enough of is time, supplemented by a
grand sanctuary in which to enjoy it. Which
is why this vehicle is incredibly spacious,
offering a wrap-around Macassar wood
interior with carpets, seats and cushions
created using soft and refined silks.
To ensure passengers are transported
in effortless style and with minimal fuss,
Rolls-Royce envisage the creation of
Eleanor a digital distillation of the Spirit of
Ecstasy, which has adorned the bonnets of
the luxurious marque for decades. Eleanor
is an AI personal assistant, a guide to
travel, and a concierge.
When its time to arrive, Rolls-Royce DESIGN
VISION NEXT 100 allows one to do so in DYNAMICS
grand style. As the roof opens smoothly In the future, each
Rolls-Royce will be
like the entrance to a luxury jet, the full-
designed less like a
length door sweeps outwards, projecting a car, and more like
red carpet of light. The effect is enhanced an individual work
by the design of the vehicles bodywork it of art or sculpture.
appears to float, which wont be far off Every aspect of the
the truth. Rolls-Royce predicts its future vehicle could be
altered for a
machines will be constructed using an
bespoke build, so
unequalled lightweight architecture, no two machines
coupled with hugely powerful drivetrains. would have the
It may well be time to start saving up. same specification.
THE SILENT
SILHOUETTE
Rolls-Royce
VISION NEXT 100
is almost six
metres in length.
One of the most
imposing vehicles
the marque has
produced, its also
a metre and a half
tall so passengers
can stand upright
as they gracefully
exit the vehicle.
REBOOTED &
REDEFINED
Its still that classic
MINI shape, but
the BMW Groups
vision of the future
is a far cry from the
1959 original.
Perhaps most
radically, future
MINIs might not
have owners
anyone could
utilise its shared
ownership model.
 BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

MINI
PERSONALISED
PROPOSITION
Approach this
concept MINI and

MAKING
it will beam a
personalised
greeting on to the
road. Step inside,

MOVES
and itll adjust to
your driving
preferences and
interior layout.
Even the exterior
can be changed to A familiar shape and a new
match your style. concept in ownership

he MINI. Its another element of the

BMW Group that has a heritage thats
recognised globally. But today, MINI is
more about looking to the future than it
is looking backwards in time.
This is the MINI VISION NEXT 100 a car
thats not built for you; its built for anyone
and everyone. Some exterior surfaces
can transform to suit individual tastes
and styles, and it projects a personalised
greeting as a driver approaches.
Key to the design is its translucent body-
work useful to see if anyone is already
taking advantage of the shared ownership
model imagined by MINIs future-gazing
designers. Another neat touch is how the
steering wheel can slide from one side of
the dash to the other. And the wheels are
adorned so that their rotation creates a
mesmerising ombro-cinema effect.
Perhaps the most radical feature is the
instrument known as the Cooperizer.
This circular display is the heart of the
MINI VISION NEXT 100 concept, designed
to communicate with the driver through
changes in colour. The Cooperizer also
allows the driver to control the style of
motoring offering a gentle, relaxed drive
or a supercharged sporty experience.
Touch the inspire me button and
the MINI will navigate to a public space
loved by people of a similar personality.
Its time to put the fun back into driving.
 BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

The BMW VISION

FORWARD NEXT 100 is a

shape-shifting
car of tomorrow.

THINKING
IN MOTION
Self-driving AI, sustainable
materials and more

oncept cars might sometimes do little

but outline a manufacturers future
design language, but with its trio of
VISION Vehicles, the BMW Group is
making a clear statement: that driving
pleasure and technology will be closely
combined as we speed towards the
connected future of mobility.
Now, 100 years since BMW was
founded, the company is looking to
shape the future and seeking to under-
stand what new technologies will mean
for tomorrows mobility. The BMW VISION
NEXT 100 is one of the physical and theo-
retical embodiments of this exploration.
The BMW Group has always sought
to bring enjoyment to driving. To help
everyone become the ultimate driver,
it now aims to redefine the automotive
experience by connecting the human to the
car. The cars AI is designed to be the ulti- LIGHT
mate co-pilot. Dubbed the Companion, WORK
it can recognise the drivers needs, Road users will be
aware of how the
enhance their perception and adjust its
vehicle is being
modes automatically, on the move. driven whether
A touch of the steering-wheel logo in self-driving
allows the AI to take control of driving, Boost mode or in
and transforms the wheel into an element autonomous Ease
of the dash. The vehicle uses an array of mode thanks to
illuminated
sensors to identify dangers, presenting
contours of the
issues on a head-up display (HUD) for the car, and the light
driver to see. When not in control of the signatures in the
journey, Companion monitors its driver headlights.
MATERIAL
INSTINCT
The BMW VISION
NEXT 100
showcases a
totally new way of
looking at
automotive
design. Its wheel
arches move in
sync with the
wheels, creating a
shape-shifting
concept called
Alive Geometry.
 BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

in order to intuitively and subtly support INNOVATIVE

them in every type of on-road situation. INTERIOR
The HUD which removes the need for When driven by
additional monitors keeps the driver the Companion AI,
the VISION NEXT
informed with real-time context-specific
100s steering
information. This might include showing wheel morphs into
optimal cornering lines or navigation the dash. Red
markers integrated into the surroundings. scales act as a
Externally, the vehicles assertive physical alert
design with its front and rear gull- system, while the
HUD displays
wing doors signals the potential for
other warning and
performance. Utilising alive geometry, navigational
the reptilian scales move and stretch information.
apart as the wheels are turned. A similar
design inside create a dash alert system, A POWERFUL
warning the driver of any dangers ahead. PROFILE
It might have the
When feeling sporty, the driver can
looks of a sporty
launch Boost mode which makes coupe, but the
helpful recommendations for optimised VISION NEXT 100
driving performance, addressing points has four doors and
such as acceleration, incoming bends seats four adults.
and braking areas. If they want to relax, Short front and
rear overhangs
the VISION NEXT 100 can be switched
means it doenst
to Ease mode for a comfortable and
just look the part,
autonomously-chauffeured journey. but that it handles
The future is smart. The future is like a true drivers
connected. And its closer than you think. car as well.
Sailing into the future
RG EEN RIVERS
With city roads and transport links ever more
congested, waterways offer a low-carbon alternative route
London has a transit problem.
As do San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo,
Shanghai and just about every
city where public-infrastructure
spending cant keep up with urban
population growth.
Jay Gardner, co-founder and
president of Wind+Wing Technol-
ogies, says he has found a solution
or at least part of one. In San
Francisco, [commuter train]
Caltrain is maxed out and the
Bart [Bay Area Rapid Transit] is
overloaded, but its a 20-year project
and at least $10 billion (7.6bn) to
build a new line under the Bay, he
explains. The ferries, however,
have a number of possibilities
for expansion and they can be
implemented in just 18 months.
The downside: the average ferry
in San Francisco achieves just
11 passenger miles per gallon
(or 3.9kpl) of diesel. You could
take a Cadillac Escalade across
the bridge by yourself and get 20
miles per gallon, Gardner says.
Or you could take a bus with 300
passenger miles per gallon.
Gardners solution, picked up from
25 years as a sailing-tour operator
around the Bay, is to harness the free
energy thats already all around
the wind. About 95 per cent of
our trips are done with wind only,
and theres a really regular supply
around the Bay, he says. Yet, as
 Kathryn Nave
the ferry operators see it, sailing
is complicated; operating a motor
is not. Wind+Wing Technologies
answer is a motorised, rigid carbon-
fibre sail, based on those used in
high-performance yacht racing, that
automatically sets itself to the wind
and moves to neutral position when
not in use, meaning no additional
training is required for captain and
crew. For the rst three months of
2014, a 12-metre demonstration
vessel followed five main ferry
routes. The results conrmed our
feasibility study that you can achieve
a more than 42 per cent reduction
in fuel use with wind assist, says
Gardner. With wind assist and
electric vessels we think we could
achieve around 150 passenger miles
per gallon. A nal demonstration
is now in the works to convince the
ferry company board members to
adopt the technology.
Gardner is just one of a wave of
entrepreneurs looking to use the
same technologies developed to get
the likes of Ben Ainslie round the
Americas Cup course to transport
passengers from Greenwich to
Westminster with minimal carbon
emissions. In Paris, yachtsman and
former speed sailing record holder
Alain Thbault wants to take the
hydrofoils that allowed his trimaran
lHydroptre to y 103kph above the would bring to
water and incorporate them into a
031 NIck D Burton
fleet of five-person electric water
taxis, called SeaBubbles, with the
first full-scale prototype planned
for later this year. The hydrofoils
reduce drag by around 40 per cent
compared to a traditional boat,
he explains. That means we can
achieve a range of up to 100km.
Investors include Partech Ventures
and Henri Seydoux, founder and
CEO of drone company Parrot. For
Thbault, however, the motivation
comes from a drive to pay his dues
to the future for a life lived in the
impulse of the present. I sold our
house to pay for lHydroptre, he
explains. My daughters said I was
crazy but they let me do it. Then,
when I was recently sailing from
Miami to LA with them, they asked
why cant I do something useful?
Something about the pollution
afecting cities like Paris?
42%
Even with fuel improvements,
ferries and water taxis have a further
core cost: manpower. Thats another
cost Thbault believes can be elimi-
nated, with plans to introduce
driverless versions of the SeaBubbles
once theyve been successfully tested
The reduction in under manned conditions. We can
fuel Wind+Wings use the same technology as in cars,
claims its fixed but autonomous control should be
carbon-fibre much easier on the river than the
sail technology road, he says. Its a more controlled
space, and you dont have pedestrians
Bay Area ferries emerging from every direction.
Enhanced athletics  Greg Williams

CYBATHLETES
PUSH THE PEAK
OF HUMAN
PERFORMANCE
Next-generation prosthetics arent mere replacements for lost or damaged limbs theyre (competitive) game-changers
033 Seor Salme
BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

FILIP MAERTENS
CYBERSECURITY
RESEARCHER &
CONTRIBUTOR, EU.VR

Just a few years ago, you

might have wondered
what a cybersecurity
expert and internet of
things consultant like
Filip Maertens has to do
with personal mobility.
Then came the rst few
reports of connected
cars being hacked, even
as their owners were
driving them in public.
As our vehicles join the
increasing number and
variety of things being
hooked up to a
vulnerable internet
connection, experts
such as Maertens are
increasingly in demand
as is the ability to spot
the opportunities in
smart objects. In 2011,
he founded Sentiance,
which uses the data
collected by sensor-rich

MORITZ MEENEN
Co-founder, ElectricFeel
haring can be tough, but at least when it
comes to transportation, Moritz Meenen
believes it doesnt have to be.
Our mission is using data intelligence
to solve the problem that all bike-sharing
systems have in common, he says. Its
often the case that when users come to
smart devices to build
context-aware customer
proles useful for
tailored car insurance
products, ride-share
administration, or
citywide mobility
they can only see what its like right
management. The BMW
now, Meenen says. They cant see Group envisages that in
what people are going to be doing in the future, our vehicles
the next few hours. That causes supply will know their drivers
and demand problems. intimately
Seven public and private bike-share understanding their
preferences, driving
systems use ElectricFeels system,
styles and even
as well as Barcelonas Cooltra electric strengths and
scooter rental service. But Meenen is weaknesses at the
looking to expand beyond two wheels wheel. Furthermore,
and exploring shared ownership models. tomorrows cars wont
just understand us,
At radhub, Meenen explained how
theyll support us, going
shared ownership systems could be beyond providing
a challenge for car manufacturers, navigational help to
but the delegation saw that the BMW ofer driving tutelage.
Group is already preparing for a radical
redefinition of automotive use.
People think of BMW as just a car
manufacturer, but with Uber and self-
driving vehicles, the market is being
ILLUSTRATION: AISTE STANCIKAITE

a station they cant find a bike, or they
have one but cant find a docking spot.
ElectricFeel uses predictive algorithms
to anticipate demand and highlight
where bottlenecks will form.
Currently, the system operator can
look at the status of the system, but
shaken up and turned upside down, says
Meenen. The fact that the BMW Group
had workshops around things such as
3D printing and brought together people
from all different areas from educa-
tion to culture showed me that theyre
looking at the future in a holistic sense.
Enhanced athletics
Kevin Evison takes a particular
delight in spinning his right wrist
around 360 degrees as he talks the
only one of his many hand gestures
which, despite the carbon-fibre
shell and exposed actuators of his
prosthetic arm, doesnt quickly start
to seem almost natural. Evison is an
experienced prosthetics user, having
lost his arm in the 80s at the age of
22, just as the first generation of
myoelectric limbs controlled by the
detection of electrical signals from
the contraction of muscles were
beginning to be introduced to adult
patients. But those early devices
have nothing on the Bebonic arm.
This, Evison proudly declares, is
the Rolls-Royce of prosthetics. With
the old versions I could just contract
the rst two ngers together. With
this I can type, I can use a mouse,
I can, to the frequent surprise of
waiters, cut up a steak.
Evison is speaking as one of a
group of engineers, academics and
athletes-in-training gathered in
a small room at the back of Stoke
Mandeville Stadium, the birth-
place of the Paralympic movement,
to formulate a vision for the future
of disabled sport. A future in which
there are no limitations on the
technologies that can be used, in
which even those with the severest
of disabilities can compete, and in
which powered prosthetics take their
users to the same or greater ability
level of the able-bodied. This October,
that future makes its rst appearance
at the inaugural Cybathlon, a
bi-annual bionic athletics event
organised by ETH Zurich.
Theres a sense in which the
Paralympics hasnt done enough, says
Aldo Faisal, associate professor of
neurotechnology at Imperial College
TECHNOLOGIES ARE
CROSSING FROM
RESTORATION INTO
AUGMENTATION
 Greg Williams 035
London, and leader of the univer-
sitys team. They focus on elite-
level athletes, he says. It doesnt
cater to those with higher-end
disabilities, or the promotion of
new assistive technologies.
The Cybathlons six disciplines
will focus not only on athletic
challenges, but also the ability to
overcome everyday obstacles,
such as climbing stairs (in a wheel-
chair); opening a jar of jam (with
a prosthetic hand); or controlling
a computer (and being quadri-
plegic). And not only will tech teams
compete and learn from each other
to develop new solutions, so will the
athletes themselves. When I went to
Zurich [for the Cybathlon rehearsal]
I felt like, hey, there are other people
that know the pain, that understand
the struggle of doing the simplest
4M
things that others take for granted,
explains Team Imperial wheelchair
pilot Sivashankar Sivakanthan.
We can bounce ideas off each
other and learn from each others
experience of dealing with it.
Though at f irst glance the
Paralympics seems the obvious
Amount awarded comparison, the Cybathlon, explains
by the European the events creator, Rob Reiner,
Commission to will be altogether different. His
Aldo Faisal to preferred analogy, and one that
develop a robotic occurs frequently when you talk
exoskeleton to Cybathlon competitors, is
Formula One racing. We award
a medal for both the pilots and
the technology, the ETH Zurich
professor of sensorimotor systems
explains. Its about the skills that
they can have in combination.
Skills such as Evisons ability
to keep his wrist joint perfectly
stable while rapidly spinning it
through 360 degrees. That full
rotation may not seem like much,
but thats how technologies are
crossing the boundary from resto-
ration into augmentation. At a recent
Cybathlon rehearsal, Evison, a pilot
for the Imperial team, was able to
outperform even able-bodied users
in a test of manual dexterity that
involved guiding a loop of wire
around another piece without
touching. Faisal who sounds
mildly afronted when he explains
that the obstacle is worth a mere
two points failed to complete it.
And there could be real advantages
for example, on production lines,
suggests the Imperial teams co-
ordinator Ian Radclife, where attach-
ments could allow a prosthetics
user to screw bolts into a car.
Prosthetic designers are starting
to face questions like, is it OK to have
a hand that can spin, and spin and
spin? Evison says. Ive had people
say to me that if that thing gets any
better, Im going to want to lose my
normal limb and have one of those.
For participants with more
extensive disabilities, such as Tom
Nabarro, a software engineer for
Intel who was paralysed from the
neck down in a snowboarding
accident in 2007, the competition
gets even more interesting. In the
brain computer interface (BCI) race,
competitors must guide an avatar
around a course with the power
of their mind alone. An electro-
encephalography cap detects the
electrical signals of activity across
the brain, then deep-learning
algorithms attempt to extract the
small suggestion of an intention
amid this noisy, buzzing confusion.
You think of natural actions,
like clenching your hand, which
comes quite naturally, Nabarro
explains. The concentration is
very intense, but you can train
by pretending youre playing the
game and thinking through those
actions every morning.
Whereas standard BCI devices can
discriminate little more than the
equivalent of an on/of switch, the
BCI challenge requires the use of
four separate controls for running,
jumping and steering. You can think
of standard BCI technology as being
like a mouse click. We want to give
people a keyboard, says Faisal. For
Nabarro its more about moving
beyond the standard computer
peripherals, to the creation of whole
new interfaces between humans
and technology. Working with
BCIs is the future of technological
interaction, Nabarro says. I use
voice recognition, but its still based
around a mouse or keyboard. And
if you think about it, this may
not be the most efficient way to
interact with a computer.
Faisal agrees that human-com-
puter interaction needs re-thinking,
but he has something much cheaper

than the 200,000 EEG cap in mind.
Rather than extracting intentions in
the muddled mass of brain activity,
hes created a 200 system to read
them directly, the way we already
do quite easily in each others
eyes. Combining a front-facing
eye-tracking camera, attached to a
powered wheelchair, and a forward-
facing Kinect that maps the landscape
in front, Faisals system plots the
location of the users gaze on to this
landscape, and directs the chair to
that direction. It was really easy to
use on the slalom or indoors. And I
really loved the accuracy in being
able to turn, explains powered-
wheelchair pilot, Sivakanthan.
It takes a bit of practice, but it
doesnt take that long to learn.
Beyond merely directional
control, this simple eye-tracking
system was sophisticated enough
to allow the team to win a recent
036
Cybathletes
are pushing the
capabilities of
prosthetics to the
point where they
can outperform
the able-bodied
competition in which its entrant
painted a picture with a robotic arm
while drinking cofee and eating a
croissant with their natural upper
limbs. If you want to grab that glass,
you will look at it in one specic way,
but if you want to assess how full it is
you will look at it in a diferent way,
explains Faisal, who has recently
been awarded 4 million (3.3m) by
the European Commission Horizon
2020 programme to develop this
system into a robotic exoskeleton
for those with upper-arm paralysis.
The one commonality in all of
Team Imperials solutions is their
non-invasiveness. This isnt a
requirement of the competition:
one team in the functional electrical
stimulation bike race, in which
electricity is used to stimulate a
paralysed persons muscles, have
a participant with surgically
implanted leg sockets that carry
Seor Salme
the current directly into muscle
bres for greater stimulation. But
for Faisal, this non-invasiveness is
essential. It has to do both with
the restorative method many,
many patients just wont qualify for
surgery. Psychologically less stable
people will be excluded. Older people
will be excluded, he explains, Then
theres the other aspect: when you
talk about imbuing able-bodied
people with new physical powers.
You need to have technologies that
you can just take off and youre
normal again. The mobile phone
is an amazing piece of cognitive
augmentation but how successful
do you think it would have been
if it had required surgery?
Grounded as he is in under-
standing the real needs of disabled
users, Faisal doesnt shy away
from exploring the more fantas-
tical implications of such non-
invasive augmentative technologies.
If a device can control a wheelchair,
then it should be able to help me
drive a car, he says. If I can control
a computer game with my mind, then
I should be able to control my phone
with it. Researchers are working on
prosthetics that give you a sense of
touch, but why should that be limited
to the form of an arm? You could be
an aeroplane and feel the wind on
the wings. You could be cleaning
up a nuclear spill while physically
situated in a safe place thousands
of miles away. And with non-
invasive technologies, we dont
need a future of cyborgs running
around, half cut-up. You could shrug
on a rucksack and become like
Shiva with six arms. It would make
childcare a lot easier.
These are the kinds of applications
more typically found in the les of
Darpas big-budget investments, but
the beauty of the Cybathlon, explains
Faisal, is that its combination of
collaboration and competition both
pushes these technologies forward
and showcases them outside a
military context. There is one
problem with the current course, at
least according to Kevin Evison its
too easy. This is just the start, he
says. Im all for the course getting
harder. I want to be able to show
off the super-hand, to compete at
the level of superhuman abilities.
 BMW GROUP x WIRED PARTNERSHIP

MIKELE BRACK
FOUNDING PARTNER,
URBAN LIVING
FUTURES

Mikele Brack works with

corporates and projects
to build eicient urban
areas in places where
tech companies are
looking for sustainable
spaces. Its a positive
step to see an automotive
company reaching out to
the innovation
community, she says,
noting that an inspired
idea from the radhub
was getting businesses to
stagger start times so
there are fewer vehicles
on the road, along with
encouraging more
vehicle-sharing schemes.

LUKAS NECKERMANN
Entrepreneur & author, The Mobility Revolution

discussing what such technologies

might look like in the future.
The fleets of shared autonomous
pods seemed to be the natural and
obvious outcome, he reports.
Neckermann said it was encouraging
to see the BMW Group admit it doesnt
MANDEEP RAI
BOARD MEMBER, necessarily have all the answers
CREATIVE VISIONS thats why its asking experts such as
FOUNDATION himself. The event made clear that
they have thought about this and have
Rais expertise ranges some interesting product interpreta-
from nance and
tions, Neckermann says. But also
journalism to
entrepreneurship. ukas Neckermann has what he calls that they are willing to bring in people
She examined what an intimate connection with the from various, unrelated backgrounds
expanding populations BMW Group. He started his career to think about this on a much deeper,
will mean for mobility: there, before founding his consulting more philosophical level.
We chose to look at a
firm, Neckermann Strategic Advisors. Transportation is already evolving,
Southeast Asian village
brainstorming what they
His mobility credentials go further, as and thats likely to bring changes in
would expect to see and he sits on the advisory board of NEXT how we perceive driving. What used to
ILLUSTRATION: AISTE STANCIKAITE

what we can contribute. Future Transportation, a pod ride- be a dream has become a nightmare,
The result? Linked sharing startup, and is the author of Neckermann says. High traffic levels
transport and more The Mobility Revolution: Zero Emissions, mean driving is a road-rage inducing,
information about the
Zero Accidents, Zero Ownership. time-wasting distraction. But smarter
best routes, so travellers
can make better mobility At the radhub event, Neckermanns cars and improved public transport could
decisions. Essentially, group worked on the autonomous help shift driving away from utility and
a data revolution. multi-modal transport foresight task, mobility, back to driving for pleasure.
Robots on the rise
Although we often think about the
researchers, designers and entre-
preneurs who bring us the latest
cutting-edge devices, its often easy
to forget about the logistics chain
which allows your California- or
South Korean-designed smartphone
to wind up in your local retail store.
But thats exactly the point.
Like the editing in a movie,
when the logistics chain works
perfectly, the greatest compliment
is, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, that
it just works. But as with every
other industry, this chain is in
the process of being disrupted
by changing demands. In 2016,
consumers demand not only more
choices, but also to receive products
faster than before. And there are
ever more of them demanding it
according to analysts at Forrester
Research, the growth of online
shopping is currently rising at
ten per cent year-on-year, and
faster than that in Asia.
Most companies are eager to
improve and to squeeze all they
can from optimised efficiency,
says Arne Viehmeister-Kerner of
MULTIROTOR, a leading German
company in the B2B drone industry.
Right now, were at a point where
conventional technology is already
at such a high standard theres not
much more room for improvement.
As a result, companies are looking
for new technologies they can use.
One of the biggest and most high
prole step-changes in logistics over
the coming years will be the arrival
of autonomous delivery vehicles.
Self-driving trucks the big brothers
of Googles self-driving car ofer a
tantalising glimpse at the next gener-
ation of haulage vehicles. In April
this year, a trial took place in which a
MORE TRADITIONAL
ROBOT FORMS
ARE DESIGNED TO
DO JUST ONE TASK
 Luke Dormehl
LOGISTICS:
BREAKING
THE CHAIN
Smarter, more adaptable robots are about to transform delivery
platoon of connected smart trucks
drove themselves from Sweden and
Germany to the port of Rotterdam,
as an investigation into the potential
of driverless vehicles.
Even more significant than
driverless trucks will be pilotless
ships, says rnulf Jan Rdseth, a
research scientist who has spent
the past several decades inves-
tigating exactly this topic for
Maritime Unmanned Navigation
through Intelligence in Networks
(MUNIN), a European Commission
research project. The eventual
goal is to completely remove the
human crew from ships, Rdseth
says. Its an idea that opens
up entirely new possibilities in
terms of new business models.
Rdseth notes that ship transport
is responsible for an overwhelm-
ingly large proportion of the goods
that are shuttled around the globe.
Ninety per cent of imports and
exports in the world take place by
ship, he says. You cannot under-
estimate how important it is. By
removing humans from the role of
ship operators, it will be possible
to develop new concepts minus
crew accommodation and safety
equipment that will transform
merchant shipping with entirely
redesigned, more eicient vessels.
Of course, when it comes to the
promise of revolutionised transpor-
tation, the most widespread dream
is that of drone-based delivery.
Widely publicised after a December
2013 television interview with
Amazon.com CEO Jef Bezos, drone
delivery (Amazon Prime Air)
will rely on multirotor miniature
unmanned air vehicles to autono-
mously fly individual packages to
the doorsteps of customers within
half an hour of them placing an
order. Since then, other companies
have investigated similar concepts.
For example, in September 2014,
the German delivery firm DHL
tested a parcelcopter which
autonomously delivered urgent
packages such as medication to
the 2,000-person island of Juist,
12km of the German coast.
For now, drone delivery remains
a proof of concept due to a combi-
nation of technical challenges, such

as battery life, and regulatory issues,
including the insistence that drone
operators can only y drones within
their line of sight. But although
some of these technologies still
have hurdles to overcome, drones
are already playing an important
role in other parts of the logistics
chain such as being item scouts
which find or catalogue specific
items in large warehouses.
Already having signicant impact
are the industrial robots used in
factories. Factory robots date back to
1956, but the kinds of machines being
manufactured by companies such
as Boston-based Rethink Robotics
are as diferent as the modern iMac
is from a 1950s mainframe. Tradi-
tionally, buying an industrial robot
didnt just mean shelling out for
the machine itself; it also meant
adapting warehouses and tasks to
t the new robot. Now some of these
barriers are starting to come down.
In most of western Europe, the cost
threshold for robotic workers to
become viable is currently around
100,000, yielding a positive return
on investment in around three
years, based on productivity gains
of 20-30 per cent. Robots are also
becoming more and more afordable,
whereas human labour costs
continue to rise. But the biggest
change will be qualitative.
The more traditional robot
forms are custom-designed to do
one task. They do it really well, but
if theyre not doing it, then they sit
there and idle, says Jim Lawton,
chief product officer at Rethink
Robotics. The newer types of robot,
because of the smarts that are built
into them, are like PCs with arms.
If I buy a computer, I dont neces-
sarily know up front what Im going
to with it. Today I may be writing a
paper, tomorrow I might be lling
out a spreadsheet. The computer
accommodates whatever it is that
I need to do. Breakthroughs in
artificial intelligence mean that
instead of simply programming
robots to do one task for their
whole working life, they can (and
will increasingly) be capable of
carrying out a broad range of tasks
with instruction being as straight-
forward as showing them a video.
039 Janne Iivonen
Beyond speed, what will be the
impact of this increasingly unmanned
logistics chain? The answer lies in
the amount of personalisation that
they make possible. Henry Ford is
erroneously supposed to have told
Model T customers that they could
have their car in any colour they
wanted, so long as it happened to
be black. Now, successful companies
will be those that can most keenly
sense marketplace demand and
respond to it quickly, efficiently
and at a reasonable cost whether
thats car manufacturers allowing
customers to choose custom modi-
cations, sportswear brands letting
shoppers design their own trainers,
or simply the ability to package up
different product combinations
according to local demand.
For a long time you could get
Automation of what you wanted when you wanted
logistics will it, but that came with more costly
stretch from the systems which customers werent
production line to willing to pay for, or else they were
delivery, thanks to mass-produced in a way that limits
a new generation choice, Lawton says. Consumers
of versatile, today want more, and they also want
learning robots to be able to change their mind.
Reinvented interfaces  Chris Stokel-Walker 040 Anna Pan

From smartphones to satellite
navigation, televisions to tax-return
websites, the visual interface
dominates our society. A smart-
phone screen can represent anything
because its pixels, suggests Hiroshi
Ishii, director of the Tangible Media
Group at MITs Media Lab. You
can even make a pixel dance.
But, according to Ishii, our
obsession with graphical user inter-
faces (GUIs) is damaging, removing
us from millennia of human-object
interaction. Worse, it stops us
thinking: Because GUIs are so well
done and are so pervasive, people
cant think of a better way to present
interfaces, Ishii explains.
Through the Tangible Media
Group, Ishii is working to fill out
our interactions with digital
information by giving these pixels
physical form. Platforms such as
Skype and FaceTime connect us over
long distances, but we have lost the
physical presence in those commu-
nications. One of the groups projects
Car dashboards groan with inter-
faces demanding attention. Yet for
safetys sake, its important drivers
keep their eyes on the road. And the
secondary tasks such as turning on
air conditioning or changing radio
stations use up mental bandwidth.
The less mentally demanding you
make these tasks, the safer the car
will be, says Tom Carter, chief
technology oicer of Ultrahaptics, a
Bristol-based startup working to get
rid of physical buttons and replace
Haptic interfaces them with mid-air haptics.
will use sound Ultrahaptics vision is simple: a
to create highly driver can raise her hand in the air
adaptable while driving. Of-the-shelf tracking
controls that are devices such as Microsofts Kinect or
felt, but not the Leap Motion controller recognise
seen, reducing the hand instantly and feed that
driver distraction information to Ultrahaptics system,
which uses speakers to concen-
trate ultrasonic waves on to the
hand. These sound waves cause the
skin to vibrate gently, mimicking
the touch of a dial or a button.
We can make 3D shapes that you
can touch and feel, says Carter. So
pushing an ultrasonic button in
mid-air will make it give way in
much the same way as its physical
counterpart. Ultrahaptics technology
processes these interactions so
quickly within 30-50 milliseconds
that they feel instantaneous.
It sounds futuristic, but after
seven years in development, its
close to installation in cars. Were
not planning on replacing the
steering wheel, Carter says. But
we can replace some of the interac-
tions done regularly while driving.

TOUCH THE FUTURE

is inFORM, which aims to restore
physicality to a Skype call, via dynamic
pins that rise and fall in response to
the participant on the other end. This
physical telepresence attempts to
bring tangibility back to technolo-
gy-mediated interactions.
We have amazing skills to deal Physical sensations will upgrade the digital interactions of tomorrow
with the physical world that arent
used at all in current computer
interaction, says Ishii. In the 4th
century BCE, landscape designers
would shape clay or sand to design
their cities; today, we pull and
poke computer-generated models
around a series of pixels meant to
represent a room. Ishiis laboratory
is combining both: moulding clay
in real life is echoed in changes
on-screen. The problem was that
until recently it cost too much to
build the hardware thats required
to inject tangibility into technology.
Now 3D printing and the maker
movement have allowed physical
objects to be built more cheaply.
But what if you didnt need a
physical object to hold? Haptic
technology mimics solid items
without requiring the space to store
them or the materials to make them,
and is becoming a popular alternative
to the visual interface particularly
in the automotive industry.