Shows / Uncanny Valley | WIRED
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
Welcome to Uncanny Valley—an insider look at the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley—where each week, WIRED’s writers and editors bring you original reporting and analysis about some of the biggest stories in tech. On Tuesdays, The Big Interview with WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond in conversation with influential figures in culture, politics, business, science, and beyond for a discussion captured through the WIRED lens. On Thursdays, WIRED writers and editors Zoë…
Episodes
Uncanny Valley | WIREDOK, Car Computer
Modern cars are giant computers. They're packed full of chips and bits, all working toward the goal of making your ride smoother, safer, and more comfortable…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDZuckerberg's Innovation Dilemma
As its new company name would imply, Meta’s making a big deal about the metaverse. The company formerly known as Facebook just announced a new VR headset, the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDLife in Pixels
Even though it’s already October, we are somehow still seeing new products announced by the tech giants. This week, it was Google's turn to show off its new…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDThe State of the Smart Kitchen
Companies love sticking chips in everything. That's how you get a feast of connected kitchen tech: app-controlled Instant Pots, $400 touchscreen toasters, and…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDRow Row Row Yourself
Peloton's been weathering a rough year. The home workout company soared high in the early days of the pandemic, when demand for its stationary bikes and…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDVisualizing VR’s Future
Virtual reality has long been hailed as the next big thing in tech. It's pure escapism; strap on a headset and immerse yourself in a different world. At least…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWelcome to Dynamic Island
At a splashy media event this week, Apple announced four configurations of the new iPhone 14, as well as some new Apple Watches and an update to the wireless…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDHow YouTube's Tumultuous Past Will Shape Its Future
Collectively, people stream more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every single day. That's a lot of eyeballs, and it means the platform has enormous…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDHow to Get Your Climate Tax Credits
The United States government just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that allocates nearly $400 billion dollars to fund clean…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDTractor Hacks
Farming has gotten quite tech-savvy. These days, there are all sorts of Wi-Fi-enabled, app-controlled, and autonomously piloted machines out there doing the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDThe Weird Phone Future
Samsung's mobile phone design philosophy could best be described as "if it ain't broke, bend it." The company—one of the top smartphone manufacturers in the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDNFT Frames
Maybe you’re intrigued by NFTs. (They can often be pretty fun.) Maybe you’ve even felt the urge to buy a piece of digital art, only to give up once all the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDReel Talk About Instagram
If you've opened Instagram recently, you've certainly seen Reels. The photo-sharing app has started aggressively pushing the TikTok-like video feeds onto its…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDZucka Kappa Meta
Facebook has nearly three billion users, which means that when it makes a change to its business, it affects nearly half the planet. Facebook's ambitions have…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDToo Cool for Juul
Do you even vape, bro? Well if the United States Food and Drug Administration has its way, that answer might soon be a hard "no." Last month, the FDA went…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDSeriously, What Is the Metaverse?
Technologists have been crowing about “the metaverse” for a long time now, and here at WIRED we’ve written about it quite a bit, too. But sometimes we’re still…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDThe Zoomification of Slack
If you work in an office, chances are you spend a lot of time on Slack. The workplace messaging platform has become an even more important tool in the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDStreaming TV’s Many Possible Futures
Streaming TV was supposed to be a thing you did to relax. But these days you might grab a drink, kick up your feet, and then sit there paralyzed by an absolute…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDApple In Real Life
Spring is in the air, so you know what that means: Developer conference season. Apple held its Worldwide Developers Conference this week and used Monday’s…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDTexting Is Broken
The away message is a relic of desktop chat apps from decades past. But this simple feature helped keep boundaries between your online connections and your IRL…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWTF Is Web3?
The cover story of this month’s issue of WIRED magazine is “Paradise at the Crypto Arcade: Inside the Web3 Revolution” by Gilad Edelman. We interviewed Gilad…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDHow to Get Started Biking
For a lot of people, riding a bike through a crowded city—or even on suburban avenues—might feel daunting. Should you get an electric or acoustic bicycle? What…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDGoogle Gadgets Galore
It’s springtime again, which means developer conference season is in full swing. (Hoo-ray?) This week marks the return of Google I/O, the annual conference for…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDKara Swisher's Take on Twitter
Hey, remember how Elon Musk bought Twitter? It's been a chaotic week since then, both on and off the controversial social media platform. There are still a lot…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDSnap’s New Drone Takes Flight
The social photo-sharing and messaging app Snapchat is bigger than you probably think it is. According to its parent company, Snap, the app has more than 330…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWhat Would Elon’s Twitter Look Like?
It probably won't surprise you that Twitter's a bit of a mess right now. Last week, billionaire Elon Musk made a play to buy the whole company, stating that…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDBrowse Better
Even if you spend a lot of time on the internet, you may not give much thought to your browser. Once you find one you like (probably Google Chrome, if you're…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDPeloton Bets Big on Body-Tracking
Peloton has had a turbulent couple of years. After the ups and downs of the pandemic economy came a rash of bad press spurned by a series of tragic product…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWho's Behind the Okta Hack?
Even if you aren't familiar with Okta, you've probably used it. The digital login system is used by thousands of companies across the world to manage employee…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDHow You DAOing?
If you wanted to create an exclusive online community with a shared goal, how'd you go about it? If your answer is, "with crypto, obviously!" then you're in…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWhen Facial Recognition Tech Is Wrong
Like a lot of tech solutions to complex problems, facial recognition algorithms aren't perfect. But when the technology is used to identify suspects in…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDAnd Apple Marches On
Apple held its first product announcement event of the year on Tuesday. It showed off a bunch of new devices, including a new iPhone SE, a revamped iPad Air…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDSwift Sanctions
Russia's armed invasion of Ukraine has already exacted a terrible human cost. Thousands of people are dead and over a million have been displaced. In…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDTracking Apple
Apple has been sprucing up its mobile operating system, bolstering privacy and safety features and sprinkling in some new emoji to boot. But while the company…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDSamsung Gonna Samsung
This week, Samsung held its Galaxy Unpacked event, its annual product spectacle the company uses to announce new mobile devices. In addition to its new Galaxy…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDHitting Pause on Spotify
You probably know Spotify as a streaming music juggernaut, but its business model has grown far beyond just music. Last year, the company paid a reported $100…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDHelp! My Family is Stuck in the Metaverse
When the real world's a mess, the metaverse that Facebook (er, Meta) is pitching might seem like a welcome refuge. Just strap on a headset and play some VR…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDRoad to the Future
For years, companies and techno-bros have been saying that self-driving cars are ready to roll. Now companies like the ride-hailing service Lyft are actually…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDDry If You Might
Many people are taking a break from alcohol this month, a cultural moment that’s come to be known as Dry January. Beyond trends fueled by new year’s…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDLive From CES 2022
New year, new chaotic mega tech exhibition. CES was this week, complete with all of its usual glitzy gizmos and gaudy gadgets. It was a strange year for the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDGoodbye to All That
Good thing 2021 was the year we fixed all of the brokenness of 2020, huh? OK, not even close. But for some people, 2021 was a year of reassessing, recommitting…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWTF Is Web3?
Web3! It's the latest internet buzzword which encompasses an egalitarian vision of the web that's more reliable, based on trust, and, inevitably, built on the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDA Conversation with Neal Stephenson
Over his nearly four-decade career as a novelist, Neal Stephenson has built complex visions of future worlds that, looking back at them now, feel eerily…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDWhat an Augmented World
Mark Zuckerberg may be busy pushing the idea of augmented and virtual reality worlds, but he is far from the first to start imaging them. Niantic CEO John…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDShipping and Shopping
Hey, how's that holiday shopping coming along? It's still a little early to start panicking in earnest, but right now is the best time to start buying stuff if…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDLet’s Get Meta
Facebook has a new name. This week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company is changing its name to Meta. The title comes from something Facebook has…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDBig Macs, New Pixels
Yep, it’s still product announcement season. This week, Google officially unveiled its new Pixel phones and Apple showed off new MacBook Pro models. Both…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDFacebook's Uncertain Future
Facebook has once again found itself in the hot seat. Things heated up for the company after a whistleblower shared thousands of pages of Facebook internal…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDAndrew Yang on Micromobility
Description: Andrew Yang, former presidential and New York mayoral candidate, really likes to ride his electric scooter. He's been a big proponent of…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDAmazon Bots
About this time every year, Amazon announces a slew of new products. Some of them are fairly normal: new Echo devices, smart screens, video doorbells. But…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDScratching the Surface
It's product announcement season, and this week was Microsoft's turn. The company slid out a few new Surfaces, a weird flippy laptop thing, and an…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDiPhoning It In
It's September, which can only mean one thing: Apple's got some new products. This week, the company held a virtual event to detail its slate of upcoming…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDBoosters and Mandates
On Thursday, President Biden announced a number of new policies to fight Covid-19. Chief among them: More vaccine mandates are coming. Now, businesses that…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDPower Problems
This week, Hurricane Ida swept through the southern US, hitting Louisiana and parts of Mississippi especially hard. The storm disabled the power grid across…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDI Never Metaverse I Didn’t Like
The metaverse. A simulated world, controlled with inputs from our reality to merge cyberspace and meatspace into one plane of existence. If this sounds like a…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDPixel Party
By now, Google has gotten the hang of making solid affordable phones. Its new Pixel 5A has just about all the features most people need in a phone, and the…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDApple’s Photo-Scanning Tech Explained
Recently, Apple revealed some new technical measures in Messages, iCloud, Siri, and search that are meant to protect children from sexual abuse online. Apple…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDI Can Haz Memes
Internet memes seem harmless enough. A few pictures of cats with some grammatically incorrect text—what could go wrong? Well, memes have come a long way since…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDInside Black Twitter
If you've been on Twitter, then you've been on Black Twitter. No other subsection of social media has produced ideas and movements as influential or as dynamic…
Uncanny Valley | WIREDBezos in Space
This week, Jeff Bezos flew to space. Or, at least high enough into the sky for it to technically count. While his 10-minute joyride in a Blue Origin rocket was…