W-i-r-ed_UK_-_March_2017

PLUS 

UK EDITION 

MAR 17 

WIRED.CO.UK 

EDITION ...BUT HEY, WIRED WILL SAVE YOU!

03 / 17 / CONTENTS / 005 

096 

FEATURE 

Humankind’s saviours 

The fate of humanity rests with a group of 

scholars tackling civilisation’s biggest 

risks – from rogue AI to tyrannical leaders 

3D VISUALISATION (COVER): HIT AND RUN. PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON 

Lalitha Sundaram, X-risk 

researcher, pictured 

outside the Great Hall, 

Clare College, Cambridge

03 / 17 / CONTENTS / 007 

014 

START 

News and obsessions 

Iceland’s disappearing ice caves; edible 

drones; AI that can identify cancer; 

how the blockchain tracks diamonds 

041 

IDEAS BANK 

Brain food and provocations 

Your love of emoji is old news; the 

science behind traffic; why singularity 

comes from clay; taming AI overhype 

061 

EVENT 

WIRED Security 

From data policy to business breaches 

and bug hunts, our inaugural security 

summit tackled the sector’s key challenges 

069 

PLAY 

WIRED culture 

Neil Gaiman on art in uncertain times; 

the stuntmasters behind John Wick: 

Chapter 2; a brief history of time travel 

104 

FEATURE 

Life blood 

A California-based startup has developed 

a new type of test – and it could help save 

the lives of millions of cancer patients 

112 

FEATURE 

How to fix fake news 

Facebook and Twitter wield huge 

influence over how people understand the 

world. This is the year we confront that 

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAY BROOKS 

047 087 116 

GEAR 

Rated & reviewed 

Coding kits for kids; ocean-inspired 

furniture; pasta makers tested; 

Microsoft’s Surface Studio; cutting tools 

R&D 

Scientific progress 

Building the human genome; how 

Amazon’s Echo found its voice; an 

illustrated guide to fusion reactors 

FEATURE 

Global village 

How a billionaire investor and a data 

genius helped make rural Chinese stores 

the world’s most connected retailers 

Right: Guillem Anglada-Escudé, 

discoverer of Proxima b, on the roof of 

the Queen Mary University of London

Editor David Rowan 

Commercial director Nick Sargent 

Creative director Andrew Diprose 

Managing editor Mike Dent 

Science editor João 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 Simon Ward 

Deputy chief sub-editor Tola Onanuga 

wired.co.uk 

Deputy editor Liat Clark 

Senior 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 

Deputy managing director 

Albert Read 

Managing director 

Nicholas Coleridge 

Deputy editor Greg Williams 

Digital editor Victoria Woollaston 

WIRED, 13 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HN 

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Chairman and chief executive, Condé Nast International 

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Classified director Shelagh Crofts 

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Head of digital Wil Harris 

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Deputy marketing and research director Gary Read 

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Senior data manager Tim Westcott 

Market research manager Claire Devonport 

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Condé Nast International director of communications Nicky Eaton 

Group property director Fiona Forsyth 

Circulation director Richard Kingerlee 

Newstrade circulation manager Elliott Spaulding 

Newstrade promotions manager Anna Pettinger 

Deputy publicity director Harriet Robertson 

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Creative design manager Anthea Denning 

Senior marketing designer Gareth Ashfield 

Production director Sarah Jenson 

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Production controller Emma Storey 

Production and digital co-ordinator Annie Franey 

Commercial senior production controller Louise Lawson 

Commercial and paper production controller Martin MacMillan 

Commercial production co-ordinator Jessica Beeby 

Tablet production controller Lucy Zini 

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 

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010 / WHO MADE THIS? / CHANNEL HOPPING 

MAKING WIRED 

LAURIE 

WINKLESS 

For Ideas Bank, 

physicist 

Winkless looks 

at the science 

behind traffic 

jams. Will they 

get any better 

in the future? 

“Technology will 

smooth out the 

rougher edges 

– but getting 

driverless and 

human-operated 

cars to coexist 

peacefully 

won’t be easy.” 

CLIVE 

THOMPSON 

In this issue, 

the author of 

Smarter Than You 

Think examines 

the tricky battle 

against fake news 

on social media. 

“Waging war on 

disinformation 

isn’t easy,” says 

the US-based 

writer, “because 

not everyone 

agrees on what 

disinformation is.” 

STEPHEN 

ARMSTRONG 

Armstrong spent 

the day at WIRED 

Security – and 

it proved to be 

an eye-opener 

for him. “I learnt 

that everything 

we think about 

hackers is 

wrong. They’re 

not kids, they’re 

organised and 

well-equipped. 

Meanwhile, people 

post pictures of 

their new credit 

cards on Twitter…” 

CREATE A SPLASH 

IN THE LINE OF DUTY 

One occupational hazard of shooting a 

fire engine in action is the chance that 

you’re going to get wet. So when Londonbased 

photographer Charlie Surbey 

captured the Rosenbauer Panther, he 

knew the risks. So, how did it go? “I got 

soaked. I wanted to get a front-on shot 

and thought I was out of range – but 

unfortunately I was also downwind.” 

JOÃO 

MEDEIROS 

WIRED’s science 

editor reveals how 

Guardant Health 

plans to transform 

cancer treatment. 

“Its liquid biopsy 

is a huge step 

towards early 

diagnosis of 

cancer across the 

board. Add to that 

the ability to track 

its genomics 

and we’ll be 

able to increase 

the efficacy of 

treatment.” 

EMMA 

BRYCE 

In R&D, WIRED 

regular Bryce 

tells us how 

geneticists plan to 

build the human 

genome. Should 

we be worried? “It 

deserves serious 

ethical scrutiny, 

but from what 

researchers have 

told me, I think it’s 

more a cause 

for excitement 

than concern.” 

RICHARD 

BENSON 

For this issue, 

Benson met the 

X-risk teams 

who debate 

potential risks to 

humanity. Was 

there anything 

he’d like to see 

added to their list 

of threats? “Come 

back to me in 

May, when I know 

whether or not 

Leeds have finally 

been promoted 

from the football 

Championship.” 

RISKY BUSINESS 

HUMANITY’S LAST HOPE 

When shooting the X-risk teams responsible for 

accessing various threats to humanity (above, 

right), Nick Wilson (above left) found a location 

befitting their esteemed status. “The Great Hall 

at Clare College is an inspiring place,” he says. 

“Hopefully it will be around for many years to 

come – perhaps due to the work of these future 

thinkers. They were an inspiring and unassuming 

bunch of people… in a Clark Kent sort of way.” 

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY; NICK WILSON; ART STREIBER; STEVE GALLAGHER. ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON

INSTAGRAM 

THE FUTURE, ONE FRAME AT A TIME 

Showcasing the very best in still life, 

portrait photography, product picks, 

world-beating architecture and amazing 

landscapes, WIRED’s Instagram feed 

is your one-stop destination for visual 

stimulation in 2017. Sign up and 

get inspired: follow us at @wireduk 

MAGAZINE 

A FORCE FOR GOOD 

In issue 12.16 we shone a spotlight on the behind-the-scenes figures responsible for shaping 

our cultural identity, from Netflix’s Ted Sarandos to Danae Ringelmann from Indiegogo. Top of 

the pile was Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, the producer of your favourite childhood 

movie and gatekeeper to the Star Wars universe. Judging by the amount of positive feedback the 

piece attracted, it seems this female role model was a suitable choice in our gender-imbalanced 

world. “If ever we needed a reason to have more women at the helm, this is why”; “In contrast 

to the movie narrative, the Star Wars galaxy is actually run by women”; “Biggest takeaway: 

two-thirds of the Star Wars control group are women” are just three of the hugely positive 

tweets we received. Good to see some much-needed balance being restored in the galaxy… 

WEEKENDER 

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MAGAZINE 

DRIVING ROUND IN CIRCLES 

An email from Andrez Choma: “Perhaps the utopian vision 

of the future of transport in The Big Question (WIRED 01.17) 

will come true for Champagne-and-caviar CEOs, but for most 

of us this will not be the lived experience. The real future 

of transport in the UK is one of congestion, overcrowding 

and discomfort. The need is for an integrated strategy, 

commercialised – but non-profit – investment management, 

automation and focus on maximum benefits to users, rather 

than vanity projects, and less let-them-eat-cake-ism.” 

PODCAST 

THE WEEKLY VIEW FROM WIRED 

The WIRED Podcast is your weekly 

digest of ideas, technology, design and 

business stories from the wired.co.uk 

team. Among the subjects covered in 

recent episodes: penis bones, naked 

mole rats, chimpanzee buttocks and 

Uber’s money worries. Something for 

everyone, then. Listen at wired.co.uk/ 

podcast, or search WIRED UK on iTunes

D OOMSDAY PREPPERS / 013 

Jaan Tallinn is a thoughtful, engaged sort of 

entrepreneur – an accomplished Estonian 

physicist who helped found Skype and Kazaa, 

and went on to fund success stories such as 

DeepMind. But ask him what’s on his mind, 

as I did at a friendly Pictet event in Geneva 

last September, and you’ll become caught up 

in his concerns about existential threats to 

humanity from rogue AIs, asteroid strikes 

and viral contagions. Small talk it wasn’t. 

PHOTOGRAPHY: BENEDICT EVANS 

But listening to Tallinn – not least his concerns 

about AI risks – I felt grateful that people such 

as him were weighing these heavy burdens for 

the rest of us. Indeed, it made me want to know 

more about who these people are, what 

dystopian scenarios they’re planning for and 

how one typically starts one’s day in a job 

devoted to fathoming how planetary life could 

simply collapse (porridge? extra-strong coffee? 

Valium?). This month, we celebrate those 

heroes in their X-for-existential-risk research 

institutions and set out the teeny things the 

rest of us might want to start worrying about. 

We were hoping to singe burn-holes in the 

magazine cover to dramatise the premise, but 

Condé Nast’s production deemed this an 

existential threat to our printer’s tolerance. 

I’m writing from China, where so much tech 

innovation is happening that I feel I need a 

couple of visits a year just to keep up. This issue 

I write about an extraordinarily ambitious 

project I explored during my most recent trip: 

an audacious plan to turn a million stores 

across China into the world’s greatest real-time 

retail-data network. It’s called Ule and it 

involves tracking millions of daily purchases 

as they happen, to know what people are buying 

at any moment. If you want to know which beer 

is popular on warm summer days among men 

aged 45 to 50, Ule will tell you. Ule can tell you which 

shoppers are buying which detergents today and let you 

target them with deals for a rival brand. Sure, it raises 

questions around another Chinese initiative to gather 

data linked to citizens’ behaviour. But in terms of scale, 

Ule makes western consumer marketing look analogue. 

If you enjoy João Medeiros’s feature in this issue, about 

an important new way to diagnose illness and personalise 

treatment, then consider joining us at WIRED Health in 

London on March 9 (wired.co.uk/events). We’re planning 

a day of innovation with speakers from all over the world. 

I hope to see you there. If the asteroid doesn’t hit first. 

Above: Marcus 

Krause is managing 

his cancer thanks to a 

blood test created by 

Guardant Health (p104) 

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

PHOTOGRAPHY: GUY HAVELL

ICELAND’S 

GLACIAL 

MELTDOWN 

Savour the beauty of 

this ice cave, because it 

may not be around for 

much longer. The 

structure is underneath 

the Breiðamerkurjökull 

glacier in Iceland. 

Formed by a sub-glacial 

river, it consists of 

natural features that 

are threatened by rising 

global temperatures. 

Glaciologists are 

monitoring the glacier, 

which spans 17 square 

kilometres in southeast 

Iceland, to 

measure the harmful 

effects of carbon 

emissions. Teams 

from the University 

of Iceland and the 

Icelandic Met Office 

have developed a 

mass-balance 

measurement, which 

involves tracking the 

amount of snowfall in 

winter and the volume 

of melting ice in 

summer. The data is 

worrying: “Since 1995, 

every year except one 

has displayed negative 

mass balance,” 

says Thorsteinn 

Thorsteinsson, 56, 

a glaciologist at the 

office. “In 2016, it’s 

negative again.” 

If trends continue, 

melting glaciers could 

cause major flooding 

and a rise in sea levels. 

“Glaciers all over the 

world are melting. In 

Iceland, we are losing 

0.34 per cent a year,” 

says Thorsteinsson. 

“They will be gone in 

200 years if global 

warming continues like 

this.” Ruby Lott- 

Lavigna en.vedur.is 

NEWS AND O BSESSIO NS / EDITED BY ROWLAND MANTHORPE / 015

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MAKE IT PERSO NAL / START / 017 

PHOTOGRAPHY: JORDAN HOLLENDER 

CCORDING TO NUMBER 13 IN 

Pixar’s 22 rules of storytelling, 

characters must have opinions: 

“Passive/malleable might seem 

likeable to you as you write, but it’s 

poison to the audience.” But what if 

that character is a robot? That’s what 

the author of the rules, Emma Coats, 

has been exploring as she works to 

give Google its new personality. 

Coats, 31, writes the dialogue for 

Google Assistant, the chatty digital 

helper the company is using to turn 

search queries into conversations. 

Unveiled in messaging app 

Allo in September 2016, then 

extended to the Pixel and Amazon 

Echo rival Home the following 

month, Assistant is intended to be 

the character at the core of 

Google’s products – its AI-powered 

answer to Siri. But a character 

requires a personality. That’s what 

Coats (pictured), who joined 

Google in January 2016, was hired 

to create. “What I thought was 

really crazy and interesting is that you have to think of everything 

a user might ask,” she says. “Be able to create this completely 

well-rounded character, be able to handle questions from any direction 

and come across as a consistent persona.” 

To construct Google Assistant’s “easygoing, friendly” personality, 

Coats’s small team in Mountain View, California – part of a division 

run by Google Doodle head Ryan Germick – imagines likely questions, 

then comes up with a range of responses, which are then handed 

over to the developers to code. The low-tech method harks back to 

Coats’s time at Pixar, where she worked from 2006 to 2012 as a 

THE HUMAN 

IN GOOGLE 

ASSISTANT 

Ex-Pixar storyteller Emma Coats teaches AI how to be affable

EARLY ADOPTERS 

storyboard artist – mainly on Brave, but also on Monsters University and Inside 

Out. It was there that she wrote the 22 rules of storytelling, which started out as 

a series of widely shared tweets. Coats, who went freelance after leaving Pixar 

and before joining Google, describes the set of unofficial rules as “Notes to my 

younger self”. The nuggets of advice range from “Pull apart the stories you like” 

to “Story is testing, not refining” and “Come up with your ending before you 

figure out your middle.” Not all of the rules apply to Google Assistant, however, 

for one simple reason: unlike in a film, this character isn’t the hero. “You, the person 

interacting with it, are the hero,” Coats says. That’s why the Assistant can’t be 

opinionated: it’s there to be reliable, 

not to have depth. “If we gave it 

How does Google 

Assistant deal with 

pesky humans such 

as WIRED’s reporter? 

Hi Rowland 

How can I help? 

Hello there 

Do you have a name? 

Did I forget to introduce myself? 

I’m your Google Assistant 

Hi 

Do you ever sleep? 

I take power naps when we aren’t 

talking 

I’m thinking 

0 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 

0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 

0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 

0 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 

What are you thinking about? 

0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 

0 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 

0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 

0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 

0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 

0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 

0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 

0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 

0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 

0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 

0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 

Just answer the question 

My Apologies... I don’t understand 

some dark conflict secret, that 

probably wouldn’t be a great user 

experience.” In Pixar terms, it’s 

Slinky Dog, not Buzz or Woody: it’s 

the fun trusty sidekick always on 

hand with a witty quip. 

At Pixar, jokes are a crucial 

element of Coats’s work. That’s 

partly because humour is one of the 

most effective ways of building 

character. It’s also because humour 

can be used to deflect awkward 

questions, especially for an AI that 

is learning its way. “We don’t want 

to have to fall back on something 

like, ‘I don’t understand’,” explains 

Coats. “That draws the attention 

back to you instead of continuing 

the conversation you’re building.” 

Ask the Assistant if it’s human and 

it will say, “Well, I’ve been told I’m 

personable.” Ask if it can learn and 

it will reply: “Learning is my jam,” 

followed by a honeypot emoji. 

All this is very cute, but it’s not 

really the answer – because in fact 

the Assistant is learning: to 

displace its human writers. As it 

takes requests and listens to the 

user’s reactions, its machinelearning 

algorithm improves itself, 

a process Google refers to, rather 

sinisterly, as “the transition”. 

By keeping users talking, Coats 

is putting herself (and perhaps, 

one day, all of us) out of work. Does 

this worry her? If it does, she 

doesn’t show it. “I’m sure we’ll be 

out of a job at some point as the 

Assistant learns faster and faster,” 

she says, “but for now it’s a really 

fun job.” RM google.com 

WHAT’S EXCITING… 

LISA LANG 

Founder, 

ElektroCouture 


ANTHON Y FLE TCHER 

CEO, 

Graze 


JUSTINE R OBERTS 

CEO and 

co-founder, 

Mumsnet 

“The Dipper Audio 

Necklace is a 

piece of jewellery 

that’s also a pair of 

headphones. The 

sound quality is 

amazing – and I 

can skip tracks, 

answer my phone 

and adjust volume 

with a fingertip on 

the necklace. I 

always listen to 

music, but I’d 

never found stylish 

headphones 

before these.” 

“My favourite app 

at the moment is 

Brilliant – it 

appeals to the 

science geek in 

me. Brilliant poses 

challenges and 

quizzes posted by 

a vast global 

community – some 

for fun, some in 

need of a solution. 

It’s satisfying to 

contribute to, 

while getting my 

daily problemsolving 

fix.“ 

“Gift Wink is an app 

that reminds you 

about birthdays 

and suggests 

gifts to buy. Since 

I started using it, 

there’s been a 

big improvement 

in my birthdayremembering. 

You add the dates 

and the app 

crowdsources gift 

ideas. There are so 

many apps that try 

to do too many 

things at once; Gift 

Wink does one thing 

very well.” RL-L 

018 / START / MAKE IT PERSO NAL / EARLY ADOPTERS

0 2 0 / START / PLASTIC FANTASTIC 

AI VISION 

FOR 3D 

PRECISION 

Ai Build is reshaping industrial 

printing, one layer at a time 

This plastic pavilion 

solves one of the 

biggest problems for 

3D printing. Created by 

London firm Ai Build and 

exhibited at the GPU 

Technology Conference 

in Amsterdam, the fivemetre-high 

structure was 

constructed by a robotarmed 

printer guided by 

AI-powered computer 

vision. The combination 

of robotic brawn and 

artificial eyes let the 

printer produce this 

intricate pattern without 

sacrificing speed. Its 48 

pieces were printed in just 

over two weeks, rather 

than the months it would 

have taken a typical 3D 

printer. “This saves time 

and, as a result, it saves 

money – so 3D printing 

at large scale becomes 

feasible,” says Daghan 

Cam, CEO of Ai Build. 

3D printers forge 

designs layer by layer 

while following a digital 

blueprint. But because 

even minimal mistakes 

can doom a whole 

structure, they have to 

plod much more slowly 

than traditional industrial 

machines. That’s why 

Cam, a 29-year-old with 

a background in digital 

design, introduced vision. 

“We attached motionsensing 

Kinect cameras 

to the robot, so now as it 

manufactures the piece, 

it uses computer vision 

algorithms to evaluate 

how it looks compared 

to the original designs,” 

he says. “We have shown 

that the technology works 

and can scale.” The future 

of 3D printing looks good. 

Gian Volpicelli ai-build.com 

WIRED 

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O 

PLANTS UNDER PRESSURE 

Kew has mapped the global threats to flora – and they’re growing fast 

Utility and service lines 

Shipping lanes 

Thermal pollution 

Housi sing and urban 

areas 

Roads and railr lroad ads 

Flightpaths 

NE-FIFTH OF ALL EARTH’S PLANT 

species are at risk of extinction – and 

we’re to blame. In Southeast Asia, 

rainforests are being replaced by palm 

oil plantations. In Madagascar, the £64 

billion tropical global timber industry 

is decimating native plant populations. 

“The rate of extinction we’re seeing is 

something in the region of 1,000 times 

more than the background rate,” says 

Steven Bachman, research leader in 

species conservation at Royal Botanic 

Gardens, Kew, and co-author of the first 

report to bring together the collective 

knowledge of the world’s botanists. 

Kew’s State of the World’s Plants 

report records 391,000 vascular species. 

Eighty-two per cent are thought to be 

at risk. The report helps Kew determine 

which plants to add to its Millennium 

Seed Bank, where it saves wild species 

as insurance against extinction. 

By 2020, Kew aims to have 25 per cent 

of the world’s plants preserved in its 

West Sussex repository. But as more 

wild plant species disappear, humans 

will miss out on thousands of plants that 

could be useful as biofuels, medicines 

or food. Some 31,000 plants have a 

documented use, more than half of them 

medicinal. Bachman says many more 

await discovery. “By no means have we 

exhausted the possible uses of plants,” 

he says. “We’re really just chipping away 

at a huge mass of potential.” 

The infographic on the right shows 

what’s threatening plant species 

around the world. Extinction risks fall 

into 12 major categories and are sorted 

by the precise nature of the threat. The 

bigger the bubble, the more plant 

species at risk of becoming extinct due 

to that threat. Matthew Reynolds 

stateoftheworldsplants.com 

Seepage from mining 

Sewage 

Type unknown 

Nutrient loads 

Type unknown 

Herbicides and 

pesticides 

Runoff 

Soil erosion and 

sedimentation 

Type unknown 

Smog 

Ozone 

Type unknown 

Agricultural and forestry estryeffluents 

effluents 

fluents 

Acid rain 

0 22 / START / SEED FUND / BEETLE J UICE 

Oil spills 

Domestic andurban waste e water 

Trend unknown 

Industrialandmilitaryand 

y effluents 

fluents 

Increase 

Airb 

borne pollutants 

lutants 

Suppression 

Garb arbag age and solid waste 

Ear 

arthquakes/tsunami 

Commercial and industrial area eas 

Other ecosys 

Abstraction of 

groundwater 

Excess Excess ene energy energy 

Fire 

sy tem modification 

ons 

Abstraction of 

surface water 

Tourism and recreation are reas 

Dams 

Pollution 

on 

Other options 

Natura 

l system system modificamodific 

ifications 

ations 

ions 

Dams Dams and wat 

ter 

management/u 

management/use 

nt/ se 

Residential and 

commercia cial al develo develo 

elopment elopm 

Unspecified 

at ial 

Introdu uc ed g enetic mater 

Prob em ma 

pe es 

le tic native s eci 

Transpor ansporta sportation 

and service service e cor co corridors corrid 

ematic 

seases 

Inv asi 

ve and other 

problem 

species, , genes e and disea 

Invas siv 

ve s 

INFOGRAPHIC: VALERIO PELLEGRINI. 

ILLUSTRATION: MATT CHASE

Rec creational activities 

Smallholder plantations 

Human Human di disturbance 

disturbance 

Wood 

and pulp ppantations 

pl 

a tions 

Agro-industry plantations 

War, civil unrest andmilitary exercises s 

Scale unknown 

Agriculture 

Geological Geolog 

gical al e event vent 

nts nts 

Work and other activ ivities 

e unknown 

Scale 

Expansion/int 

n/intens n/n nsific ification 

of crop pfarm farming 

arming 

Agro-industry farming 

Shif 

hifting agriculture 

Biological 

resource use 

Smallholder farming 

Livestock Livestock Livestock Livesto 

farmingfarm Climate e change 

and severe e w weather 

Ener Ener Ener 

Ener nergy production 

production pro on and and mini mini ning ning 

Avalan 

anches/landslid ides 

Volcan anoes 

Other threat 

Small holder grazing, ranching or farming 

Aquacult 

ure 

Nomadic No grazing 

Logging 

ging 

Agro-industry Agr 

grazing, ranching or farming 

unknown 

Scale u 

Gathering 

terrestrial plants 

Temperature extremeses 

Storms and flooding 

Other O impacts 

Droughts 

Habita 

tat shifting and alteration 

Renew ewable energy 

Mining 

ng and quarrying 

Oil and gas drilling 

INFOPORN 

Subsistence/small scale 

Sub 

Large-scale harvest 

Unin 

nintentional effects of subsistence 

Motivation unknown 

Fishing and harvesting aquatic resources 

Unintentional effects of 

larg 

rge-scale harvest 

Motivation unknown 

Intentional use 

Species is not the target 

Persecution/control 

NUMBER OF 

SPECIES 

100 

1,000 

5,000 

10,000 

IT’S A 

GROOVY 

KIND OF 

PAINT 

What connects the 

highlands of 

Kyrgyzstan to 

southern Africa’s 

arid Namib 

Desert? Answer: 

the shell of the 

fog-basking beetle. 

UK building 

manufacturer Sto 

was asked to make 

a paint to protect 

the University of 

Central Asia’s 

central campus, 

where temperatures 

drop to -40°C in 

winter and soar 

above 35°C in the 

height of summer. 

To cope with this 

climate, Sto copied 

the micro-sized 

grooves on the 

beetle’s shell, which 

condense dew and 

ocean fog into water 

droplets and direct 

them to its mouth. 

Sto used a 

micro-textured 

paint that is 

simultaneously 

hydrophilic and 

hydrophobic, so it 

attracts water then 

immediately repels 

it. “The coarse 

particles attract 

water and the 

deeper areas in the 

texture act to 

channel the water 

down and off the 

façade,” explains 

Gary Bundy, Sto’s 

technical director. 

The paint, StoColor 

Dryonic, keeps the 

campus free of 

micro-organisms 

such as fungus and 

algae. Beaten by 

beetles. Clare 

Dowdy sto.co.uk

THE BIGGEST EUROPEAN FESTIVAL ON THE FUTURE 

1-3 JUNE 2017 – BUDAPEST, HUNGARY 

Toomas Hendrik 

ILVES 

FORMER PRESIDENT 

OF ESTONIA 

Rocio 

FONSECA 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR 

OF START-UP CHILE 

George 

FRIEDMAN 

FOUNDER OF 

GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES 

Simone 

GIERTZ 

QUEEN OF 

SHITTY ROBOTS 

Albert-Laszlo 

BARABASI 

ROCKSTAR OF 

NETWORK SCIENCE 

Lucy 

MCRAE 

SCI-FI ARTIST & 

BODY ARCHITECT 

Peter 

SUNDE 

CO-FOUNDER 

OF PIRATE BAY 

Stephen 

CAVE 

DIRECTOR OF 

CENTRE FOR THE FUTURE 

OF INTELLIGENCE 

Mona 

CHALABI 

DATA EDITOR 

OF THE GUARDIAN 

Ari 

POPPER 

FOUNDER AND CEO 

OF SCIFUTURES 

Tomotaka 

TAKAHASHI 

FOUNDER OF 

ROBO-GARAGE 

Robert D. 

KAPLAN 

SENIOR FELLOW AT 

CENTER FOR A NEW 

AMERICAN SECURITY 

Megan 

MILLER 

CO-FOUNDER 

OF BITTY FOODS 

Peter 

ARVAI 

CEO AND CO-FOUNDER 

OF PREZI 

Stephen 

WALT 

HISTORIAN FROM 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

TICKETS: BRAINBARBUDAPEST.HU

N O SE-TO -TAIL EATING / START / 02 5 

N 

IGEL GIFFORD MAKES DRONES WITH A DIFFERENCE. HIS HUMANITARIAN 

UAV, the Pouncer, is designed to deliver food aid in disaster zones – by being edible 

itself. That may sound unlikely, but Gifford, 70, has a history of succeeding with unconventional 

projects. He’s the Somerset-based engineer behind Aquila, the Wi-Fi-beaming 

drone bought by Facebook in 2014 to connect 1.6 billion humans to the internet. 

In 2010, Gifford (pictured) imagined Aquila (originally named Ascenta) as a highaltitude 

drone that could be used to beam internet or mobile-phone connectivity to civilians below. 

“I absolutely believed in what we were doing; I could see how this could be a major benefit in communications 

applications,” he says. The UAV was designed with solar panels that would give it enough power 

to stay airborne for 90 days, with a flexible central section that could adapt to securely carry any cargo. 

The call from Facebook dramatically changed Ascenta’s fate. It bought the drone for a reported $20 

million (£16 million). Now with an enlarged wingspan the size of a commercial airliner, Aquila made 

its first successful flight – a 96-minute cruise above Yucca, Arizona – on June 28, 2016. Gifford 

is delighted with its progress: “For what it started out as and has now become, it’s super.” 

Post-sale, Gifford’s new company Windhorse Aerospace has focused its energies on the Pouncer, a UAV 

whose three-metre-wide hull can enclose vacuum-packed foods. Its structure will be made from as yet 

unspecified baked components that can be consumed. “It will have a 

50kg payload that should feed 100 people for one day,” Gifford says. GPS will 

guide it to within eight metres of its target. Windhorse Aerospace will be 

testing its capabilities in the spring; by late 2017, it will be in production. 

Will Gifford sell this drone, like Ascenta? “We have the vision; we want 

to take it through to development,” he says. But any partnership allowing 

the Pouncer to be rapidly deployed would be a priority. “The key is getting 

the Pouncer used for humanitarian aid,” he says. “If this existed now 

it would be saving lives in Syria.” Emma Bryce windhorse.aero 

THE ALL-YOU- 

CAN-EAT 

FOOD PARCEL 

Aquila inventor Nigel Gifford 

has made an edible UAV to 

fly aid to developing countries 

PHOTOGRAPHY: NICK WILSON

0 26 / START / AR/ VR? / BUILDING IN A BUILDING 

PAUL TRAVERS 

CEO, VUZIX 

WILL AUGMENTED REALITY 

BECOME MORE SIGNIFICANT 

THAN VIRTUAL REALITY? 

“Without a doubt, AR is where it’s at. 

Although VR will be big, there are limits 

to what you can do when you’re isolated 

from the real world. AR, on the other hand, 

connects the digital world to the real 

world. This will enable amazing use cases 

in enterprise and the mass market. Even 

now, use cases for AR are already proving 

that. For example, look at how quickly 

Pokémon Go took off. Analysts are claiming 

that, together, AR and VR will be a £120 

billion market by 2020, yet 90 per cent 

will be made up of AR users. AR is already 

changing the way we work and live.” 

VALÉRIE RIFFAUD-CANGELOSI 

NEW MARKET DEVELOPMENT 

MANAGER, EPSON 

THE BIG QUESTION 

“While VR provides an immersive, exciting 

experience, it’s aimed at very different 

audiences to AR. There’s a strong buzz 

around VR – it’s cool, trendy and consumerfacing. 

Its strong gaming association 

captures the imagination. AR has broader 

applications. These range from drone 

piloting, live theatre subtitles, enhanced 

museum exhibits and customer retail 

improvements to increasing industrial 

safety and efficiency. The ability to interact 

with the surrounding environment means 

there are no limitations to AR’s usage.” 

BLAIR MACINTYRE 

DIRECTOR, AUGMENTED ENVIRONMENTS 

LAB, GEORGIA TECH 

COLLEGE OF COMPUTING 

“The value in AR and VR is not the A or the V, 

it’s the R. The most exciting possibilities are 

tied to our physical reality, like education, 

long-distance communication and 

new approaches to games and storytelling. 

AR/VR are two sides of the same coin, 

presenting in media some ‘representation’ 

of reality. Future displays, platforms and 

applications will support both, letting people 

choose how to mix media with different 

representations of reality depending on 

their situation and preferences.” 

HEATHER KELLEY 

CO-FOUNDER, KOKOROMI 

“In a few years’ time, these legacy terms will be artefacts. The underlying 

question is, to what degree does a digital immersive experience 

require us to either tune out, or engage with, the physical world? As 

designers, we’ll be able to dial that up or down to suit the situation. 

Meanwhile, the systems themselves will become much more context 

aware. I look forward to the day when I won’t worry about tripping over 

my cat while in a virtual space, either because I can see the cat through 

the display, or because the system steers my movement around her – 

or perhaps even brings her into the action.” RL-L 

ADRIEN LEU 

CEO, INITION 

“Both AR and VR are aspects of the 

continuum between real and virtual 

worlds. In future, the hardware allowing the 

visualisation of such mixed-reality projects 

will smoothly switch between AR and 

VR. Saying that, VR’s power relies on its 

strong ability to engage at an empathetic 

level with the viewer due to its power in 

creating remote presence experiences and 

the feeling of disembodiment. Its natural 

applications are in areas that rely on 

that strong connection, like entertainment, 

medical and health. At least, for now, 

that does set a higher barrier of entry.” 

ILLUSTRATION: KRISTINA COLLANTES; PHOTOGRAPHY: MORENO MAGGI

A CLOUD 

FOR THE 

CROWDS 

Studio Fuksas has created a rather 

unconventional convention centre 

ITS CREATORS CHRISTENED IT 

“the floating space” but in Rome 

everybody knows it as “the cloud”. 

The New Congress Centre opened 

in October 2016 after eight years 

of work, filling 55,000 square 

metres in the EUR business 

district in the south of the city. 

Designed by Roman husbandand-wife 

practice Studio Fuksas, 

the building contains another 

building inside it: a cloud-shaped 

auditorium floating in a steel-andglass 

“theca”. “It’s a rigid, 

geometric element and the cloud is its polar opposite,” explains architect 

Massimiliano Fuksas. “The perception of the spaces between the theca and the 

cloud changes depending on the observer’s point of view.” The cloud’s steel 

framework is shrouded by 15,000 square metres of glass fibre and silicone, a translucent 

fabric that helps disperse and amplify light throughout the building. 

The five-level complex, which includes a 400-room high-rise hotel and a 1,760- 

capacity hall, is the largest building to be erected in Rome for more than 50 years, 

The structure comprises three elements: 

the theca; the cloud; and the blade of the hotel 

and 73-year-old Fuksas and his wife 

Doriana worked to whittle its 

environmental impact down to a 

minimum. The building’s cooling 

system taps into the waters of a 

nearby artificial lake, and solar 

panels on the rooftop produce 

electricity while shading the building’s 

interior from intense sunlight. 

“Apart from being environmentally 

compatible, the building has also 

been designed to behave optimally 

if a seismic event occurs,” Fuksas 

says. This is key in a country that 

has suffered recurrent quakes over 

the past few years. The building’s 

base isolations are horizontally 

stiff but vertically flexible, meaning 

it will stand still during a small or 

medium quake, and oscillate without 

falling apart during a more intense 

event. “The cloud is chaos trapped 

inside rationality,” adds Fuksas. 

Architect-speak for a safe place to 

shelter. Gian Volpicelli fuksas.it

A 

STRONOMER GUILLEM 

Anglada-Escudé took four 

years to form the team that 

found Proxima b, the closest 

Earth-like planet to our solar 

system. Discovered in 

August 2016, it orbits the red 

dwarf star Proxima Centauri, 

4.2 light years away. It is 

slightly larger than Earth 

and has a temperature range 

that can accommodate liquid 

water. In short, it is the 

closest place to search for 

life outside of the Milky Way. 

“The nearest stars and these 

red dwarfs, like Proxima, are 

the places where we have the 

chance to test these questions,” says 

Anglada-Escudé, 37, a lecturer in astronomy 

at the Queen Mary University of London. 

For years, scientists speculated that a 

planet lurked near Proxima Centauri, but 

they had no physical observation to back 

up the theory. Reams of publicly archived 

spectrograph data showed that something 

was pulling Proxima Centauri back 

and forth, but nothing could reconcile 

violent flares with a planet’s orbit. 

The astronomers needed to untangle the 

star’s activity from the signal. 

In 2012, Anglada-Escudé devised a way 

of analysing data to extract more accurate 

signals from spectrographs. This caught 

the attention of applied mathematicians 

at the University of Hertfordshire. 

Together, they developed a theoretical 

model of Proxima Centauri; now all 

they needed was the evidence to support 

it, as well as access to more historic 

data and telescopes on the ground. 

So Anglada-Escudé and his colleagues 

set out to find Proxima Centauri enthusiasts 

around the world for a campaign 

they called Pale Red Dot. For 60 nights in 

2016, the 31-person team obtained new 

data from the High Accuracy Radial 

Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) 

spectrograph in Chile. They did this while 

simultaneously monitoring Proxima 

PLANET 

HUNTER 

Guillem Anglada-Escudé and his 

crowdsourced team have found 

Earth's close – but distant – cousin 

Centauri’s activity on a series of photometric 

telescopes. To their delight, the 

scientists clearly saw the planet’s orbital 

period in the signal. Thanks to the 

telescope observations, they could rule 

out interference from the star. 

Next, Anglada-Escudé plans to mobilise 

more researchers to help search for 

exoplanets around 15 other nearby stars. 

“Within the next two or three years, we 

should be able to detect a lot of Proximalike 

planets,” he says. The search for life in 

the Universe will become more crowded. 

Tina Amirtha astro.qmul.ac.uk 

PHOTOGRAPHY: JAY BROOKS 

0 2 8 / START / SKY SCANNER

FIRE, YOU’VE MET YOUR MATCH 

Rosenbauer Panther’s thermal imaging and 16-metre stinger are ready for action 

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY 

T 

his fire engine can pump 10,000 litres of water per minute into a burning aeroplane. 

Launched in 2015, the Rosenbauer Panther 6x6 is designed to deal with emergencies at 

the world’s busiest airports. It’s already in action: last August, it was successfully deployed 

after a plane crash-landed at Dubai International Airport. It features a centrifugal pump 

capable of spraying water or foam up to 100 metres and its thermal-imaging camera 

can pinpoint the hottest part of a striken plane. This model is 11 metres long, three metres wide and 

features a dual 760-horsepower engine configuration, giving it an impressive top speed of 120kph. 

The Panther is currently on standby in 81 major airports around the world, including Heathrow and 

Southampton. “It’s a lifesaving piece 

of kit, so it has to be world-class,” 

explains Oliver North, managing 

director of Rosenbauer UK. “The 

innovation in the boom and engine [see 

far right] is an absolute necessity.” 

WIRED hopes it makes a big splash. 

Ruby Lott-Lavigna rosenbauer.co.uk

The Panther’s 

760-horsepower 

engine and eightspeed 

gearbox 

helps it hit 80kph 

in 28 seconds. 

Its Driver 

Enhanced Vision 

System allows 

for navigation in 

areas omitted from 

standard mapping. 

A FLIR (forwardlooking 

infrared) 

camera improves 

the driver’s vision 

through smoke 

and thick fog. 

It has a rotating 

front boom and 

16.5-metre 

extendible stinger 

that can penetrate 

aircraft fuselages.

032 / START / POWER UNDER P RESSURE / RO CK STAR 

HOT WATERS RUN DEEP 

Iceland is harnessing underground water vapour to keep homes toasty 

MIND YOUR STEP: THIS IS THE HOTTEST HOLE IN THE WORLD. SITUATED 

near the town of Reykjanes in southwest Iceland, the geothermal well goes five 

kilometres into the Earth’s crust and hits temperatures between 400°C and 

1,000°C. Started on August 11, 2016, it’s being dug by the Iceland Deep Drilling 

Project (IDDP), whose mission is to mine magma for energy. 

Geothermal engineers on the project hope to find the sweet spot of temperatures 

and pressures to create supercritical fluid – water vapour so laden with 

energy it could potentially generate 50mW of power versus just five megawatts 

from a typical well. That’s the difference between powering around 50,000 

homes versus 5,000 homes per year in Iceland 

– although before IDDP connects the well to 

Iceland’s energy grid, it will run a battery of 

impact studies over the next one to three years. 

“This high-energy concentration of supercritical 

fluid will give us more output in terms 

of electricity than a conventional high-temperature 

fluid,” says Bjarni Pálsson, manager 

of geothermal research and development 

at Landsvirkjun, which operates 17 power 

stations across the country. But don’t the mines 

spoil the view? “We get more energy out of the 

same-sized footprint,” explains Pálsson. More 

power to them. Tina Amirtha iddp.is 

Water filters 

down from 

the ground 

Supercritical 

steam zone 

Magma heats the 

groundwater 

to between 400°C 

and 1,000°C

DIAMOND DATA MINER 

Leanne Kemp is harnessing the power of the blockchain with 

Everledger, her global registry tracking millions of jewels 

ILLUSTRATION: MUTI. PHOTOGRAPHY: CHARLIE SURBEY 

DIAMOND’S PAST IS RARELY 

crystal clear. Knowing a stone’s origin 

can stop fencing and insurance frauds 

and winnow out synthetic diamonds or 

those sourced in war zones. But forged 

paper certificates make provenance 

hard to verify. That’s why in May 2015 

Leanne Kemp founded Everledger, a 

global digital registry for diamonds, 

powered by the blockchain – the decentralised 

ledger underpinning cryptocurrencies 

such as Bitcoin. “Blockchain is 

immutable; it cannot be changed, so 

records are permanently stored,” says 

Kemp (pictured). “Information on the 

blockchain is cryptographically proven 

by a federated consensus, instead of 

being written by just one person.” 

Everledger uses more than 40 

features, including colour and clarity, 

to create a diamond’s ID. Enshrined 

in the blockchain, this information 

becomes a certificate chronicling the 

jewel’s ownership, from mine to ring. 

Everledger has digitised more than one 

million diamonds and partnered with 

firms including Barclays and Allianz. 

The 20-person company has 

expanded its focus from polished stones 

to rough ones. This way, Everledger 

can monitor conflict diamonds, such 

as those mined in war zones, which 

frequently sneak into the market in their uncut form. 

Now Kemp plans to extend London-based Everledger’s 

scope by building an anti-counterfeit database for other 

precious goods. Fine wines are top of the list, due to a collaboration 

with oenologist Maureen Downey. “We created a 

digital thumbprint for wine using information about the 

cork, the label and the bottle,” she says. “We can use all these 

elements to identify an object and build up its reputation.” 

Australian-born Kemp, who is in her mid-forties, hopes 

that in the future, Everledger’s core tech – a system 

relying on the Bitcoin blockchain and 

proprietary ledgers – could be aided by 

other tools, including computer-vision 

algorithms. “We are looking into using 

that to understand when counterfeiting 

is occurring,” Kemp explains. “But so 

far, we have processed only a million 

diamonds. When we get to three, four, 

ten million stones, we’ll be able to build.” 

Gian Volpicelli everledger.io 

THREE OTHER SMART 

BLOCKCHAIN STARTUPS 

PROVENANCE 

Uses smart tags to check a 

product’s origins. A 2016 pilot 

scheme tracked Indonesian 

tuna through the supply chain. 

CIRCLE 

Send currencies via Apple’s 

iMessage service for free. 

Founded in Boston in 2013. 

SLOCK.IT 

Smart, blockchain-linked locks 

could allow delivery people 

into your home if you’re not in.

PREVENT 

CYBERATTACKS 

WITH ARTIFICIAL 

INTELLIGENCE 

Cybersecurity that predicts, prevents and protects. cylance.com 

© Cylance 2017

AI BIOPS Y / START / 035 

HIS IMAGE – ONE OF AROUND 

400,000 mammograms belonging 

to Zebra Medical Vision – shows 

what a breast looks like to AI. It has 

T 

been colour-coded to make it easier 

for a self-teaching neural network 

to identify breast cancer. Using this 

technique, Zebra Medical claims to 

have been able to detect cancerous 

cells with 91 per cent accuracy. This 

is an improvement on the typical 

radiologists’ rate of 88 per cent, 

with fewer false positives. “Right 

now,” says Zebra Medical founder 

Elad Benjamin, “this is better than 

human performance.” 

Launched in 2014, Tel Aviv-based 

firm Zebra Medical, which consists of 25 employees, has developed 

image-scanning algorithms to identify bone, lung, liver and heart 

disease. It didn’t begin to look at breast cancer, however, until it was 

approached in 2015 by British computer programmer Phil Teare. “His 

wife had died of cervical cancer at a very young age, so he had a 

different motivation and he really dived into it,” Benjamin recalls. 

Using anonymous data from 14 hospitals – including biopsy and 

pathology records as well as images – Teare began work on an algorithm 

that could identify malignant cells in mammograms. That meant finding 

a way to make the scans machine-readable. He approached this problem 

by using colour to differentiate features. “Phil separated different signals 

within the image and fed them into the red, blue and green channels of 

the network.” The result is being prepared for US clinical trials in a 

number of hospitals before submission to the Food and Drug Administration 

towards the end of 2017. 

When the technique becomes 

commercially available, Benjamin 

expects it to have a big impact. “Five 

or seven years from now, radiologists 

won’t be doing the same job 

they’re doing today,” he explains. 

“They are going to have analytics 

engines or bots like ours that are 

going to be doing 60, 70, 80 per cent 

of their work.” RM zebra-med.com 

RADIOLOGY 

BY ROBOT 

An AI is beating human efforts to detect breast cancer 

APPS OF THE MONTH 

NYT VR 

As VR becomes more 

accessible, more 

newspapers will 

incorporate it. The New 

York Times’ VR app 

turns its international 

reporting into Google 

cardboard-compatible 

videos. Android and iOS, 

free nytimes.com/ 

marketing/nytvr 

STACK 

FOCUS KEEPER 

Based on the Pomodoro 

Technique, Focus 

Keeper breaks down 

working into intervals of 

25 minutes, with a fiveminute 

break between. 

The “goal” feature 

will encourage the 

competitive to stay 

focused. iOS, £1.49 

limepresso.com 

I LOVE FUR 

This app lets you stroke 

the scales, fur or spikes 

of creatures until you 

(or they) are satisfied. 

Complete a challenge to 

unlock other characters, 

such as Bipolar Bear 

or Fire Intolerant 

Dragon. Strangely 

therapeutic. iOS, free 

geometrieva.com 

WIRED 

Stack tests your timing. 

As a block tessellates 

across the screen, you 

tap at the moment it 

fits, building a larger 

ombre structure. Its 

beautiful palette and 

soundtrack make it 

all the more enticing. 

Android and iOS, free 

ketchappstudio.com 

WEIRD

HOW DO TODAY’S TOP 

FUTURISTS IMAGINE 

TOMORROW’S WORLD? 

ARCONIC AND WIRED HAVE COLLABORATED TO CREATE NONFICTION PREDICTIONS, A 

SERIES DESIGNED TO EXPLORE THE ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING INNOVATIONS 

THAT WILL HELP TO CREATE THE HOMES, CITIES AND TRANSPORTATION OF TOMORROW 

G 

reat minds do so much more than 

think alike – they think big and think 

far. To this end, WIRED has partnered 

with Arconic – a global technology, 

engineering and advanced manufacturing 

leader for major markets 

including aerospace and automotive 

– to tap into some of the world’s 

brightest futurists and learn what’s in 

store for humankind in 50 years’ time. 

The project, Nonfiction Predictions, 

taps into Arconic’s sharpest 

engineering minds to highlight how 

materials science, advanced manufacturing 

and smart thinking will 

take us into the future. 

The online series will investigate 

and explore exactly how our cities, 

homes and transportation – both 

across town and across the Universe 

– will transform and flourish. 

The future may be bright, but it’s 

also yet to be written. For a look ahead 

at how engineering innovations 

are shaping what’s possible, visit 

the Nonfiction Predictions project 

at wired.com/arconic. 

Images, from left: 

New manufacturing 

techniques will take 

us to new worlds; 

buildings will 

evolve; a change 

in aerospace is 

on the horizon. 

ARCONIC’S PREDICTORS: 

KLAUS KLEINFELD 

Chairman and CEO of 

Arconic – a global 

leader in engineering 

and manufacturing. 

LUKE HAYLOCK 

A pioneering engineer 

with 16 years at Arconic, 

Haylock is its global 

aerospace technologist. 

SHERRI MCCLEARY 

Chief materials scientist 

at Arconic and inventor 

of innovations enabling 

lighter, safer vehicles. 

DON LARSEN 

Arconic’s advanced 

manufacturing 

metallurgist and a 

holder of 11 US patents. 

TODAY’S PROLIFIC FUTURISTS: 

KEVIN KELLY 

Co-founder of WIRED 

and author of The 

Inevitable and What 

Technology Wants. 

ANNE LISE KJAER 

Founder of ideas agency 

Kjaer Global and the 

Time to Think Future 

Trends conferences. 

ADRIAN HON 

Former neuroscientist, 

tech writer and author 

of A History of the 

Future in 100 Objects. 

THOMAS FREY 

Executive director, 

founder and senior 

futurist at think tank 

DaVinci Institute. 

THIS ARTICLE WAS PRODUCED BY WIRED IN COLLABORATION WITH ARCONIC

ARCONIC / WIRED PARTNERSHIP

038 / START / T O MATO PLANT 

A FARM DESIGNED 

FOR THE DESERT 

Sundrop Farms is using Sun and seawater to reinvent agriculture 

PART GREENHOUSE, PART SOLAR PLANT, THIS FARM IS HARVESTING 

food from the Australian desert. Officially launched in October 2016 at Port Augusta 

in South Australia after a six-year pilot, it’s the first outpost of Sundrop Farms. 

The company wants to make farming more resilient to climate change by using 

the desert’s plentiful sunshine, plus piped-in seawater, to grow food in arid environments. 

“Our farm grows more than 15,000 tonnes of tomatoes each year,” says 

CEO Philipp Saumweber. That’s 15 per cent of the Australian tomato market. 

Sundrop’s tomato plants are grown hydroponically, free of soil, in a watery 

solution fed by nutrient-rich coconut husks. “Intake 

water is pumped, using sustainable electricity 

produced by our concentrated solar plant, in a 450mm 

pipe over 5km to our desalination unit,” Saumweber 

explains. The solar plant, which flanks the eighthectare 

building, is made of 23,000 mirrors reflecting 

the Sun’s heat on to a solar tower. This transforms 

1,000,000 litres of seawater each day into fresh water. 

Sundrop Farms produces enough truss tomatoes 

(pictured right) daily to fill eight trucks 

It also drives a turbine to generate 

electricity. Additional water is also 

taken from the roof of the greenhouse. 

As seawater is a natural disinfectant, 

the farm can operate pesticide-free. 

The high-saline water left over from 

desalination is then carried back to the 

sea. “Gravity is used to return water 

along the same course, in a larger pipe, 

where it is discharged into the sea only 

when salinity levels have returned to 

normal,” Saumweber explains. 

Sundrop’s plant cost AUD$200 

million (£116m) to build, including a 

$100 million investment from private 

equity firm KKR. In 2016, Sundrop 

expanded to Portugal and Tennessee 

in the US, where it’s building farms 

to meet the needs of local supermarkets. 

“This means that our 

produce complements what is already 

being grown locally, rather than 

competing with it,” says Saumweber. 

“Now that we have proved the 

commercial viability of our systems, 

we’re aiming to bring Sundrop 

projects and produce to locations 

around the world,” he says. “This is 

unlike any other farm on the planet.” 

Emma Bryce sundropfarms.com

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BRAIN F OOD & PR O V O CATIO NS / EDITED BY JOÃ O MEDEIROS / 04 1 

ILLUSTRATION: EDWARD TUCKWELL 

TOM VANDERBILT 

YOUR OF 

A EMOJI 

IS OLD NEWS 

In a series of lectures at the University 

of Cambridge in the late 1930s, the 

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted 

the trouble humans can have expressing 

themselves – particularly when it comes 

to our feelings about things or people. 

The use of a word such as “lovely” to 

describe a piece of art or music was 

annoyingly muzzy. And yet, he observed, 

“A lot of people who can’t express 

themselves use the word frequently.” 

If he were a good draughtsman, 

Wittgenstein continued, he “could 

convey an innumerable number of 

expressions by four strokes”. He 

sketched three simple faces: a smiley 

face with closed eyes; that same face 

with a raised eyebrow; and a smiling 

face with open eyes. “Such words as 

‘pompous’ and ‘stately’,” he argued, 

“could be expressed by faces.” Far from 

simplifying our discourse, he suggested, 

the crude symbols would make it more 

precise. “In fact, if we want to be exact, 

we use a gesture or a facial expression.” 

What Wittgenstein was proposing 

was a sort of proto emoji long before 

such things had begun to permeate our 

digital consciousness. 

The ascent of emoji has been astonishing. 

In Gavin Lucas’s The Story of 

Emoji, the linguist describes emoji as 

the fastest-growing language of all time. 

For instance, when emoji were added 

to the iOS keyboard in 2011, about ten 

per cent of Instagram posts contained 

emoji; that figure is now north of 50 per 

cent. As a study by the Georgia Institute 

of Technology found, emoji even seem 

Tom Vanderbilt 

is an American 

journalist and 

author of You May 

Also Like: Taste in 

an Age of Endless 

Choice (Simon & 

Schuster UK) 

to be crowding out their more primitive 

cousins, the emoticons, based on an 

analysis of Twitter usage. 

A 2015 survey by Bangor University 

found that 72 per cent of participants 

aged between 18 to 25 felt more 

comfortable expressing themselves 

using emoji than words. But before one 

goes off tut-tutting about a socially 

blinkered, post-literate generation 

communicating via smiley faces, we 

should remember Wittgenstein’s emoji. 

Indeed, the problems of communication 

he was addressing, well before 

the computer age, are only magnified in 

electronic messaging; where, in the 

absence of facial gestures, intonation, 

pauses and other contextual cues, our 

language can seem sterile at best and, 

at worst, open to misinterpretation (if 

I sign off with a full-stop, and not an 

exclamation point, does that seem 

passively aggressively hostile?). 

Communicating online is like being in 

a car and trying to talk to other drivers. 

Without time for lengthy formalities, 

generally unable to see each other’s 

faces, we use gestures – a wave, a flash 

of headlights, a sounded horn. 

But simple language can be as hard 

to read as complex language. Were you 

honking at me? Was it a polite honk, or 

an angry honk? Inventors have 

occasionally suggested systems for cars 

which would display messages – like 

“sorry” – to other drivers, to help 

broaden the range of expression. 

Facebook was in essence trying to 

solve a similar problem when, earlier 

last year, it unveiled “Reactions”, which 

added “wow” and “sad” emoji, among 

others, to its original “like”. As US 

magazine n+1 noted, “like” itself was 

born “as an ‘awesome’ button, but the 

company decided that the language of 

a ‘like’ translated across cultural vocabularies 

in a way that ‘awesome’ didn’t.” 

Universal or not, “like” had its limits. 

When a friend told you of bad news, 

hitting ‘like’ – even if you were sure 

they would get what you meant – felt 

uncomfortable. “Binary ‘like’ and 

‘dislike’,” as Facebook’s director of 

product design put it, “doesn’t reflect 

how we react to the vast array of things 

we encounter in our real lives.” 

And now that “love” has emerged as 

the most popular response, does a mere 

“like” seem tepid? And is “reacting” 

the same as feeling? As Dacher Keltner, 

part of the University of California 

team that advised Facebook on 

Reactions, put it, a tagger could in effect 

be saying: “I recognise that what you’ve 

done could produce this feeling, but 

I don’t necessarily feel it.” 

The power of emoji is their ability 

to tap into the cognitive architecture 

for reading facial emotion (smiling 

and unsmiling faces are so powerful 

they are routinely used in psychology 

as unseen “primes” to influence 

people’s response to other things). At 

least since Charles Darwin, who 

showed 20 house guests a series of 

photographs of people and asked them 

to judge what emotion was being 

displayed, the legibility and near-universality 

of facial expression has been 

known. Darwin thought we had facial 

expression before language because 

it was key to our survival – one needed 

to signal danger, disgust, maybe even 

joy, before we invented words to go 

alongside. It was social media 1.0. In 

this sense, emoji are not a new 

language, but the oldest one of all.

F 

our thousand years BCE in the ancient 

Near East, a region we have come to 

describe as the cradle of civilisation, 

Sumerian scribes made replicas of their 

minds in mud and created the clay tablet 

– the world’s first silicate chip. 

Five thousand years later, silicon 

semiconductors, ferromagnetic films 

and floating gate transistors have 

amplified the recording power of clay 

a q uintillion times. Trends in 

processing and storage technology 

suggest to futurists that before too 

long, human thought, as the Babylonian 

mythology Enûma Eliš described so 

presciently, “shall be bound” and “to a 

unity brought together”. 

The technological singularity – that 

moment when humanity is surpassed 

by intelligent machines and absorbed 

by them – was first described by the 

mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, as a 

defining moment when “the ever accelerating 

progress of technology” leads 

to a point “beyond which human affairs, 

as we know them, could not continue”. 

For the engineer Ray Kurzweil, this 

event marks overcoming the limitations 

of biological brains. 

There is a tendency to view one’s 

own time as uniquely sophisticated, 

to conceive of the past as primitive. 

Yet with clay tablets, humans overcame 

the limitations of their brains 5,000 

years ago. The first singularity took 

place in the Stone Age. 

It is only recently that we have 

grasped what it means for individual 

brains to extend into the world of 

culture, fuse with the thoughts of society 

through the properties of physical 

artefacts and technologies, and then 

reabsorb the experience of the collective 

by accessing these technologies. 

And what we have learnt is that the 

evolution of human intelligence is a 

continuous process of alternating 

outsourcing and reintegration, an 

endless series of fusions and fissions 

DAVID KRAK AU ER 

SINGULARITY 

COMES FROM 

CLAY, NOT 

COMPUTERS 

among individuals and collectives. To 

make this organic-inorganic narrative 

clear, let’s consider numbers. 

In the western world we have grown 

complacent about our Indian-Arabic 

number system. These numbers 

possess both a zero and a place-based 

value. One might assume that previous 

number systems were less able and that 

our decimal numerals are a late and 

highly evolved means of representing 

magnitude and relation. This is far from 

the case. The two earliest number 

systems were Egyptian and Sumerian. 

The ancient Egyptian numbers were 

also base ten, and each power of ten 

was represented by a different hieroglyph 

– from strokes (one), to cattle 

(ten), ropes (100), and lotus flowers 

(1,000). The Sumerians used base 60, 

written in cuneiform characters, one 

for units and one for powers of ten. A 

legacy of the sexagesimal base persists 

in our units of time – 60 seconds to the 

minute and 60 minutes to the hour. 

Cultures are swimming in unfamiliar 

number systems: base 27 among the 

Oksapmin people of New Guinea; base 

20 among the Yoruba of West Africa; 

David Krakauer 

is president of the 

Santa Fe Institute 

and the William H 

Miller professor of 

complex systems 

and base 12 among the Nimbi of Nigeria. 

In all of these culturally evolved 

instances, numbers were inscribed 

upon suitable physical materials in 

order to encode matters of great value 

and where the constraints of time and 

space would necessitate outsourcing 

of arithmetical and mathematical ideas. 

Numbers have evolved as a means of 

achieving long-lasting consensus. By 

being placed in the “public domain” 

these numbers have achieved incredible 

exponential returns through the 

collective deliberation of generations. 

Whereas thoughts restricted to 

individual brains depend entirely upon 

the knowledge and ability of one brain, 

ideas in the world can be manipulated 

across time and space by countless 

minds, and achieve through collective 

consideration a significant non-linear 

increase in stored knowledge. 

It is therefore the combined memory 

(stored solutions that span generations) 

and computational (worked on 

by many individuals) representational 

powers of the silicate chip, and its many 

subsequent Stone-Age cousins, that 

make their realisation in history as 

candidate singularities. 

It is true there is something about our 

contemporary solid-state artefacts that 

suggests a form of independence or 

autonomy from humans which merits 

special consideration. Whereas silicate 

chips need to be modified by hand, 

silicon chips can be modified by current. 

And although silicate chips can be transmitted 

across vast distances, they do so 

slowly, unlike calculations in silicon that 

travel at near light speed. On the other 

hand, silicate chips have successfully 

stored information for more than 5,000 

years, whereas digital media is 

considered resilient if it can store information 

for more than a decade. 

The evolution of human intelligence 

has always been about overcoming the 

constraints of soft organic matter. The 

adaptability of cells and tissues, their 

ability to perpetuate through replication, 

comes at a cost of fragility, 

limited scale and the needs of the generalist. 

Specialist tasks can be better 

served by more restrictive materials. 

And collective performance can be facilitated 

by platforms that support the 

combined activity of populations. Our 

earliest cognitive platform was the 

silicate chip of the Sumerians – clay 

tablets upon which humanity achieved 

its primal, introductory singularity. 

ILLUSTRATION: JON FOX; ANDRÉ BERGAMIN

FRO M SILICATE TO SILICO N / DO N’T BELIEVE THE HYPE / IDEAS BANK / 0 4 3 

L UKE DORMEH L 

ONLY ONE 

WEAPON CAN 

TAME THE 

AI OVERHYPE 

T 

Luke Dormehl 

is a journalist and 

the author of 

Thinking Machines: 

The Inside Story of 

Artificial Intelligence 

and Our Race to 

Build the Future 

(WH Allen) 

hanks to neural networks – digital 

approximations of the way that the 

human brain learns – artificial intelligence 

has made enormous breakthroughs 

in everything from creating 

machines that can recognise faces with 

more accuracy than a human, to 

building cars capable of driving 

themselves, to recently, a computer 

“Turing test for sound” which can 

watch silent videos and predict the 

sounds that should accompany them. 

But it very nearly didn’t happen like 

this. Forty years ago, research into 

neural networks almost stopped 

altogether. Budgets were slashed, plugs 

were pulled and students were advised 

by their teachers that researching neural 

networks was a bit like dating the loser 

in school: they’d never amount to 

anything and you’d just get hurt in the 

process. Certainly there were things 

neural networks weren’t capable of at 

the time, but it’s equally true that a large 

amount of the backlash the field suffered 

came down to the massive amount of 

hype it had received. Researchers, 

particularly in the rival, more established 

field of symbolic AI, were 

perturbed by articles like the one 

Science magazine published in 1958 

about neural nets, entitled “Human 

Brains Replaced?” Reading it today, the 

crazy thing is how accurate the article 

was: predicting machine learning 

capable of making decisions and translating 

languages. But neural networks 

weren’t capable of doing all of that just 

then, and the vitriolic response to those 

stories helped crush the hopes of people 

interested in the field. It was only the 

willingness of a group of strong-willed 

researchers in the 80s, willing to work 

away in relative obscurity for years, that 

pulled neural networks back from the 

brink. Today, many of them are the top 

experts in the field and enjoy high-level 

jobs at companies such as Google. 

Neural networks, of course, aren’t the 

only technology to prompt overhype 

and, inevitably, disappointment. 

Robotics has had a similarly challenging 

time. In the 60s, a ground breaking robot 

called Shakey set benchmarks in fields 

such as pattern recognition, information 

representation, problem solving and 

natural language processing. It has, 

quite rightly, been described as the 

world’s first general-purpose robot 

capable of reasoning about its own 

actions. But when it was profiled in Life 

magazine in 1970, Shakey was called the 

world’s “first electronic person” and 

was said to be (wrongly) capable of 

travelling “about the Moon for months 

at a time without a single beep of 

direction from the Earth”. 

So are journalists to blame? Possibly, 

but not exclusively. Overhype, like 

success, has many fathers. Researchers, 

for instance, have benefitted from hype 

when it comes to funding. At an AI 

conference in Boston during the 70s, one 

researcher told the press that it would 

take just five more years until all of us 

had smart robots in our homes picking 

up stray socks. He was confronted by a 

furious colleague who said, “Don’t make 

those predictions! You’re underestimating 

how long this will take.” Without 

pausing, the researcher responded, “I 

don’t care. Notice all the dates I’ve 

chosen were after my retirement date.” 

As AI became big business in the 80s 

– initially thanks to the boom in what 

are called “expert systems” – we began 

to encounter a new species: venture 

capitalists. Although many VCs believe 

in the transformative abilities of 

technology, it would be naïve to think 

that big business doesn’t bring with it 

a certain “pump and dump” mentality, 

whereby promises are inflated until the 

metaphorical balloon finally pops under 

the pressure. Neural networks 

recovered from this effect, but there 

are plenty of other examples of 

technology in which their macro story 

was correct, but their inability to match 

the hype in the short term proved to be 

a blow too fatal to overcome. 

AI may be more subject to hype than 

any other field. It is a discipline which 

exists perpetually on the brink of 

science fiction, being sometimes 

described as “cool things that 

computers aren’t yet capable of”. AI 

is the only subject I’ve come across 

where successes are shuffled out of 

the field altogether: no longer 

considered “AI proper”, but rather 

some lesser sub-field of it. It’s a bit like 

a magician dismissing illusions as 

simple tricks the moment he discovers 

that there’s no real magic in it, but 

rather a trapdoor on the stage. 

There are plenty of short-term 

benefits to hype but, ultimately, it can 

bring with it more problems than it 

solves. However, with an army of 

excitable journalists, eager VCs and 

perpetually optimistic computer scientists, 

it’s not the kind of thing which 

can easily be lifted out of the field like 

a dodgy line of code. We need a more 

thoughtful approach to the subject of 

building thinking machines – meaning 

less sensationalism, more stability and, 

ultimately, satisfying progress. 

Of course, the other risk of hype is 

that in our eagerness to look to the 

future and to all that machines are not 

yet capable of, we overlook the massive 

strides that have already been made.

0 44 / IDEAS BANK / TRAFFIC THAT G O ES WITH THE FLO W 

W 

LAU RIE WINK LESS 

MOLECULAR 

ECOLOGY CAN 

SHORTEN YOUR 

UBER RIDE 

e’ve all been there. Stuck in a citycentre 

traffic jam, a sea of red brake 

lights ahead. Grumpy and stressed, you 

edge forward, silently (or occasionally, 

loudly) cursing the other drivers on the 

road. When asked, somewhere between 

80 and 90 per cent of drivers believe 

that their skills behind the wheel are 

above average. Clearly, lots of drivers 

are wrong. But the idea that traffic jams 

must be the fault of someone else is a 

pervasive one, and it’s reflected in the 

language we use to discuss them. We 

say things such as, “Oh, the traffic was 

terrible,” or, “The roads were so busy 

this morning” – as if the jam is a separate 

entity to the drivers caught up in it. 

The science behind how and why 

traffic jams form tells a very different 

story. And it is one that’s being collectively 

written by researchers from 

a diverse range of fields. From 

molecular ecology and human 

behaviour to network science and 

urban planning, there are thousands 

of people trying to understand traffic 

and find new ways to keep it moving. 

Road congestion can be caused by any 

number of factors – bad weather, an 

accident, roadworks or just by too many 

vehicles competing for too little space. 

But there’s also the “jamiton” or 

“phantom traffic jam”, where, for no 

discernible reason, traffic builds up and 

then eases. A now-famous video of how 

these types of jams form shows 22 cars 

being driven on a closed track. The 

driver of each car was instructed to get 

up to 30kph and maintain that speed at 

a safe distance from the car in front. But 

the system broke down very quickly, 

with some cars left at a standstill while 

others were accelerating. The reason is 

simple – people have trouble 

maintaining a constant speed. Say one 

driver finds themselves driving just 

slightly above the speed limit – to 

correct for it, they then tap on the 

brakes. The car behind then overcompensates 

for this sudden braking, as 

does the car behind that one. This causes 

a start-stop shockwave that travels 

backwards through traffic. 

We usually associate the concept of 

collective behaviour with the natural 

world more than the urban jungle. A 

paper published by German scientists 

in 2015 looked specifically at traffic flow 

in ant colonies. Black-backed meadow 

ants construct and maintain permanent 

roadways not unlike our own – a fixed 

width and a smooth surface, clear of 

obstacles. By observing ants using the 

route, Christiane Hönicke and her 

colleagues could investigate the ant 

etiquette involved in the rapid flow of 

traffic in and out of the colony. Surprisingly, 

they found that, as the trail got 

more crowded, the ants sped up. In fact, 

they increased their speed by about 25 

per cent as the density doubled. 

At these higher speeds, collisions 

were more frequent between ants – 

possibly not a situation that human 

drivers should be emulating. But 

another factor in ant traffic flow was the 

evolution of “lanes” as the route got 

busier – something that has been 

observed by mathematical modellers 

in India too. Most researchers also agree 

that individual ants tend give each other 

a lot of headway. This gives them more 

time to react to any incidents, reducing 

the risk of kick-starting a jamiton. Ants 

could teach us a thing or two, but 

changing driver behaviour on the roads 

can be a challenge. For example, dynamic 

late merge, also known as the “zipper 

system” has been shown to greatly 

reduce congestion when merging two 

lanes into one. But despite this, many 

drivers still opt for the more polite (and 

less efficient) early-merge option. 

Marta C González of MIT’s Civil and 

Environmental Engineering Group 

believes that we could all benefit from 

taking a less selfish approach to driving. 

Using smartphone data, she showed that 

Laurie Winkless 

is a New Zealandbased 

writer, 

physicist and 

science 

communication 

consultant 

taking just one per cent of cars off the 

roads from specific neighbourhoods in 

Boston and San Francisco could reduce 

travel time for all other drivers in those 

cities by up to 18 per cent. In early 2016, 

González found that in cities including 

Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon, even if a small 

number of drivers took a slightly longer 

route, the total time lost to congestion 

could drop by 30 per cent. 

Infrastructure has a role to play too, 

including traffic lights within cities. 

They use sensors embedded in the road 

to continuously feed information on 

traffic flow back to a central control 

centre. But cities such as London are 

making lights smarter. There, thermal 

cameras monitor the number of 

pedestrians and cyclists at certain road 

junctions and adjust the “green-light 

time” to give them an official head 

start. In August, Audi announced 

that their new Q7 and A4 cars will be 

able to communicate with smart 

traffic lights, providing a green light 

countdown for drivers. 

Longer term, the biggest challenge 

facing traffic managers will be the 

mix of transportation on the road – 

namely, a growing number of autonomous 

vehicles, surrounded by many 

human-controlled ones. A full move 

to driverless cars would have a major 

impact on road infrastructure 

too. Because they can continuously 

communicate with each other, 

driverless cars could potentially speed 

safely through junctions, removing 

the need for physical traffic lights. 

Where will that leave pedestrians? 

Well, that’s a question that designers 

don’t yet have an answer to. 

ILLUSTRATION: GIOVANNA GIULIANO

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TUMI / WIRED PARTNERSHIP 

Above: TUMI’s Regent Street store was the venue for the awards ceremony 

READY, JET SET, GO 

IN NOVEMBER 2016, WIRED AND LUXURY TRAVEL BRAND TUMI HELD THE 

SECOND INNOVATION IN TRAVEL AWARDS TO CELEBRATE THE COMPANIES 

AND DESTINATIONS DELIVERING THE SECTOR’S FINEST EXPERIENCES 

AT THE AWARDS PARTY: 

FIRST CLASS 

The evening kicked off the 2016 

party season, with TUMI’s 

flagship London store hosting 

all nominees from the awards. 

ALL INCLUSIVE 

A range of cocktails were mixed 

on site by TUMI mixologists 

– keeping the networking and 

celebrations going until late. 

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT 

Jeremy White, WIRED’s 

product editor, announced 

the award winners for the 

second year running. 

YOUR CAPTAIN SPEAKING 

Victor Sanz, TUMI’s New 

York-based creative director, 

flew to London to kick off the 

Innovation in Travel Awards. 

A VIP BOOKING 

Guests flew from Europe 

and beyond for the awards – 

representatives from Japan 

even made the 9,000km trip. 

LONDON’S LANDSCAPE 

When the ceremony finally 

came to an end, many guests 

dispersed to find an after-party 

in the chilly London night. 

“The key focus for us is perfecting 

the journey – pushing the limits of 

innovation and elevating our brand,” 

said Victor Sanz, creative director of 

TUMI, as he introduced the TUMI X 

WIRED Innovation in Travel Awards 

in London last November. “All of the 

nominees here are leaders in the 

global travel market and are pushing 

the boundaries of their industry and 

the customers’ experience.” 

Voted for by wired.co.uk readers 

throughout autumn 2016, the winners 

were announced on stage by Jeremy 

White, WIRED’s product editor. 

Hilton McLean Tysons Corner 

picked up the Best-connected hotel/ 

resort prize for its experimental hotel 

concepts, and Best in-flight experience 

went to Virgin America for its power 

outlets, Wi-Fi and Netflix, Spotify and 

The New York Times for all passengers. 

Travel app Pana, which blends human 

knowledge with machine search, won 

Best specialist travel agent/concierge; 

Best UK-based travel influencer went to 

travel blog A Hotel Life for its refreshing 

taste of exotic locations; Canopy by 

Hilton Reykjavik City Centre secured 

Iceland the Best travel destination or 

experience; and Spain’s Logroño highspeed 

train station picked up Best 

transport hub for its futuristic design. 

For more about Tumi, visit tumi.com 

PHOTOGRAPHY: SUN LEE

RATED & REVIEWED / EDITED BY JEREMY WHITE / 04 7 

WORDS: KATHRYN NAVE. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE 

MICROSOFT SURFACE STUDIO 

The second in the between drafting 

Surface range’s at an angle and 

series of strikingly traditional monitor 

designed hinges mode. An ultrathin 

28-inch 

has a desklampstyle 

support display contains 

that’s perfectly 13.5 million pixels 

balanced for of rich colour. 

graceful motion There’s also 

tactile interaction 

through ten-point 

multitouch, a 

Bluetooth Surface 

Pen and a clever 

puck-shaped 

Surface Dial 

controller. £2,649 

microsoft.com 

Designers can 

switch between 

colour modes at the 

push of a button 

Press and hold 

the Surface Dial to 

display a menu of 

tools and apps 

F E T I S H

INVENTABLES 

CARVEY 

Fully enclosed for 

safety and messminimisation, 

Inventables’ 3D 

carving machine 

is as at home in 

the hands of 

children as it is 

sat on a designer’s 

desktop. It cuts 

plastics, soft 

metals, foam, wax 

and more. The 

machine’s software 

auto-adjusts its 

settings to match 

the material. Your 

designs can be 

created in Easel, 

an easy-to-use 

web app. $2,500 

inventables.com 

CRAFT DESIGN 

TECHNOLOGY 

SCISSORS 

The Samuraisword 

inspiration 

for these scissors 

is carried through 

from design into 

manufacture, with 

each pair being 

created in the 

Gifu prefecture 

of Japan, an 

area once famed 

for its swordmaking 

artistry. 

A universal 

configuration 

means these 

clippers are 

compatible with 

both righties and 

lefties. £60 the 

journalshop.com 

0 4 8 / GEAR / WHAT A CARVE-UP 

RZR 

Why let springs, 

hinges and flexballs 

do what 

your wrist was 

designed for? 

The RZR razor 

uses just three 

components: 

a simple, solid 

titanium handle; 

a premiumquality 

blade; 

and a head 

designed to 

maximise contact 

between blade 

and skin. €89 

rzrshaving.com 

SHARPEST 

TOOLS IN 

THE BOX 

From whiskers to 

woodwork and Wagyu, 

WIRED selects six 

angular implements 

that are good enough 

to make the cut 

CUTTING 

IAIN SINCLAIR 

CARDSHARP4 

CNC machined 

from a thin strip 

of aluminium, 

this pocket knife 

has a 65mm 420 

surgical stainlesssteel 

blade. It 

weighs just 24 

grams and can 

be folded down 

to a 2.2mm-thick 

credit-cardsized 

profile. £55 

iainsinclair.com 

DEL BEN PRIMITIVE KNIFE 

Italian designer flake of flint and 

Michele Daneluzzo incorporates 

found inspiration a contoured topridge 

as a secure 

in the simple 

efficiency of Stone hand-grip. Perfect 

Age tools. His for Paleo fans. 

steel Primitive AU$329 harvey 

Knife resembles a norman.com.au 

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

FESTOOL 

SWORD SAW 

Weighing just 

6.5kg, the 

Sword Saw has 

a chainsaw 

blade that can 

slice timber and 

hard insulation 

materials up to 

200mm deep. 

Its drawing cut 

enables jolt-free 

operation, while a 

swivelling range 

of 0-60° allows 

for deep mitre 

and compound 

angles. Guiderail 

compatibility 

means clean cuts 

every time. £714.14 

axminster.co.uk

WIRED MONEY. MAY 18, 2017. LONDON 

WIRED’S ONE-DAY EVENT SHOWCASING THE TECHNOLOGIES, BUSINESSES AND PEOPLE 

IMPACTING MONEY, BANKING AND FINANCE RETURNS FOR ITS FIFTH YEAR. JOIN US 

AND MEET THE THINKERS, MAKERS AND DOERS DISRUPTING THE SECTOR, WITH 

TWO STAGES SHOWCASING FAST-GROWING STARTUPS AND EVOLVING INCUMBENTS 

STUDIO SPACES, LONDON. MAY 18, 2017 BOOK YOUR TICKET: WIRED.UK/MONEY2017-TICKETS

SAMSUNG 

FAMILY HUB 

MULTI-DOOR 

FRIDGE 

FREEZER 

You may be able 

to remember how 

many eggs you 

have left in the 

fridge, but are 

you sure they’ll 

last until next 

week? Three 

Wi-Fi-connected 

cameras built 

into the 550-litre 

Family Hub and a 

companion app 

let you not only 

check your 

supplies, but 

also digitally track 

your food’s expiry 

dates for updates 

on when to restock. 

From £4,500 

samsung.com 

An integrated 

21.5-inch tablet can 

display a calendar, 

messages and 

recipe ideas 

Use the appliance’s 

entertainment 

system to listen 

to music or 

watch TV shows 

F E T I S H 


THE BIG CHILL / GEAR / 051

CODING

OSMO CODING 

Osmo’s coding kit 

(left) uses the 

same concept as 

Cubetto, but the 

difference here is 

that the intrepid 

Awbie inhabits a 

virtual iPad app 

world. The iOS-only 

game, aimed at 

five- to 12-yearolds, 

uses coloured 

plastic blocks that 

snap together to 

create instructions 

for Awbie. He 

gambols his way 

between trees and 

over rivers while 

stuffing his face 

with pies (a 

favourite detail for 

Lake, WIRED’s fiveyear-old 

tester). 

With no separate 

command console, 

there is a neat 

method of 

transferring 

information from 

the instruction 

blocks to your 

screen. A stand 

holds the iPad 

while a mirror 

attachment points 

the camera to the 

surface in front of 

the screen where 

you assemble the 

blocks. WIRED’s 

tester found it 

easy to get to grips 

with the blocks, 

and it felt like a 

small step to an 

on-screen “blocky” 

programming 

language. Parents, 

however, may 

wonder why it is 

necessary to buy 

the starter kit as 

well. 8/10 £49 

(starter kit £75) 

playosmo.com 

GET KIDS 

TO CRACK 

THE CODE 

WIRED finds out if 

these games can 

inspire a generation 

of programmers 

HOW WE TESTED 

To test these coding toys for children, WIRED enlisted the help 

of a crack team of five mini-testers aged between four and 

eight – supervised by a grown-up, of course. We rated how easy 

it was for each game to get started, how well they engaged the 

children and how long each of the games kept them occupied, 

as well as whether they wanted to play them again. 

TEST 

CUBETTO 

This beautiful – if 

expensive – toy 

makes the bold 

claim that it can 

introduce coding 

to children as 

young as three. 

And, through a 

simple but 

charmingly sedate 

robot, it does just 

that – without 

going anywhere 

near a computer 

keyboard. The 

eponymous cubeshaped 

droid 

comes with a 

separate control 

console and 16 

commands in the 

form of colourful 

wood blocks. To 

give the twowheeled 

machine 

instructions, 

simply add the 

blocks in order 

(just like lines 

of code), press 

Go and off it 

trundles. Getting 

started is easy 

with a step-bystep 

manual. 

The pack also 

contains a metresquare 

cloth 

map for your 

robot to navigate. 

The narrative 

for map one is 

Cubetto’s first day 

at school, but 

there are four 

other engaging 

story maps in the 

Adventure pack: 

the city, Ancient 

Egypt, deep sea 

and outer space. 

The kit is robust, 

but what’s clever 

here is that it 

gives children 

a fun route into 

the concepts 

and jargon of 

computer coding 

using tangible 

real-world 

objects. It may 

get repetitive over 

time, however. 7/10 

£159 (Adventure 

pack £50) 

primotoys.com 

CHILD’S P LAY / GEAR / 053 

WORDS: JAMES RANDERSON. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE; ROGER STILLMAN 

CURIOUS KIT 

Construct a 

remote-controlled 

car, a traffic light, 

a stirrer, a pinball 

machine… the 

list goes on. This 

versatile pack 

includes two 

DC motors, 

a tilt switch, a 

button switch, 

a slider and an 

RGB LED. Aimed 

at seven-yearolds 

and upwards, 

these “SAMs” 

can be hooked 

up via Bluetooth 

to a computer or 

tablet. To unlock 

their full potential 

you’ll need the 

SAM Space app. 

The physical 

SAMs appear 

in your virtual 

tool box and 

can be combined 

with virtual 

SAMs. Some of 

these virtual 

SAMs are easy 

enough to figure 

out, but WIRED 

had no idea how 

many of them 

worked. The 

instructions 

weren’t much 

help, either. This 

is a brilliant 

idea that WIRED 

wanted to love, 

but we were 

left scratching 

our heads. 4/10 

£149 samlabs.com

OCEAN 

ROXY RUSSELL 

MEDUSAE 

COLLECTION 

The diaphanous 

glow and delicate 

tentacles of these 

jellyfish-inspired 

lamps will fill your 

room with the calm 

of the sea. Made 

from velum-finish 

polyester mylar, 

the Medusae 

collection is 

available in four 

varieties, including 

the Polyp pendant 

lamp (centre). 

From $375 

roxyrussell. 

bigcartel.com

RE-SEA ME STOOL 

This stool flips the 

dynamic from 

discarding waste 

into the ocean 

to extracting 

sustainable 

materials from it. 

Dutch designer 

Nienke Hoogvliet 

collected discarded 

fish skins, then 

tanned them into 

a beautiful, strong 

leather. The 

manual technique 

uses no harmful 

chemicals and 

Hoogvliet is now 

working on scaling 

it up to larger 

projects. £poa 

nienkehoogvliet.nl 

INODA+SVEJE 

MANTA RAY 

CHAIR 

The Manta Ray 

chair combines 

elements of the 

classic Windsor 

chair design with 

influences from 

ocean rays’ 

tapering bodies. 

Danish-Japanese 

design partnership 

Kyoko Inoda 

and Nils Sveje 

have created 

a harmonious 

balance of organic 

softness and 

formal rigour. 

A thick rear 

support contrasts 

with its delicate 

spindles and a 

seating surface 

pared down to the 

thinnest degree. 

€1,600 shop. 

inodasveje.com 

WORDS: KATHRYN NAVE; JEREMY WHITE. PHOTOGRAPHY: MITCH PAYNE 

TINNIE 10 BOAT 

Resembling the 

aggressive angles 

of a destroyer’s 

prow when viewed 

in side profile, this 

perfect isosceles 

triangle of a boat 

leaves space for 

two side-by-side 

passengers at the 

wide rear. Thick 

but lightweight 

aluminium 

construction 

means the boat is 

just 79kg, making 

for a snappy ride 

on its 10hp fourstroke 

engine. 

£tbc jruiter.com 

CREST OF A 

NEW WAVE 

WIRED explores ocean-inspired treasures 

OMEGA 

SEAMASTER 

PLANET OCEAN 

DEEP BLACK 

The new 45.5mm 

Deep Black has 

a GMT function 

powered by the 

new Master 

Chronometer 

calibre 8906. Built 

from a single block 

of ceramic, it is 

the first of its kind 

to be rated down to 

600 metres and 

resistant to 15,000 

gauss. There 

are four models: 

black, red, blue 

and this piece 

with Sedna gold 

accents on a 

leather strap 

and matching 

gold hands and 

indices. From 

£7,900 omega 

watches.com

We are looking for excited, engaged and opinionated readers to join the WIRED Reader Panel and 

share their thoughts on our print and digital editions. To take part, visit wired.co.uk/insiders and 

register. Every time you complete one of our surveys, you will be entered into a prize draw to win high 

street or online gift vouchers. Join us in exploring our future – we look forward to hearing your views.

F E T I S H 


F O R YOUR EARS ONLY / GEAR / 057 

SONY MDR-Z1R 

STEREO 

HEADPHONES 

These cans 

are engineered 

to deliver an 

impressively wide 

frequency range. 

A newly developed 

diaphragm 

incorporates a 

magnesium dome 

and liquid crystal 

polymer edge for 

up to 120kHz 

playback. Their 

special acoustic 

filter eliminates 

any unintended 

reverberations to 

ensure only the 

purest form of 

sound reaches 

your eardrums. 

£1,700 sony.co.uk 

SONY TA-ZH1 ES 

HEADPHONE 

AMP 

With feedbackeliminating 

S-Master 

technology, Sony’s 

Signature-series 

amplifier delivers 

a pleasingly 

precise audio 

experience. For 

extra sonic 

warmth, the DC 

Phase Linearizer 

allows you to 

adjust amp 

voicing. This 

helps to deliver 

a traditional 

analogue sound 

while correcting 

errors caused by 

digital switching. 

£1,640 sony.co.uk 

SONY 

NW-WM1Z 

WALKMAN 

The NW-WM1Z 

matches the 

highest auditory 

quality with 

premium looks. 

Its gold-plated, 

oxygen-free 

copper chassis 

not only catches 

the eye – its 

conductivity also 

lends a natural 

acoustic sound. 

Integrated DSEE 

HX upscaling 

technology 

analyses your 

music and 

replaces lost data 

to produce nearhigh-res 

audio. 

£2,562 sony.co.uk

DURUM ROLL, 

PLEASE… 

WIRED tries its hand at creating 

authentic carb-fuelled 

dishes with five pasta makers 

KITCHENAID 

4.8L STAND 

MIXER WITH 

SHORT PASTA 

MAKER 

ATTACHMENT 

For those who 

already own a 

stand mixer, this 

steel and plastic 

attachment will 

come in useful. 

The dough is 

prepared in a 

metal bowl and 

then the plastic 

spinner is filled 

to extrude pasta 

from the plastic 

cutters. In our 

test, the middle 

part of the pasta 

sheet came out 

evenly, if not a 

little thick, but 

SMART 

WORLDWIDE 

MODERN PASTA 

MAKER 

Quiet in operation 

and with all the 

features to create 

perfect pasta, 

this machine 

impressed Remoli. 

He particularly 

liked the dryer, 

which makes sure 

the pasta doesn’t 

stick. 8/10 £136 

wayfair.co.uk 

Time to prepare: 

Dough 4 minutes 

30 seconds 

Sheet of pasta 

12 seconds 

Tagliatelle 

22 seconds 

both edges were 

ripped. “The pasta 

comes out slowly 

and I don’t feel 

the cutter is safe 

as it doesn’t have 

any protection,” 

says Simone 

Remoli. “This 

model is good 

for short-shape 

pastas such 

as fusilli and 

rigatoni.” 6/10 

£499 for stand 

mixer; £199 for 

pasta attachment 

kitchenaid.co.uk 



30 seconds 


17 seconds 

Tagliatelle 

25 seconds 

PASTA MAKERS 

LAKELAND 

PASTA MAKER 

MACHINE 

Designed for 

tagliatelle, 

fettuccine and 

sheets, this 

machine made 

smooth pasta. 

Remoli found that 

the pasta-sheet 

rollers were not 

straight, so the 

results were not as 

even as he would 

have liked. As it is 

easy to clean and 

flexible enough to 

make a variety of 

pastas, this is a 

good budget 

option. 7/10 £22 

lakeland.co.uk 



by hand 


4 minutes 

10 seconds 

Tagliatelle 

5 minutes 

50 seconds 

WORDS: EMILY PECK. PHOTOGRAPHY: ROGER STILLMAN; MITCH PAYNE 

PROCOOK PASTA MAKER 

Pasta dough has 

to be prepared by 

hand before using 

this machine. In 

our test, Remoli 

noted “smooth and 

even” results. He 

also liked the eight 

thickness settings 

and that the 

machine created 

uniform shapes. 

“This design is 

ideal for ravioli,” 

he concludes. 6/10 

£32 procook.co.uk 



by hand 


3 minutes 

Tagliatelle 

3 minutes 

30 seconds 

Digital extra! 

Download the WIRED 

app for Simone Remoli’s 

oxtail ravioli recipe 

HOW WE TESTED 

WIRED asked chef Simone Remoli, 

owner of London restaurant Pasta 

Remoli (pastaremoli.co.uk) – 

specialists in traditional handmade 

pasta – to test five of the latest pasta 

makers. Remoli assessed each model 

on performance, durability, ease of 

cleaning and versatility and told us 

what type of pasta he thought would 

work best in each model. We timed how 

long it took Remoli to make a sheet of 

50cm egg pasta and a batch of 

tagliatelle in each machine. He gave 

each design a WIRED score out of ten.

R O LL WITH IT / GEAR / 059 

PHILIPS HR2355/07 PASTA AND NOODLE MAKER 

Remoli found this 

model to be a very 

intuitive design, 

with a timer and 

electronic setting, 

that was simple 

to use and easy 

to clean. “The 

machine can 

create the dough, 

and then extrude 

the pasta from the 

different cutters,” 

he says, “so it’s 

straightforward.” 

The dough did 

come out a little 

crumbly, however. 

The process, from 

making the dough 

to cleaning the 

machine, took 

just 20 minutes. 

“Its best use is 

for spaghetti 

and tagliatelle,” 

says Remoli. 

7/10 £169 

coolshop.co.uk 


Dough 

3 minutes 


90 seconds 

Tagliatelle 

90 seconds 

WIRED shot this 

month’s products 

at Soho Works 

Shoreditch, 

(sohoworks.com), 

a workspace for 

creative businesses 

to hire in London 

TEST

WILL THE 

JURY FIND 

YOUR FRIDGE 

GUILTY? 

Who’d have thought that 

everyday accessories could 

be hacked and used in 

cybercrimes? When technology 

becomes connected faster 

than our ability to keep it 

safe, we need to ask the right 

questions to stay ahead. 

For more Forward Thinking, 

visit xlcatlin.com 

XL Catlin, the XL Catlin logo and Make Your World Go are trademarks of XL Group Ltd companies. XL Catlin is the global brand used by XL Group Ltd’s (re)insurance subsidiaries.

DECRYPTED TAKEAWAYS / 06 1 

WIRED SECURITY 

by 

The first WIRED Security summit, held at Canary Wharf 

in London on October 20, tackled key challenges in the 

sector – from data policy and business breaches to bug hunts 

and cyber warfare. Turn the page for our event debrief. 

Stephen Armstrong. illustration: Lizzie Gill

meet the speaker #1: 

Sadie Creese, professor of 

cybersecurity, Department 

of Computer Science, 

University of Oxford 

MAKE A 

HACKER 

YOUR BEST 

FRIEND 

Based on presentations by 

Jamie Woodruff, technical 

director, Metrix Cloud; Mustafa 

Al-Bassam, security adviser, 

Secure Trading; Alex Rice, 

co-founder and CTO, HackerOne 

T 

o stay safe, open your doors 

to hackers and share information 

about security issues. 

This was the message from the 

Learning from Hackers session. 

White-hat hacker Jamie Woodruff, 

ex-LulzSec co-founder Mustafa 

Al-Bassam and HackerOne founder Alex 

Rice all agreed that transparency is key 

to safety. The companies posting the 

biggest bug bounties for hackers are 

making the safest software, argued Rice 

– urging the room to “engage hackers 

in a productive way… encourage them 

to use their creativity for good, rather 

than leaving them on the outside.” 

HackerOne encourages anyone to 

find bugs in a company’s software and 

pays a bounty for any vulnerabilities 

identified. Rice has hackers working 

with Twitter, on full software takeovers, 

and on internet-of-things devices, from 

vacuum cleaners to connected cars. 

“Android, iOS and Chrome are posting 

huge bounties and asking hackers to 

prove they can carry out a full takeover,” 

Rice explained. “They have realised that 

the earlier you have hackers engaged, 

the better off you will be.” 

Al-Bassam proved Rice’s point. As part 

of the group that hacked Sony, Fox and 

the FBI, he received a suspended 

sentence and was banned from the 

internet for two years. He’s now security 

adviser for Secure Trading: “We hack 

companies with big security teams by 

using simple vulnerabilities,” he said. 

It’s because companies don’t talk to each 

other about security that problems arise. 

“Yahoo! was hacked in 2014, but kept 

it from the public because it would affect 

their ability to compete with other tech 

giants,” he argued. “Amazon sells tonnes 

of internet-of-things devices, but most 

of them are insecure. If companies 

become more transparent, customers 

can make more informed decisions on 

what products to use and companies 

can know which customers to trust.” 

Open dialogue, all three agreed, 

makes everyone safer. 

“I no longer have 

to hack 50 

companies. I can 

hack one cloud 

and I get every 

employee using 

that cloud.” 

– Sadie Creese, 

professor of 

cybersecurity, 

University 

of Oxford 

What is the 

easiest, most 

effective way 

of hacking any 

environment? 

Sadie Creese, 

professor of 

cybersecurity 

at the University 

of Oxford, had the 

answer: be on the 

inside. “And be 

there for a long 

time to gather the 

knowledge to go 

for the highestvalue 

stuff.” 

Creese has 

been working in 

computer security 

since 2000. 

“Over those years 

we’ve invested 

intellectual 

resources, time 

and infrastructure 

to make sure it’s 

hard to break into 

the systems,” she 

explained. Despite 

this, “the insider 

threat is massive.” 

Insiders could 

be disgruntled 

employees, 

people under 

stress or those 

with vulnerable 

devices – “We’re 

already cyborgs 

to an extent,” 

she argued. “You 

couldn’t take 

away our mobile 

phones if you 

tried, and some 

of us will have 

devices implanted 

under our skin for 

health reasons.” 

Recent 

cyberattacks on 

celebrities 

illustrated another 

weakness for 

organisations. 

“I no longer have 

to hack 50 

companies, I can 

hack one cloud 

and I get every 

employee using 

that cloud,” she 

explained. 

The solution? 

Become a mindful 

employer. “We’re 

not dealing with 

people and 

technology in 

tandem – both are 

equally important,” 

she said. “You 

must learn what 

your people do 

on a normal day 

so you can spot 

anomalies. And 

you need to 

be aware of 

pressures on 

staff that may 

make them more 

open to coercion.”

WIRED SECURITY / EVENT / 0 6 3 

KEEP TABS ON UNUSUAL 

BEHAVIOUR PATTERNS 

Based on presentations by Sadie Creese, professor 

of cybersecurity, Department of Computer Science, 

University of Oxford; Staffan Truvé, CTO, Recorded 

Future; Dave Palmer, director of technology, Darktrace; 

Cameron Colquhoun, managing director, Neon Century 

CYBERATTACKERS ARE 

THE NEW MAFIA 

Based on presentations by Moty Cristal, founder & CEO, 

NEST Negotiation Strategies; Mikko Hyppönen, security 

expert; Troy Hunt, founder, Have I Been Pwned? 

In the future, 

artificial 

intelligence, 

predictive 

intelligence and 

even monitoring 

open-source 

intelligence will 

be crucial in 

preventing 

cyberattacks. 

Staffan Truvé, 

CTO of predictivesoftware 

firm 

Recorded Future, 

suggested that 

clues for 

impending hacks 

were dropped all 

the time on GitHub 

and the dark web. 

“We spend a lot of 

money trying to fix 

things after they 

happen, but we 

should stop the 

attacks before 

they happen,” 

he suggested. 

By building 

mazes and walls, 

we’re giving 

intruders a 

challenge, he 

argued. Learning 

the ways hackers 

work and using 

predictive 

intelligence 

“to figure out 

who wants to 

attack us, what 

motivates them, 

where are they 

attacking and 

where the weak 

spots in our 

systems are” 

will help prevent 

assaults. 

And the threats 

are increasingly 

personal, warned 

Darktrace’s 

director of 

technology Dave 

Palmer. “The 

widespread age of 

machine learning 

and automation 

is imminent,” he 

explained. 

Cybercriminals 

will launch 

ransomware 

attacks on smart 

TVs, self-driving 

cars and even 

MRI scanners, 

or alter the 

geophysical 

datasets that oil 

companies use to 

decide where 

to drill next. 

AI can help, he 

said. Smart data 

warehouses could 

make decisions 

about how users 

are interacting 

with them, or 

weed out spam 

emails. “We can’t 

imagine future 

attacks,” Palmer 

warned. But 


can understand 

how businesses 

might typically 

operate, and 

search for unusual 

behaviour that 

could signal an 

impeding attack. 

For Neon 

Century managing 

director Cameron 

Colquhoun, open 

data is becoming 

a source for 

criminals looking 

to plant false 

information and 

benefit from 

short-selling 

company stock. 

German payments 

company 

Wirecard’s 

share price fell, he 

explained, after a 

research institute 

called The Tower 

published a report 

falsely accusing 

the company of 

money laundering 

and corruption. 

“It looked like 

an open-source 

intelligence report 

– lots of screen 

shots, LinkedIn 

network diagrams 

and so on, proving 

this business 

was not worth 

investing in,” 

he explained. 

The answer? 

“Proactively 

manage your 

online footprint – 

make sure you 

know everything 

that’s out there.” 

“We spend a lot 

of money trying 

to fix things after 

they happen, but 

we should stop 

the attacks before 

they happen.” 

– Staffan Truvé, 

CTO, Recorded 

Future 

C 

ybercrime is changing – and understanding 

cybercriminals is increasingly 

complicated, negotiator Moty Cristal, 

security expert Mikko Hyppönen and Have 

I Been Pwned? founder Troy Hunt warned. 

“In the early days of malware they were 

being written for fun and the attackers had 

no motives,” Hyppönen said. The Finn is the chief research 

officer for F-Secure and has been battling cybercrime since 

1991. “Today there’s activists and governments – but the most 

common is organised online crime syndicates, the new Mafia.” 

Hyppönen receives 350,000 to 450,000 malware samples 

per day from around the world and estimates that 95 per 

cent of those come from organised criminals. “Of course, 

getting targeted by a foreign intelligence agency is really 

bad,” he admitted. “But most organisations have nothing 

that would be interesting to foreign spies.” 

Cybercriminals’ sites have Mafia-like themes, and cybercrime 

is big money. Moldovan hackers Evil Corp, for example, 

stole millions of dollars in hits on 300 banks across 2015. 

For ordinary citizens, Hunt suggested, teenage hackers 

are still an issue. “Very often it is a scared kid who 

approaches me,” the 39-year-old security specialist told 

the room. “I try not to ask too many questions when 

people send me the data – I’m just interested in whether it 

is legitimate and where it came from.” 

Hunt himself deploys security such as two-factor authentication, 

but has still been breached. “As a consumer, there’s 

not much more we can do about that other than being 

conscientious about what we put online,” he explained.


Jamie Woodruff, 

technical director, Metrix Cloud 

You might think of 

hackers as kids 

sitting in darkened 

rooms, white-hat 

hacker Jamie 

Woodruff told 

the conference, 

but they could 

just as easily 

be your doctor. 

In the Learning 

from Hackers 

session, Woodruff 

– who works 

as a certified 

penetration 

testing engineer 

for UK-based 

Metrix Cloud – 

explained how 

his favourite 

technique 

works. “Social 

engineering 

is the art of 

manipulation 

for information – 

a cyberattack 

that has minimal 

technical 

intervention, 

relying on specific 

attributes of 

human decisionmaking 

known as 

cognitive biases.” 

He described 

observing that at 

one company 

there was a pizza 

delivery on Fridays 

– so he dressed in 

the pizza firm’s 

uniform, carried 

a box and was 

inside the server 

room in minutes. 

Here, a quick UV 

spray of “a chipand-pin 

thing 

from the 80s” 

revealed which 

buttons to press. 

Woodruff uses 

techniques such 

as stealing data 

from a device 

while its owner is 

distracted, placing 

fake links in emails 

and dropping USB 

drives with labels 

such as “Spring 

Break”. (“Seeing 

how many guys 

put that into 

their machine? 

It’s unreal.”) 

He even helped 

Kim Kardashian, 

warning her 

publicly about 

her website’s 

vulnerability. “It 

was all over the 

news and then five 

days later she had 

a new website,” 

he explained. He 

probably won’t be 

invited over, he 

admitted, “but 

I don’t think I like 

Kanye anyway”. 

“We might think 

of hackers as 

kids sitting in 

darkened rooms… 

but they could 

just as easily 

be your doctor.” 

– Jamie Woodruff, 

technical director, 

Metrix Cloud 

WE ARE ALL 

SPIES – AND 

WE ARE ALL 

BEING SPIED ON 

Based on presentations by: 

Gordon Corera, BBC security 

correspondent; David Ormand, 

visiting professor, War Studies 

department, King’s College 

London; Taavi Kotka, government 

chief information officer, Estonia 

T 

here will be no secrets in the 

future,” BBC security correspondent 

Gordon Corera stated 

at the National Security session. “We 

will all be spies, and will all be spied on.” 

The question of how nation states 

deploy technology for defence may not 

be as old as the computer – but spying 

is, Corera argued. “The first computer, 

Colossus at Bletchley Park, was built 

to aid spying,” he pointed out. 

Bletchley Park’s successor, GCHQ, is 

under attack for similar snooping, said 

David Ormand, former head of GCHQ 

and now professor at King’s College 

London – but he argued that the new 

Investigatory Powers Act marks “a 

phase change in the relationship 

between the secret state and 

Parliament, with the secret activity of 

the state now being fully brought under 

the modern rule of law”. 

Success, Ormand continued, means 

balancing strong encryption to secure 

the UK’s future online, while preventing 

strong encryption helping criminals. 

In Estonia, the government is ahead 

of the UK, the country’s chief information 

officer Taavi Kotka told the room. By 

moving the state online, Estonia is 

defending itself against potential 

invasion and annexation by Russia. 

Its expansionist neighbour was 

thought to be behind a 2007 attack that 

took an Estonian bank offline – so the 

country created voluntary cybersecurity 

units through which businesses, 

citizens and government collaborate. 

“You can’t build 100 per cent safe 

environments,” Kotka admitted. “It’s 

just a matter of time – they will fail.” 

To deter hackers, he said, Estonia 

stores information in such small pieces 

that “even if we lose one piece, we don’t 

lose a lot and all the systems are written 

in different languages for which there 

is no repeatable architecture,” he 

explained. “So if you wanted to attack 

the system, you’d have to find a number 

of totally different types of attacks.”

WIRED SECURITY / EVENT / 0 6 5 

ON THIS YEAR’S 

STARTUP STAGE 

JUDGES’ WINNER 

Abhirukt Sapru 

CheckRecipient, UK 


Moty Cristal, founder & CEO, 

NEST Negotiation Strategies 

Irra Ariella Khi 

Vchain Technology, UK 

Sometimes the 

best approach to a 

huge data breach 

is to flirt with the 

hackers, seasoned 

negotiator Moty 

Cristal told the 

room. “Managing 

the human 

factor is key to 

overcoming a 

cyber crisis,” he 

explained. He told 

how during one 

ransomware hack, 

he sent emoji 

and flattering 

messages to the 

perpetrators to 

get them onside. 

Cristal is 

founder and CEO 

of negotiating 

consultancy NEST 

– but he cut his 

teeth in the Israel 

Defense Forces, 

negotiating 

between 

Palestinian 

militants and the 

Israeli army. In 

every situation, 

he explained, you 

need to know who 

you’re talking to, 

what they want – 

and what the risk 

of no deal is. 

He was recently 

called in by a large 

financial company 

which had 

received 

ransomware 

demands from a 

group claiming to 

represent the elite 

Russian statefunded 

hacking 

team, APT28. 

“Once I 

understood who 

they were, I began 

to tease them,” he 

said with a grin. 

Later, as he 

talked down the 

value of the data 

APT28 had stolen 

and tried to 

negotiate a 

discount on the 

ransom, he told 

them: “Don’t take 

it personally, this 

is only business.” 

Eventually he 

talked them into a 

cut-rate ransom 

in return for 

advice on how to 

secure the 

company system 

against future 

attacks – crucial 

in getting the 

company board 

onside with the 

ransom payment. 

“Negotiation 

failures can be 

attributed to the 

gap between 

the negotiator and 

a decision-maker,” 

he explained. 

“Managing the 

internal dynamic 

is sometimes as 

challenging as 

the negotiation.” 

Ionut Ionescu 

EclecticIQ, the 

Netherlands 

Raz Ghafoor 

ThirdEye Labs, UK 

Andrew Martin 

DynaRisk, UK 

Ben Southworth 

Yoti, UK 

Kerri-Lynn Hauck 

Fabric, UK 

Chris Wallis 

Intruder, UK 

Andrew Bud 

iProov, UK 

Nik Whitfield 

Panaseer, UK 

John Yeo 

Codebashing, UK 

Stuart Laidlaw 

Cyberlytic, UK 

Peter Bradley 

Torsion, UK 

Edward Mung 

SpearSec, UK 

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE 

A HACKER WITH A PLAN 

Based on presentations by Adrian Nish, head 

of threat intelligence, BAE Systems; Sadie Creese, 

professor of cybersecurity, Department 

of Computer Science, University of Oxford 

H 

acker gangs now operate with the 

sophistication of an Ocean’s Eleven-style 

heist team, Adrian Nish, head of threat intelligence 

at BAE Systems, warned as he opened 

Threat to Enterprise, the day’s first session. 

He unpicked one complex attack on 

Bangladesh Bank in February 2016, which 

targeted $951 million (£773m) from the bank’s central reserve. 

“There was a lot of planning,” Nish said. “They started six 

months before, setting up bank accounts in Manila and Sri 

Lanka. Then they waited for the perfect moment to strike.” 

They chose Thursday, February 4, 2016 – Thursday is the 

end of the week in Muslim Bangladesh and the following 

Monday was Chinese New Year and a Filipino bank 

holiday, giving the hackers a four-day window. 

“They used just eight bits of code to manipulate the 

interbank network for sending payments,” Nish explained. 

The gang sent 35 transactions to the Federal Reserve Bank in 

New York where Bangladesh has its foreign reserves. “Some 

transactions were blocked, but four were let through, netting 

$81 million – one of the biggest bank robberies in history.” 

As Nish and his team unravelled the gang’s tactics, they 

noticed the same code had been used before in a Vietnamese 

bank the previous year and the Sony Pictures hack in 2014. 

“We’re dealing with professionals who’ve been trained to 

make network intrusions, move across networks and get 

on to sensitive systems,” Nish warned. He recommended 

regular penetration testing and staff training. 

For Sadie Creese, professor of cybersecurity at the University 

of Oxford, staff were also at risk. Her warning against insider 

threats included a plea for diversity: “Monoculture makes 

you predictable, and it’s important – if we want to become 

resilient – that we embrace the natural differences we have.”

066 / EVENT / WIRED SECURITY 


Ian Levy, technical director, UK 

National Cyber Security Centre 

WATCH WIRED 

SECURITY ONLINE 

Cybersecurity is 

broken – and it’s 

the cybersecurity 

industry’s fault, 

Ian Levy, technical 

director at the UK 

National Cyber 

Security Centre 

(NCSC), said. 

“There is no 

other part of public 

policy where the 

tone is set by a 

group of massively 

incentivised 

people,” explained 

Levy, who runs 

the newly formed 

branch of GCHQ 

responsible for 

keeping the UK 

safe from online 

threats. The 

security industry 

talks up a culture 

of fear, then these 

firms offer “magic 

amulets” which 

promise to defend 

against attack. 

“Advanced 

persistent threats” 

was a bugbear 

phrase for Levy, 

who argued that, 

since most 

cyberattackers do 

the bare minimum 

to overcome 

cyberdefences, a 

better term might 

be “adequate 

pernicious 

toe-rags”. 

Levy explained 

how early 

intervention is 

key: “Rather than 

telling people not 

to click on links 

within suspicious 

emails, the NCSC 

is working on 

making sure that 

UK citizens never 

get those emails 

in the first place.” 

To do this, the 

NCSC is rolling out 

domain-based 

message 

authentication, 

reporting and 

conformance on 

all 6,000 UK 

government 

domains. This 

blocks malicious 

mail from websites 

pretending to be 

government 

agencies. He 

hopes this will 

roll out to the 

private sector. 

If all fails, he 

said, there’s 

always Levy’s own 

patented amulet, 

the Air Gap – a 

piece of hardware 

that promised to 

defend against all 

viruses. Of course 

it was a joke, he 

explained. “It was 

an empty box with 

a blue light,” he 

told the crowd. 

“But I had so many 

enquiries I had to 

take it offline.” 

Visit wired.co.uk 

to view each 

of the WIRED 

Security speakers’ 

talks in full. 

WATCH THE 

SKIES – AND 

BEYOND 

Based on presentations by 

Adrian Ludwig, head of Android 

security, Google; Ian Levy, 

technical director, National Cyber 

Security Centre; Patricia Lewis, 

research director of international 

security, Chatham House 

W 

hen thinking about the future 

of cyberattacks, it’s time we 

started worrying about space, 

Patricia Lewis, research director of 

international security at Chatham 

House, told the conference. 

Joining her in heading up the Emerging 

Threats session were Adrian Ludwig, 

Google’s head of Android security, and 

Ian Levy, technical director at the UK 

National Cyber Security Centre. Lewis 

explained that although many satellites 

orbiting the Earth have on-board 

computers that allow for remote reconfigurations 

and software upgrades, 

their hardware will inevitably fall 

behind, creating serious legacy issues. 

“There are two types of attack that 

need to be urgently addressed: jamming 

or spoofing and taking physical control 

of a satellite,” she said. “By taking 

control of a satellite, it could be turned 

off or forced to burn up its solar 

batteries, destroying on-board data.” 

Reports suggest that states are 

already developing these cyberattack 

capabilities, although Lewis argued that 

governments are probably not preparing 

to take down satellites with rockets for 

fear of destroying their own satellites. 

“But what about a state group with no 

satellites, or a non-state group who 

could do this, like terrorists?” she asked. 

Finally, she warned against manipulation 

of global navigational system data, 

which has affected two US environmental 

monitoring satellites in 2011 and 

a US weather satellite system in 2014. 

GPS is crucial for migrants and 

refugees, who use their phones to 

navigate dangerous and unfamiliar 

territory, said Ludwig. “Android is what’s 

used when these people are fleeing.” 

Android is now offering high-level 

security to anyone, including migrants, 

he explained. Its SafetyNet system 

protects data and scans for unsafe apps 

regularly – and daily in Russia. 

Levy went on to explain how the 

UK government is hoping to extend a 

similar screening system. “By default, 

let’s protect people,” he concluded.

MUMMY, WHAT’S A 

STEERING WHEEL? 

Who’d have thought that driverless 

cars would become commonplace 

within the next decade? Thanks to our 

partnership with autonomy software 

specialist Oxbotica, we’re not just 

investigating the future of risk. 

We’re also asking the right questions 

and investing in the future of mobility. 

For more Forward Thinking, 

visit xlcatlin.com 

XL Catlin, the XL Catlin logo and Make Your World Go are trademarks of XL Group Ltd companies. XL Catlin is the global brand used by XL Group Ltd’s (re)insurance subsidiaries.

INSIDER 

Events, new 

products 

and promotions 

to live the 

WIRED life 

Compiled by 

Anabelle Denford 

WIRED 

INSIDER’S 

PICK OF 

UPCOMING 

EVENTS 

WIRED 

HEALTH 

WIRED Health 

returns this March 

at The Royal 

College of General 

Practitioners, 30 

Euston Square. 

The one-day event 

will be filled with 

health innovations, 

technologies and 

new discoveries 

in the medical 

sector. Expect more 

than 20 on-stage 

talks, startup pitch 

sessions, excellent 

networking and 

a technology 

exhibition 

showcasing the 

greatest gamechanging 

devices 

coming out of the 

healthcare space. 

March 9, 2017 

wired.uk/health17 

1 

3 

2 

4 

WIRED 

MONEY 

WIRED Money will 

return in May for 

another day of 

exploring how new 

business models 

and technologies 

are disrupting the 

world of finance. 

Now in its fourth 

year, the event 

will tackle topics 

from Brexit to 

security, and 


to our cashless 

future. We’ll also be 

running a Startup 

Stage, with up to 

20 businesses 

pitching to an 

audience of 

fintech peers 

and investors. 

May 18, 2017 

wired.uk/money17 

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WIRED EVENTS 

FOR 2017 

The WIRED events 

series continues 

throughout 2017 

with WIRED Security 

returning in the 

autumn. It’s quickly 

followed by our 

two-day WIRED2017 

flagship event 

and WIRED2017: 

Next Generation, 

our one-day 

experience for 

13- to 18-year-olds. 

WIRED Retail will 

also return in 2017. 

Join us for more 

powerful insights, 

trend analysis and 

network. For more 

information, visit 

wired.co.uk/events 

Follow us on Twitter 

and Instagram: 

@WIREDINSIDERUK 

PHOTOGRAPHY: SUN LEE

PORTRAIT 

FROM THE 

SHADOWS 

> 

Wang Ningde creates 

haunting imagery 

from fragments of his 

original photographs 

WIRED CULTURE / EDITED BY OLIVER FRANKLIN-WALLIS

Portrait from 

the shadows 

(continued) 

Wang Ningde doesn’t create 

photographs – merely the 

shadows of them. The image 

on the previous page, from 

the Beijing-based 

photographer’s Form of 

Light series, consists of the 

shadows of hundreds of tiny 

sheets of photographic film. 

“Each Form of Light work 

is made from a complete 

photo that has been 

calculated and divided into 

sections on a computer,” 

says Wang. The slices are 

generated using projection 

software to estimate angles 

of a nearby light source. The 

image is then printed on 

photographic transparency 

and cut by hand. “A mistake 

in any stage of this process 

will result in failure, so the 

co-ordination of each step is 

critical,” he says. “The 

fragments are then 

reassembled on acrylic 

board. When exposed to light, 

the image is revealed.” 

The film pieces are 

mounted perpendicular to 

the gallery wall. As the light 

in the room fluctuates, so 

does each image. It 

becomes lighter or darker 

and the clarity changes. 

(A light source is also placed 

at a specific angle to provide 

the optimum image when 

required.) “The light 

projected on the fragments 

generates an illusory 

feeling,” says Wang, 45. 

Wang’s work often plays 

with photography’s 

traditional form: in addition to 

documentary images of 

Chinese life, he makes kinetic 

sculptures. He began Form of 

Light in 2013 as a meditation 

on the misleading, dual 

nature of photography: every 

picture is a document of a 

moment but also a shadow of 

it. “I no longer believe in the 

documentary ability of 

photography, nor in its direct 

correlation with reality,” he 

says. “I now view the 

photographic world as 

parallel to, and nonintersecting 

with, reality.” 

Wang aims to tour the 

work this year. “I hope that 

besides being captivated by 

the beauty and magic, the 

viewer will also consider the 

emptiness of photograph,” 

he says, “as well as the 

emptiness of our lives.” 

OF-W wangningde.com 

JOHN WICK 

AND THE 

HEROIC ART 

OF CAR FU 

Director Chad Stahelski launched a 

startup to create better stunt routines 

John Wick is back. The cult 2014 

movie set a dizzying new standard 

for fight choreography, with Keanu 

Reeves playing an ex-contract killer 

brought out of retirement by the 

death of his dog. Wick is a balletic 

killing machine, treating bullets like 

punches. The reason? The film was 

directed by Chad Stahelski and David 

Leitch, veteran stunt artists with 

The Matrix, The Hunger Games, TRON: 

Legacy and The Bourne Legacy on 

their collective CVs. The pair’s

ILLUSTRATION: ERIC SCOTT PFEIFFER 

California-based production company 87eleven Action Design 

specialises in workshopping original action sequences, which they 

then pitch to films during the pre-production process. 

“Most movies will hire a stunt co-ordinator and they’ll have six weeks 

to train an actor and develop moves,” says Stahelski, who is also an 

expert in judo and ju-jitsu. “That’s fine, but that’s why action scenes 

are starting to look repetitive. Our martial-arts team works five days 

a week creating moves that no one’s seen before. We’ll say, ‘Let’s try 

this judo throw tied in with gun fu’ [a stylised, firearms-based martial 

art inspired by Hong Kong cinema] and we’ll basically develop our 

own martial art. We will then piece it together in a cinematic way.” 

For John Wick: Chapter 2, out on February 17, the company 

decided to push their stunts even further. “The way Wick moves is 

a character trait,” says Stahelski. “We just took it to a higher level. We 

had Keanu train for four months and expanded the type of weapons he 

uses. We went deeper into that gun work and mix of jiu-jitsu [a 

Brazilian martial art] and ju-jitsu, and used longer takes. I want the 

audience to know it’s Keanu doing 98 per cent of this stuff.” 

Thought gun fu was cool? Welcome to car fu: Chapter 2 opens 

with a car-chase sequence that evolves into a full-on brawl in a 

taxi warehouse as Wick, knocked out of his car, fights several 

goons while avoiding oncoming cabs. “The sequence took three 

months to choreograph,” says Stahelski. “You don’t want to hit 

Keanu Reeves with a car.” Stephen Kelly 87eleven.net 

Below: John Wick: Chapter 2 co-director Chad Stahelski walks WIRED 

through the sequence’s original storyboard in more detail 

DARK ART / BACK TO THE STO R Y B O ARD /PLAY / 071

It’s time to make the world a smarter place. 

2016/2017 

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41 THOUGHT LEADERS / 83 GAME-CHANGING MANIFESTOS / 2017’S MUST-HAVE GEAR 

Start here. 

A vailable now at WH Smith and on the WIRED iO S app

PH0TOGRAPHY: ALEX LAKE 

EAT THIS 

SPOON; 

SAVE THE 

PLANET 

When Narayana 

Peesapaty, an 

environmental 

researcher, noticed 

the plastic cutlery 

littering his home 

city of Hyderabad, 

he sought a 

solution. The 

result? Bakey’s, a 

firm making edible 

spoons from rice, 

sorghum, wheat 

flour and water. 

Launched in 2011, 

the spoons didn’t 

sell until a video 

of the process by 

positive news site 

The Better India 

went viral in August 

2015. Within 

one month, Bakey’s 

took $400,000 

(£329,000) worth of 

orders. It has now 

has sold five million 

spoons, which cost 

£3.50 for a pack 

of 100. “It took me 

a while to get 

people to believe it 

was possible,” says 

Peesapaty, 50. 

Bakey’s factory, 

based 16km 

from Hyderabad, 

produces 20,000 

spoons a day. The 

recipe has no fat 

so the spoons stay 

solid in hot liquid. 

Now, Peesapaty 

wants to make 

forks, chopsticks 

and bowls too. 

“We want to make 

plastic cutlery 

obsolete,” he says. 

RL-L bakeys.com 

The album is changing: whether it’s 

weekly SoundCloud drops or Drake’s 

curated mixtapes, new artists no longer 

stick to traditional release schedules. 

So when Swedish singer-songwriter 

MY – aka My Helmner – set about 

creating her debut album, she recorded 

more than 80 tracks. “I think we’re 

about to lose the album format,” 

she says. “I would like the industry 

to capture bigger concepts.” 

MY’s music mixes punk with modern 

pop, experimenting with both genres. 

“I like to work with a noise and distort 

something like crazy, or play with 

sounds that you wouldn’t normally put 

in a pop song,” says Helmner. “I want 

to feel like there are no boundaries.” 

Growing up in the Swedish coastal 

city of Oskarshamn, she began 

recording music at the age of seven. 

Now 25, she records on the move using 

GarageBand, Pro Tools and her iPhone 

to create heady vocals and hooks, while 

integrating guitars with harmonies and 

other elements that wouldn’t neces- 

MY’S WAY 

OR THE 

HIGHWAY 

My Helmner is making sure her 

music is released on her terms 

sarily fit on a regular pop album. Her Red-era Taylor Swift 

style is infused with the Scandi lilt of Mø’s electro-pop. 

MY’s album, due later in 2017, will showcase her prolific 

output. But that’s just the start. Helmner knows that she 

represents a new breed of artist for whom the output 

isn’t limited to occasional releases, but rather a constant 

stream. So what should we expect next? “We’re still in the 

experimental stage of our sound,” she says. “We’d like to 

go a bit more extreme.” RL-L facebook.com/my.helmner

On being Gaimanesque 

Neil Gaiman on American Gods’ TV adaptation and creating art in uncertain times 

fter Britain voted to leave Europe 

in June 2016, Neil Gaiman’s Twitter 

mentions lit up. “It was strange,” 

says the Hampshire-born author. 

“People would quote me: ‘At times 

like this, you do what Neil Gaiman 

says, you make good art.’” 

Four months later, when Donald 

Trump won the US election, the 

messages appeared again. In 2012, 

Gaiman gave an address to Philadelphia’s 

University of the Arts and 

described how to respond when things 

go wrong. “Make good art,” he urged. 

“Do what only you do best.” Now he 

had to follow his own advice. 

The day WIRED speaks to Gaiman, 56, 

it is 28 years and a day since the debut 

of Sandman, the seminal comic-book 

series that first made his name. Gaiman’s 

distinctive dream logic – the source for 

everything from screenplays (Stardust, 

Coraline – see inset, below right) to 

award-winning children’s fiction 

(The Graveyard Book) – has shaped the 

culture. “You don’t notice it’s 

happening,” he says, “and one day you 

turn around and it’s like, oh fuck, people 

are using adjectives like ‘Gaimanesque’ 

and they seem to mean it.” His work is 

the substrate now, the thing on which 

other writers build. Take the TV series 

Lucifer, itself adapted from another 

author’s spin-off of Sandman. “Coraline 

feels like part of the landscape. American 

Gods as a novel is part of the landscape.” 

American Gods is Gaiman’s comingto-America 

story. He moved in 1992 to 

New York, where he still lives, and he 

wanted to write about his adopted 

home. He saw a nation of immigrants: 

a country, as he puts it, where no one 

is from. But in place of hopeful fables, 

the journey was dark and riven with 

violence. In a plot line that fans describe 

as prophetic, Gaiman imagined a pair 

of conmen who feed off chaos. Down on 

their luck, they devise their biggest con: 

a plan to fool a country. 

Now, after years in development, 

American Gods has been adapted into 

a television series, airing on Amazon 

Prime Video in the UK this spring. Gaiman, who 

wrote the show with Hannibal creator Bryan 

Fuller, is pleased with what he’s seen. “It doesn’t 

feel dated,” he says. But he doesn’t enjoy the 

prescience of his vision. He sighs: “Even then it 

was weird. The first signing of the American 

book tour was in the Twin Towers on June 19, 

2001. If anything, I feel like I was writing about 

stuff that was in the wind, and the wind has just 

been concentrating over the past 20 years.” 

The same foreboding, this time deliberate, 

runs through Gaiman’s latest work. Norse 

Mythology, out on February 7, retells the myths 

of the Norse gods – including Odin and Loki, the 

074 / PLAY / DARK THOUGHTS / STARTUP TAKEAWAYS

Below: Neil Gaiman photographed in Bearsville, New York. He has lived 

there since 1992 and wrote about it in his novel American Gods 

PHOTOGRAPHY: BEOWULF SHEEHAN. ILLUSTRATION: SAM PEET 

two grifters of American Gods, who’ve played 

the role of villains in Gaiman’s work since 

Sandman. The idea germinated eight years ago, 

when Gaiman was starting a relationship with 

the musician Amanda Palmer. She was diligently 

reading his back catalogue, including the 

novel American Gods. “She really hadn’t got it 

and she kept saying, ‘I wish this was annotated,’” 

Gaiman recalls. “I thought it would be interesting 

just to do a retelling.” 

Norse Mythology is an odd read, largely 

because it is so un-Gaimanesque. The tales are 

told straight, with little embellishment. 

Although at times Gaiman felt tempted to do 

his own thing – the absence of the female gods, 

he says, was especially frustrating – he wanted 

to “play fair”, both with the myths and with his 

readers. He imagines a curious child coming to 

them from one of the Marvel films, just as he 

did aged seven, after reading Jack Kirby’s 

The Mighty Thor. “It would give it depth, it would 

give it weirdness,” he says. 

The moment Gaiman comes through most 

strongly in Norse Mythology is the end. The Norse 

gods are fated to die in the final battle 

of Ragnarök. Gaiman guides the reader 

with delicacy. “If there was anything 

I felt like my craft was important to, 

it was making Ragnarök work,” he 

says. “Using Ragnarök as a weird set 

of ominous bass notes we keep 

returning to. And making Ragnarök 

pay off at the end.” It’s a sense he has 

at the moment: of things sliding out 

of control. “Right now there’s a feeling 

of recognition: ‘Oh yeah, I know that, 

that’s where we’re at.’” 

Gaiman’s gloom is grounded in 

personal experience. A passionate 

advocate for refugees, he’s spent time 

in the camps in Jordan. He’s also 

experienced online hate first hand, 

after an anti-Trump tweet attracted 

“noxious and nightmarish anti- 

Semitic stuff that I’ve never encountered 

before”. Gaiman has been using 

social media since the days of 

CompuServe. “This,” he says, “is new. 

This is bad. This is weird.” 

Mythology helps Gaiman keep 

perspective. The Norse Gods faded. 

Today’s media and tech deities will 

crumble much faster. “You look at 

things such as Facebook,” he says. “You 

look at Google, Amazon, Tinder and 

you go: ‘One day you will be MySpace. 

One day you will be one with Nineveh 

and Tyre.’” He’s now thinking ahead, 

to the possibilities inherent even in 

disaster: “There is always what comes 

after Ragnarök. Stuff comes after.” 

It’s hope, of a kind – and Gaiman is 

apt to be hopeful. “I want people 

happy,” he says. If he has a political 

message, he slips it in sideways, the 

way he did in American Gods, or in 

Neverwhere, a novel about 

homelessness disguised as a magical 

quest. He’s working on a new novel; it 

started out “light and fluffy”, he says, 

then, over the autumn, the tone 

changed. “It’s going to be a lot darker. 

And that’s OK,” he says. He’s putting 

in his experience, his desire to create. 

That’s what you do, in uncertain times: 

make good art. Rowland Manthorpe 

McNUGGETS 

OF STARTUP 

WISDOM 

Out February 10, John Lee 

Hancock’s film The Founder tells 

the entertaining tale of how 

Ray Kroc turned a family 

restaurant owned by the 

McDonald brothers into the 

world’s biggest fast-food 

chain. Here, WIRED digests 

the takeaways from Kroc’s 

methods for use in your next 

startup pitch deck. Olly Richards 

THE NAME IS EVERYTHING 

Why did Kroc snaffle McDonald’s 

instead of starting his own 

burger joint? McDonald’s 

sounded homely. Kroc’s sounds 

like it serves swamp meat. 

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS 

RIGHT – UNTIL THEY’RE NOT 

Kroc’s strategy: make sure 

your product is the finest 

quality – until you’re so big that 

people will eat it anyway. Then 

you can serve what you want. 

PUT EVERYTHING IN WRITING 

The McDonald brothers claimed 

Kroc promised a share of all 

future revenue – but only agreed 

to it on a handshake. That 

handshake was worth about as 

much as they received: nothing.

ven in virtual reality, floating 

402 kilometres above Earth is 

terrifying. Home, a 15-minute 

experience created by Londonbased 

production studio 

Rewind, is the closest most 

of us will get to the real thing. 

Based on Tim Peake’s Nasa 

and European Space Agency 

(ESA) training programme, 

Rewind is intended as a 

realistic recreation of 

working on the International 

Space Station (ISS). 

To develop the experience, 

the studio worked closely with 

Nasa and the ESA. “Nasa has 

an open-source library of 3D 

models and plans, so we used 

that for reference,” explains 

Matt Allen, the company’s 

30-year-old CTO. “With the 

ISS model, the airlock and 

the suits, we wanted to be as 

accurate as possible.” 

To build the visuals, the 

company used modelling 

packages such as 3D Studio 

Max and Unreal Engine 4. 

The narrative, created by the 

BBC’s digital storytelling 

team, begins on the Quest 

Airlock of the ISS. After 

opening the airlock, players 

must traverse the exterior of 

the space station – with an 

accompanying view of Earth 

below – to a radiator panel. 

To do this they must use HTC 

Vive controllers as hands. The 

sensation is exhilarating, if at 

times unsettling: Allen’s team 

had to adapt the experience 

because heights in VR can 

make viewers squeamish. 

“We had to tweak the way 

you move and traverse the 

outside of the ISS, taking away 

a few degrees of freedom,” 

explains Allen. “It can 

be quite nauseating in VR.” 

Home won the Audience 

award at the Sheffield film 

festival in 2016 and is 

available now on HTC Vive 

and Oculus. Rewind may 

have traversed shallow space, 

but the studio isn’t getting 

complacent. It is branching 

out into augmented 

reality with experiences 

using the Microsoft HoloLens. 

“VR is a major thing now,” 

says Allen, “but we’re always 

looking forward to the future.” 

The sky’s no longer the limit. 

RL-L rewind.co 

VISIT THE 

ISS (NO 

SPACE SUIT 

REQUIRED) 

Channel Tim Peake with 

this VR experience 

CREATING HOME’S 

VR SPACEWALK: 

HOME START S IN THE 

AIRLOCK; YOU THEN 

TRAVERSE ROUND TO 

A ROBOTIC ARM 

LIKE ASTRONAUTS 

ON THE ISS, YOU 

MUST CAPTURE AND 

DEPLOY PAYLOADS 

STORMS, METEORITES 

AND THE AURORA BOREALIS 

WERE RECREATED 

AS SEEN FROM ORBIT 

THE RENDERINGS OF THE ISS 

WERE MADE USING NASA’S 

OPEN-SOURCE LIBRARY 

OF 3D MODELS AND PLANS 

076 / PLAY / HOM E T IME / FIRST IMPRESSI O N S 

ILLUSTRATION: AXEL PFAENDER 

BOOK MYTHS 

BUSTED 

The phrase “Never judge a book by its cover” has been proven by data – partly. Scientists at Kyushu University in 

Japan have created an artificial neural network to judge more than 130,000 books from Amazon, based on their looks. 

The programme made some discoveries – light-blue covers tend to indicate diet books; larger covers indicate thrillers 

– but it only predicted 40.2 per cent of their genres successfully. Conclusion: some clichés shouldn’t be doubted. RL-L

FOLLOW WIRED ON 

INSTAGRAM 

DAILY UPDATES FROM 

THE WIRED TEAM 

INSIDER ACCESS TO 

WIRED STORIES 

GO BEHIND THE 

SCENES AT WIRED 

@WIREDUK

IT’S ALL IN THE 

DECOMPOSITION 

Daniel Arsham creates modern 

archaeology from our everyday items 

Daniel Arsham’s art 

takes you back in time 

to the present from 

a far-flung future. 

The Brooklyn-based 

artist fossilises 

contemporary items – 

cameras, furniture, 

clothing, “things we 

associate with the 

present,” says 

Arsham, 36, “as if 

they were crystallised 

over millennia.” 

Arsham’s work – 

which spans 

sculpture, architecture 

and performance – 

plays with our sense 

of time and space. 

His obsession with 

archaeology goes 

back six years, to a 

trip to Easter Island. 

“I was watching the 

archaeologists, 

thinking about how 

archaeology is 

composed,” he says. 

He began to 

experiment with 

recasting modern 

technology in volcanic 

ash. “I’ve started to 

think of eBay as this 

bizarre Library of 

Alexandria,” he says. 

When he studies its 

most popular lists, the 

site “suggests iconic 

objects”. To create the 

crystallised versions, 

Arsham casts a mould 

of the object; crushed 

calcite is then pressed 

into the moulds with a 

binding agent. “If I add 

wax to the mould in 

certain areas, it 

causes those parts to 

not bind, so I’m able to 

control the decay.” 

Arsham is almost 

completely colourblind: 

much of his work 

is monochrome. But 

recently he has worn 

EnChroma corrective 

glasses, allowing him 

to experiment with a 

wider gamut: a purple 

cave of calcified 

basketballs and, for 

his HOURGLASS show, 

opening in February at 

Atlanta’s High 

Museum, a Japanese 

Zen garden cast in 

deep blue. “It allowed 

me to select a palette 

and materials that I 

felt had a very strong 

resonance,” he says. 

Upcoming work 

includes a photo 

exhibit where 60,000 

of his shots will be 

curated by a Cisco 

artificial intelligence, 

which detects the 

emotion in images. 

And, if you don’t make 

it to one of his 

exhibitions, you may 

encounter his work in 

the distant future: the 

calcite sculptures 

don’t decompose 

unless submerged in 

water, so “our work will 

outlast some of these 

original objects,” he 

laughs. “In a funny 

way, they may be the 

last remnant.” OF-W 

danielarsham.com 

078 / PLAY / THE ART OF FALLING APART 



app to see more of 

Daniel Arsham’s work

Above: Daniel Arsham’s treatment of a Technics SL 1210 turntable. He has also fossilised keyboards, guitars and a Sony Walkman

CHARGE YOUR PHONE… 

BY STROLLING 

A brisk walk could 

soon charge your 

mobile phone – if 

you’re wearing the 

right outfit, that is. 

Nanotechnologists at 

the Georgia Institute of 

Technology, Atlanta, 

have created a 

material that can 

produce and store its 

own electricity. “We 

wanted to utilise the 

soft fibre-based 

devices to convert 

solar energy or motion 

energy into electricity,” 

says Zhong Lin Wang, 

55, who worked 

on the study. 

Using cylindrical 

dye-sensitised 

solar cells and 

nanogenerator fibres 

which create energy 

when rubbed together, 

the material can 

harvest power from 

the Sun or its wearer’s 

movement. They 

suggest it could one 

day be incorporated in 

the designs of watch 

straps, bracelets or 

even T-shirts. 

The bad news? 

The prototype is still 

“four to five years” 

from full production. 

“Performance and 

robustness were 

challenges,” says 

Wang. And then 

there’s the hygiene 

issues. “Anything you 

put in a washing 

machine will be 

destroyed.” In other 

words: this one’s for 

dry-cleaning only. 

RL-L gatech.edu 

hen 68-year-old artist Dragan Ilić 

realised he was no longer agile 

enough to create exactly what he 

wanted, he wasn’t 

deterred. The Serbian artist 

makes massive abstract works 

using pencil and paint, filling 

whole rooms. “When I noticed 

I had got old and less able, I 

knew I needed a helper,” 

explains Ilić. “That helper 

turned out to be a robot.” 

By using an industrial bot to 

carry him, Ilić is now able to 

create unique patterns on 

large-scale canvases, by preprogramming 

its movements. 

He spent 15 years searching for 

the right machine to suspend 

him above his canvases before 

discovering a second-hand Kuka K210+DI that was 

perfect for the job. Originally used for stacking 

heavy industrial loads, the £18,000 robot can carry 

up to 210kg. To create Ilić’s pieces, the robot’s 

movements are first programmed according to a 

pencil drawing made by the artist himself. Once it’s 

programmed, Ilić is strapped, standing, on to the 

machine, and moved around a canvas at a rate of 

two to three metres per second. Drawing with 

markers, paint or pencils, Ilić records his process, 

eventually creating an audiovisual art piece. 

Having debuted his technique at the Ars Electronica 

festival in Austria in September 2016, Ilić is now 

pushing the limits of his studio assistant – in 

occasionally surreal directions. One planned piece 

involves attaching pencils to the legs of his three 

pet dogs and lifting them with the machine. He’s 

also working to combine the robot with braincomputer 

interfaces, to give his thoughts direct 

control over the robot’s movements. In doing so, 

he’s again extending his body – and his mind. 

“I have been waiting for this for years,” he says. 

WIRED’s glad it’s given him a lift. RL-L draganilic.org 



app to watch the robotic 

assistant in action 

PORTRAIT OF 

THE ARTIST 

AS ROBOT ARM 

Dragan Ilić has created an uplifting 

remedy to his declining agility

PHOTOGRAPHY: BRANKO STARCEVIC. 

ILLUSTRATION: TOMMY PARKER 

C HARGE WEAR / HUM A N PAINTBRUSH / PLAY / 081

BUY NOW 

£55 

CHIC STAYS: CONDÉ NAST TRAVELLER’S 

FAVOURITE PEOPLE ON THEIR FAVOURITE PLACES 

KATE MOSS ON AMILLA FUSHI. FLORENCE WELCH ON CHATEAU MARMONT. 

SEBASTIAN FAULKS ON CEYLON TEA TRAILS. BETH DITTO ON ACE HOTEL PORTLAND. 

SIR PAUL SMITH ON CLARIDGE’S. KATE WINSLET ON EILEAN SHONA. 

CARA DELEVINGNE ON PARROT CAY, AND MORE. 

ORDER NOW AT AMAZON.CO.UK

ILLUSTRATION: NICK D BURTON 

ROBERT A 

HEINLEIN’S BY 

HIS BOOTSTRAPS 

Heinlein’s short 

story, published 

in Astounding 

Science Fiction, 

introduces the 

idea of a character 

appearing 

in multiple 

timelines, meeting 

themselves amid 

complex – and 

funny – paradoxes. 

f all tim e travel’s 

paradoxes, here’s the 

strangest of them all: hop 

on a TARDIS back to 1894 

and the concept didn’t 

even exist. “Time travel is a new idea,” 

explains New York-based author James 

Gleick, 62. “It’s a very modern myth.” 

Gleick’s entertaining Time Travel: A 

History, out in hardback in February, 

quantum leaps from HG Wells’s The 

Time Machine – the original – via Proust 

and alt-history right up to your Twitter 

timeline. Until we get the DeLorean 

working for real, fellow travellers, 

consider it the next best thing. OF-W 

1941 

HG WELLS’S 

THE TIME MACHINE 

“The idea of time 

travel with volition, 

in either direction, 

didn’t arrive until 

Wells,” says Gleick. 

It explains that time 

is a dimension – 

something not 

widely accepted 

until Einstein’s 

theories in 1905. 

1895 

WILLIAM 

GIBSON’S THE 

PERIPHERAL 

Gleick cites 

Gibson’s unique 

twist on the genre: 

“We can’t send 

people, but what if 

you could send 

information back to 

the past?” It’s a 

chilling new take. “It 

shows how our 

cultural conception 

of time is changing.” 

2014 

1930s 

THE 

MAHABHARATA 

Time travel appears 

in Hindu text The 

Mahabharata, and 

in stories such as 

Washington Irving’s 

Rip Van Winkle 

(1819) – but it usually 

only involved a oneway 

trip. “People fell 

asleep, and woke 

up in the future,” 

says Gleick. 

TIME CAPSULES 

The idea of 

preserving a time 

stamp only arose 

in the 1930s in 

Scientific American. 

“It’s the most 

pedestrian form 

of time travel: 

sending something 

into the future at a 

rate of one minute 

per minute.” 

9th century BCE 

1899 

HENRI BERGSON’S 

TIME AND 

FREE WILL 

Bergson’s thesis is 

published soon 

after Wells’s novel. 

“Bergson is a friend 

of Marcel Proust,” 

says Gleick. Soon 

Proust et al are 

jumping on the idea 

of time travel to 

explore free will – 

and influencing new 

sci-fi in return. 

A BRIEF 

HISTORY 

OF TIME 

TRAVEL 

James Gleick’s new book explores our 

(surprisingly new) obsession with era-hopping 

FLE XIB L E T IME LINE / PLAY / 083

084 / PLAY / FRAM E A N D FORTUN E 

HOLLYWOOD’S 

NEED FOR SPEED 

Film is getting faster. Watch Ang Lee’s latest, 

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, out February 10, 

and you’ll be treated to a visual feast: hyper-rich, 

almost hallucinatory images brought to life with 

astonishing clarity. The secret: whereas almost all 

films are shown at 24 frames per second (fps), Halftime 

Walk was filmed at a blistering 120fps. The result is certainly dazzling, but also polarising. 

Lee isn’t the first to experiment with high frame rate (HFR). In 2012, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit debuted 

48fps to a decidedly mixed response. HFR appears brighter and more detailed, but it’s also unyielding. 

The falsity of the Shire’s props and make-up, to some critics, were exposed under its intense gaze. Lee’s use 

of HFR is more nuanced, however. He uses its hyper-reality for storytelling to mimic the vivid flashbacks of 

the film’s protagonist, an Iraq war veteran. But early reviews haven’t been kind. 

Nevertheless, HFR is on Hollywood’s agenda: James Cameron has declared his interest in using the process 

in the Avatar sequels. And, in September 2016, Netflix released Meridian, a short film designed to explore the 

challenges of streaming at HFR to its subscribers. Expect more to follow. Why? Returns. Studios and cinemas 

are increasingly competing with our sofas. They hope that the dazzle of HFR and other projection technologies, 

such as laser and high dynamic range, will provide an additional draw. “I believe that [HFR] is something that 

audiences will perceive as added value for their experience,” says Avatar 2 producer Jon Landau. “It’s about the 

in-theatre presentation. That’s what distinguishes our storytelling from the kind that audiences get at home.” 

If audiences respond enthusiastically, hyper-reality may become the new reality. OF-W 

£2.1 BILLION 

The record boxoffice 

takings of 

2009’s Avatar. The 

film popularised 

3D in cinemas; will 

Avatar 2 do the 

same for HFR? 

HOW THE FRAME 

RATES COMPARE 

Billy Lynn’s 

Long Halftime 

Walk (2017) 

120fps 

The Hobbit 

(2012) 

48fps 

Almost 

everything 

else 24fps 

“Twenty-four fps came out of the sound era. It was the lowest rate that sound would not distort at and the cheapest that the 

studios could get away with. Nobody took into account the visual cortex. That’s why you see the flicker.” Jon Landau 

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES DAWE

Victoria Woollaston 

James Temperton 

Matt Burgess 

WIRED’s award-winning guide to the week’s defining events 

in science, technology, ideas and culture, ready to download 

every Friday. Join the wired.co.uk team and guests for discussion, 

debate and insight into the stories that shape our world. 

Download at iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or listen at wired.co.uk

WIRED HEALTH. MARCH 9, 2017. LONDON 

FOR THE DEFINING OUTLOOK ON WHERE HEALTHCARE IS HEADING, JOIN 500-PLUS TECHNOLOGY, 

MEDICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL INFLUENCERS AT THE FOURTH ANNUAL WIRED HEALTH EVENT IN LONDON 

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS INCLUDE: 

EMMANUELLE 

CHARPENTIER 

DIRECTOR, MAX 

PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR 

INFECTION BIOLOGY 

• 

Charpentier is a 

microbiologist and 

biochemist and 

co-discovered CRISPR 

gene-editing technology. 

PETER PIOT 

DIRECTOR OF LONDON 

SCHOOL OF HYGIENE & 

TROPICAL MEDICINE 

• 

Peter Piot helped 

discover the Ebola 

virus and has led 

pioneering research on 

HIV/AIDS and sexually 

transmitted diseases. 

SALLY DAVIES 

UK CHIEF MEDICAL 

OFFICER 

• 

Sally Davies is chief 

medical officer for 

the UK government, 

acting as its principal 

medical adviser 

on all issues relating 

to public health. 

HELMY ELTOUKHY 

CO-FOUNDER & CEO, 

GUARDANT HEALTH 

• 

Eltoukhy’s Guardant 

Health has created 

a blood test that can 

replace tissue biopsies 

in cancer diagnosis 

and potentially detect 

early-stage cancers. 

KRIS FAMM 

PRESIDENT, GALVANI 

BIOELECTRONICS 

• 

Bioelectrician Kris 

Famm leads Galvani 

Bioelectronics, 

a partnership alongside 

GSK and Alphabet 

to develop implantable 

medical devices. 

DAVID HALPERN 

CHIEF EXECUTIVE, 

BEHAVIOURAL 

INSIGHTS TEAM 

• 

David Halpern’s team 

is a UK government 

and Nesta partnership 

that applies 

behavioural sciences 

to public services. 

MARCH 9, 2017. LONDON 

BOOK YOUR TICKET: 

WIRED.CO.UK/EVENT/WIRED-HEALTH-2017 

EVENT PARTNERS

ILLUSTRATION: GUY BILLOUT 

THE PEOPLE 

SYNTHESISERS 

Emma Bryce explores how geneticists 

plan to build the human genome 

In July 2015, 100 geneticists gathered at the 

New York Genome Center to talk about yeast 1 . At 

12 million base pairs long, it’s the largest genome 

scientists have ever tried to produce synthetically. 

Andrew Hessel, a researcher with the Bio/Nano 

research group at software company Autodesk, 

was invited to speak at the event. The audience 

asked his opinion on which organism should 

be synthesised next. “I said, ‘Look around the 

S CIE N T IFIC PROGRESS / EDITED BY JOÃ O MEDEIROS / 087 

room. You’ve got hardly anyone here 

and you’re doing the most sophisticated 

genetic engineering in the world,” 

Hessel recalls. “Why don’t you take a 

page out of history and set the bar high? 

Do the human genome.” 

This triggered a panel discussion 

that stuck in Hessel’s mind for weeks. 

Soon afterwards, he contacted George 

Church, a prominent geneticist at 

Harvard University, to gauge his interest 

in launching what would effectively be 

the Human Genome Project 2.0. “To 

me it was obvious,” Hessel recalls. “If 

we could read and analyse a human 

genome, we should also write one.” 

A year later, his provocation had 

become reality. In May 2016, scientists, 

lawyers and government representatives 

converged at Harvard to 

discuss the Human Genome Project- 

Write (HGP-Write), a plan to build 

whole genomes out of chemically

088 / R&D / DN A REWRI TE / PL ASM A POWER 

I T H E R 

P E E R - R E V 

I E W E D 

N E 

WIRED’ S 

SCIENCE 

SECTION 

N O R R E P L 

I C A B L E * 

synthesised DNA. It will build on 

the $3 billion (£2.3bn) Human 

Genome Project, which mapped each 

letter in the human genome. 

Leading the Harvard event was 

Church, whose lab is synthesising the 

4.5-million-base-pair E. coli genome, 

and Jef Boeke 2 , the NYU School of 

Medicine geneticist behind the yeast 

synthesis project. “I think we realised 

the two of us were getting good enough 

at those two genomes that we should be 

discussing larger ones,” says Church. 

A Science paper published after the 

meeting formally laid out the group’s 

proposal: to dramatically advance 

DNA-synthesis technologies so that 

the artificial production of genomes 

becomes easier, faster, and cheaper. 

Currently, we can synthesise short 

strands of DNA, up to about 200 base 

pairs long, but the average gene has 

several thousand base pairs. Even this 

limited process is inefficient, costly and 

slow. But it’s vital: in biological sciences, 

synthesised DNA is the foundation of 

experiments that drive everything from 

cancer research to vaccine development. 

For scientists, it’s like working with a 

blunt yet necessary instrument. 

The immense three-billionbase-pair 

human genome is seen as 

the project’s ultimate goal, dangling 

like a carrot to drive innovation. Scientists 

intend to have fully synthesised 

it in a living cell – which would make 

the material functional – within ten 

years, at a projected cost of $1 billion. 

The fruits of HGP-Write could have 

wide-ranging, real-world impacts. But 

in its current form, say the scientists, 

it’s primarily a call for technological 

advancement in synthetic biology. 

The May announcement received a 

frosty reception from some, however. 

A handful of scientists invited to the 

event declined to attend, due to organisers’ 

decision not to include the press. 

Church says they were excluded because 

of an embargo on the forthcoming paper. 

There are bigger concerns: artificial 

production of genomes raises the 

ethically unsettling question of gene 

patenting. Other worries, echoing those 

that first surrounded the gene-editing 

technology CRISPR, are of designer 

humans and parentless babies. “Moving 

beyond reading DNA to writing DNA is 

a natural next step,” concedes Francis 

Collins, director of the US National 

Institutes of Health. He goes on to 

warn, however, that any project with 

real-world implications would require 

“extensive discussion from multiple 

different perspectives, most especially 

including the general public”. Currently, 

applications beyond the lab are a distant 

reality: synthesising a human genome 

may even prove unworkable. In any 

case, none of the project’s deliverables 

will be “as exciting or as evocative as a 

The immense threebillion-base-pair 

human genome is 

seen as the project’s 

ultimate goal, 

dangling like a carrot 

to drive innovation 

baby”, Hessel says. “Some of the things 

that were said [after the meeting] were 

so ludicrous that it allowed us to get 

through that bubble of misinformation 

and misinterpretation quite quickly.” 

HGP-Write’s central goal is to 

improve synthesis technologies so 

it’s easier to write longer strands of 

genetic material. DNA is made using 

software that designs the layout of 

a strand, followed by machines in a 

laboratory that use this template to 

synthesise and assemble it. It’s a clunky 

process that limits production to short 

stretches of DNA. But Hessel sees 

the potential for enhanced software 

allowing more precise genome design 

and printing tools that, for instance, 

harness enzymes to build DNA the 

way it happens in our cells. “If we can 

achieve this, it should be possible to 

write large genomes in hours,” he says. 

Smaller plant and animal genomes 

could also be synthesised along the 

way. One major scientific benefit could 

be the creation of living cell lines for 

pharmaceutical testing. Whole-genome 

synthesis would also bring down the 

cost of gene editing. CRISPR allows 

individual edits to DNA, but producing 

a full genome would allow thousands of 

edits in one go. Church sees the potential 

of genomes being edited to have multiple-virus 

resistance, for example. 

But these are the “byproducts” 

of HGP-Write, in Hessel’s view: the 

project’s true purpose is to create the 

impetus for technological advances that 

will lead to these long-term benefits. 

“Since all these [synthesis] technologies 

are exponentially improving, we 

should keep pushing that improvement 

rather than just turning the crank 

blindly and expensively,” Church says. 

In 20 years, this could cut the cost 

of synthesising a human genome to 

$100,000, compared to the $12 billion 

estimated a decade ago. 

In coming months, scientists will 

try to take HGP-Write from proposal 

to project. That depends on funding. 

Autodesk has pledged $250,000, but 

organisers want to secure $10 million by 

the end of 2017. In the meantime, they’ll 

be expanding the HGP-Write conversation. 

“I want it to be as open and 

transparent as possible,” says Hessel, 

“and to keep up as much interest in this 

powerful universal technology, which 

will enable us to bring our intention into 

the machinery we call life. And boy, do 

we need to get good at it.” 

1. www.syntheticyeast.org 

2. Boeke, JD, et al (2016) The Genome Project-Write, 

Science, 10:1126/science.aaf6850.

THE ILLUSTRATED EX PERIMENT 

LET’S BUILD A FUSION REACTOR! 

Want clean, plentiful energy? Take some hydrogen, heat to 150 million degrees… Hans-Stephan Bosch 

from the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics explains the process. By Gian Volpicelli 

*BUT WITH FOOTNOTES. ILLUSTRATION: JOE WALDRON

IMAGE OF THE MONTH 

Deciphered: the scroll 

that can’t be unrolled 

mazon Echo, the acclaimed voice-controlled 

AI device, is built on the technology of a littleknown 

British company, Evi, which Amazon 

acquired in 2012. Formerly known as True 

Knowledge, Evi was founded in 2005 by AI 

aficionado and entrepreneur William Tunstall- 

Pedoe, who wanted to develop software that 

accurately interpreted questions and framed 

more natural, conversational answers. 

When it reached the market in 2012, the 

technology, Evi 1 1 , was positioned as a contender 

to Apple’s Siri – although not by Tunstall-Pedoe, 

47, who says he set out to build something new, 

not to compete. Now, 11 years after its inception, 

he can celebrate Evi’s real-world impact. “These 

technologies are now good enough that they 

are able to create useful products that change 

lives and are used daily,” he says. 

Before Evi’s invention, Tunstall-Pedoe, who 

lives in Cambridge, built his reputation as an 

AI mastermind and was known for programming 

computers to crack cryptic word puzzles. He 

also developed the Anagram Genius software 

that uses AI to turn words into anagrams. 

Author Dan Brown used the software to devise 

the anagrams in The Da Vinci Code. (Tunstall- 

Pedoe is credited in all 80 million copies sold.) 

After three years at Amazon, Tunstall-Pedoe 

recently left to pursue other AI projects. Here, 

he speaks to WIRED about where voice 

recognition is going – and what he’ll do next. 

Pictured above are segments of the 1,500-year-old En-Gedi scroll, unrolled 

digitally in September 2016 using a technique called X-ray microtomography. 

The parchment was discovered in Israel in 1970 but is so delicate that unrolling 

it manually was deemed too risky. The process was achieved by scanning 

individual layers of the scroll, before converting them into 3D segments. Then, 

a second scan was used to detect bright pixels on the surface, which indicated 

ink. The resulting composite image helped researchers reveal the scroll’s 

Hebrew contents, without once touching its fragile surface. EB 

1. www.evi.com/technology 

2. www.williamtp.com/crosswords 

3. www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/ 

view/2298/2160 

4. www.pewinternet.org/2014/08/06/predictionsfor-the-state-of-ai-and-robotics-in-2025

X-RAY VIS I O N / KN OWL EDGE BASE / R&D / 091 

VOIC E REC OGNITION 

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM AVERY 

WIRED: Before building Alexa, the AI 

that underpins Echo, you built an AI 

that could solve cryptic crosswords. 

How did this lead to Evi? 

William Tunstall-Pedoe: It sounds 

trivial in comparison, for the size of 

the problem, but solving cryptic 

crosswords is a classic AI problem in 

many ways. It’s something computers 

find very hard, and it requires 

intelligence. In terms of world impact 

it’s obviously very small, but I was very 

proud of the technology 2 . The origins 

of Evi are about a desire to apply these 

technical skills and understanding to 

much bigger problems that can affect 

the lives of billions of people. For 

instance, the way we operate 

computers, with buttons or custom 

interfaces or guessing keywords, for 

me is not the way that computers are 

going to work in the future. Surely the 

most natural way to operate a computer 

is just to ask it for what you want? That 

vision is what drove me to found Evi. 

What is it that makes Evi competitive 

as a technology? 

One of the big unsolved problems in AI 

is the ability to understand natural 

language. The reason search engines 

still largely work with keyword search, 

statistics and snippets of text is that the 

technology doesn’t understand what’s 

in a document. There’s no deep 

understanding that comes from reading 

a document. We haven’t solved that 

problem, but the knowledge that powers 

the Evi platform is a knowledge base 

of structured data, including commonsense 

knowledge, that’s in a form 

computers can understand 3 . So it’s 

not going to a collection of documents 

– it’s not like a search engine. 

The other thing that’s pretty unique 

is its ability to reason with knowledge. 

So we can take a question that has never 

been asked before, find multiple facts 

in the knowledge base and chain them 

together, combining them to create 

new knowledge that’s needed to answer. 

Our ability to exploit that knowledge 

base is where the power comes from. 

This results in many more of the user’s 

questions being answerable than would 

otherwise be the case. 

Q & A 

HEY ALEXA, WHO CREATED YOU? 

William Tunstall-Pedoe built the voice AI behind Amazon’s Echo 

What are your predictions for how 

this will this change our reality? 

In ten years, people will expect all 

technology to respond to voice. In 

every building and vehicle, a computer 

system will respond to spoken requests 

and control the technology. Light 

switches and other controls that we 

see today may still be present, but will 

just be the manual alternative. People 

will also take for granted instant access 

to all their private data and all human 

knowledge, just by asking. It’s coming 

sooner than people might realise. 

As our idea of intelligence changes 

and refines, surely the definition of 

AI will evolve too? 

Basically, there is one object in the 

Universe that everybody acknowledges 

is intelligent, and that’s the human 

brain. So we have one reference point 

for what intelligence is. Computers are 

built in a completely different way to 

brains, though there is quite a bit of 

work now trying to merge cognitive 

science and AI, looking at how neurons 

work and taking inspiration from that. 

A lot of the recent big advances 

in artificial intelligence, such as 

those in computer vision, have come 

from what’s known as deep neural 

networks, which are very much 

inspired by the way the brain works. 

So, mimicking the human brain 

should be AI’s ultimate goal? 

To be clear, there are things that 

computers can do way better than the 

brain can do. Nobody remotely 

challenges a computer’s ability to do 

arithmetic better than a human. So it’s 

not so much drawing level with the 

brain. It’s about creating computer 

systems that surpass what people can 

do, for the benefit of people. 

What’s next for you? 

AI is pushing the boundaries of what’s 

possible with computers 4 . I’m looking 

for the next really big thing, that will 

positively impact billions of people. 

That’s where my focus is. I am keeping 

an open mind for exactly what that will 

be. I hope to settle into something new 

in a few months’ time. Emma Bryce

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“For 2,500 years we’ve been taking our time thinking about these questions. Suddenly it’s urgent.” Stephen Cave, p96

We hate to upset you, 

but asteroid strikes, 

rogue AIs, autonomous 

weapons – and maybe 

a despotic politician or 

two – could just wipe 

out our civilisation. 

Thankfully, some plucky 

UK-based scholars 

are leading the way in 

tackling existential risk 

By Richard Benson 

Photography: Nick Wilson 

Illustration: Señor Salme 

Pictured, left-right: 

Julius Weitzdörfer, research 

associate, Centre for the Study 

of Existential Risk, Cambridge; 

Beth Barnes, co-founder, 

Future of Sentience Society, 

Cambridge; Stephen Cave, 

executive director, Leverhulme 

Centre for the Future of 

Intelligence, Cambridge; 

Anders Sandberg, author and 

futurist; Huw Price, Bertrand 

Russell professor of philosophy, 

University of Cambridge; 

and Jane Heal, committee 

member, Centre for the Study 

of Existential Risk, Cambridge. 

Pictured in the Great Hall, 

Clare College, Cambridge

098 

ONE WINTRY EVENING 

IN NOVEMBER 2016, 

AN INTERNATIONAL 

GROUP OF 50 

SCHOLARS GATHERED 

at a candlelit dinner in the 14th-century 

Old Library at Pembroke College, 

Cambridge, to discuss grievous threats 

facing the world’s civilisations. 

An eavesdropper in the shadows 

playing on the wood-panelled walls 

might have heard Shahar Avin, an Israeli 

software engineer and expert in the 

philosophy of science, discussing the 

coming dangers of artificial intelligence 

(“It won’t be about the Terminator! More 

likely an algorithm selling online ads, 

which realises that it can sell more if its 

readers are other robots, not humans”). 

Or perhaps Julius Weitzdörfer, the 

German disaster specialist looking 

after the legal fallout of the Fukushima 

catastrophe, analysing the implications 

of Donald Trump’s presidency 

(“It will make people aware that they 

need to think about risks, but, in a world 

where scientific evidence isn’t taken 

into account, all the threats we face will 

increase”). At another end of the table 

was Neal Katyal, an American lawyer 

who was acting solicitor-general under 

Barack Obama, and who represented 

Apple in the San Bernardino decryption 

case. He explained how “law lag”, the 

inability of legislators to keep up with 

technological change, was weakening 

governments’ power to protect us. 

This was not a scene from a new 

X-Men movie, but an event organised by 

two Cambridge institutions: the Centre 

for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER, 

commonly referred to as “caesar”) and 

the Leverhulme Centre for the Future 

of Intelligence. For them, it was a fairly 

ordinary evening, in this case following 

a lecture by Katyal. The apocalyptic talk 

is standard: both bodies are among a 

small group of organisations in the UK 

and US which employ highly educated 

academics, scientists, lawyers and 

philosophers to study existential risk. 

Existential risk, known by practitioners 

as X-risk, groups together 

hypothetical future events that could 

bring about global catastrophe, at 

worst the end of human civilisation 

or the extinction of humanity. The 

threats can be subdivided into anthropogenic, 

or man-made (nuclear war, 

climate change), and non-anthropogenic 

(asteroids, volcanoes, hostile extraterrestrials), 

and one that gets the most 

attention, and which began to catalyse 

the new discipline about ten years ago 

– artificial intelligence. Philosopher 

Nick Bostrom initiated the movement 

when he set up his Future of Humanity 

Institute (FHI) in Oxford in 2005, prioritising 

his belief that the potential risks 

of AI were too great to ignore. The 

Centre for the Future of Intelligence 

(CFI) was set up mostly to co-ordinate 

X-risk researchers in Oxford, Cambridge, 

Imperial College, the Future of Life 

Institute (FLI) at MIT, the Machine 

Intelligence Research Institute at the 

University of California in Berkeley and 

the virtually located Global Catastrophic 

Risk Institute (GCRI). Cambridge also 

has an undergraduate organisation, the 

Future of Sentience Society, co-founded 

by computer-science undergrad Beth 

Barnes, who also works with CSER in the 

role of “student collaborator”. 

AI has been the subject of fantasy 

since the industrial revolution, but 

the 21st century’s rapid growth in 

computing power has prompted anxiety 

in some of the world’s most rational, 

informed and intelligent minds. In 

January 2015, Stephen Hawking, 

Elon Musk and Google’s director of 

research Peter Norvig were among 

dozens of experts who signed an open 

letter calling for more research on AI’s 

potential impact on humanity. The letter 

had initially been drafted by the Future 

of Life Institute, for circulation among 

AI researchers. Concern has only grown 

since: Martin Rees, the astronomer 

royal, Cambridge cosmologist and 

the third co-founder of CSER, believes 

X-risk research is essential because, 

although Earth has existed for 45 million 

centuries, ours is the first in which a 

single species holds the future of the 

biosphere in its hands. 

X-risk commands increasing interest 

within the technology industry. CSER 

was set up partly with the support of 

Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn after 

he met Huw Price, Bertrand Russell 

professor of philosophy at Cambridge, 

at a conference and found they shared 

concerns about AI and other threats. 

Tallinn became worried after reading 

Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writing about AI, 

and sought to bring together minds from 

diverse areas of study to create a new 

academic discipline. “There is a fertile 

area of scientific study that can be done 

at the intersection of physics, computer 

science and philosophy,” he says. “You 

can make a philosophical argument, but 

use a mathematical model that keeps 

you in check and stops you going off 

talking nonsense, which most philosophers 

do, because they say things that 

only bottom out in their intuitions, and 

intuitions are flawed. If you can make a 

philosophical argument that bottoms 

out in computer code or a mathematical 

model, that’s a very solid foundation. 

At the same time, philosophy can make 

science consistent and give its findings 

a framework and direction.” 

Bostrom makes a similar point when 

he says the FHI “formulates questions 

that one might need to answer if future 

technologies transform the human 

condition”. One example is that we 

might easily agree that robots should 

share human values. But how do we 

agree what those values are? As Stephen 

Cave, CFI’s executive director, notes: 

“For 2,500 years we’ve been taking our 

time thinking about these questions and 

suddenly it’s urgent. It’s very exciting.” 

X-risk can stretch the bounds of 

the imagination. Anders Sandberg, a 

polymath probability theorist at the FHI, 

discusses the possibility that someone 

might summon a demon to end the world 

(“Can you really say the probability is 

zero? Some would say yes, but we ask, 

how can you be certain?”), and others 

are careful to consider the limits of 

human cognition (How can we know 

that millions of previous human worlds 

were not wiped out in the past by risks 

that may seem very remote to us?). 

More importantly, points out CSER 

executive director Seán Ó Héigeartaigh, 

most of the work has practical applications. 

CSER management committee 

member Jane Heal, for example, studies 

“how we can distance the reflective, 

detached part of the self from the 

hubristic animal part of it, so that we 

can band together to make legislation 

that might reduce climate change.” 

Does thinking about all these 

questions keep such academics awake? 

Bostrom laughs: “People always ask 

that.” Sandberg says his standard 

answer is, “I sleep very well at night 

because at least I’m doing something 

about it.” Tallinn is more philosophical: 

“In truth, it makes me appreciate the 

world a lot more. If you have a sense 

that we might be the last generation 

after four billion years of evolution, 

it makes you want to do something 

about it, but it also makes you really 

thankful to be alive in the first place.”

One possibility is the disgruntled individual who might create 

or steal a virus and travel around the world releasing it 

ten threats the x-risk 

teams are taking seriously: 

1. 

ARTIFICIAL 

INTELLIGENCE 

TAKES OVER 

THE WORLD 

Machines developing intelligence 

superior to, and autonomous from, 

human beings is one of the most 

important concerns in the X-risk 

community. Bostrom says that if we 

experience a rate of change comparable 

to the industrial and agricultural 

revolutions, the AI train “might 

not pause or even decelerate at 

Humanville Station”. He predicts that 

machines will attain 90 per cent of 

human-level intelligence by 2075. 

The other reason for the urgency, 

as Tallinn, who is also the co-founder 

of the Future of Life Institute, points 

out, is that the AI risk increases all 

the other risks. In other words, there 

is a risk that intelligent robots will run 

wild and screw up the environment, 

or cause a nuclear winter. 

However, sci-fi scenarios are not 

on the agenda. If the community has 

a catchphrase, it is: “This isn’t about 

the Terminator.” If you can imagine 

specific, tractable risks, many of them 

cease to be risks because it’s possible 

to take preventative action. The 

challenge is to imagine what we can’t 

imagine and deal with it. 

The research in this area ranges from 

the philosophical (should we align AI 

moral values with those of humans? In 

which case, what are our moral values?) 

to the direct and practical (how exactly 

should autonomous weaponry be 

regulated?). It is also controversial. 

Some AI researchers argue that it 

doesn’t pose an existential threat. The 

X-risk argument isn’t that it does, but 

that it could, and therefore is high on 

the organisations’ threat agenda. 

likely date of occurrence: 2075 

x-risk priority: very high 

In 2014, Stephen 

Hawking said: 

“Full artificial 

intelligence could 

spell the end of 

the human race” 

2. 

SYNTHETIC 

BIOENGINEERING 

BECOMES A THREAT 

TO HUMANITY 

Along with AI, synthetic biology is 

one of the two most-studied global 

catastrophic risks. It is an area given 

new urgency by the controversy over 

“gain of function” experiments. These 

involve taking a known pathogen and 

adding extra, risky functionality. For 

example, in 2011, virologists Ron 

Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka 

created a strain of the bird flu virus 

that could be transmitted between 

ferrets. This was done in order to 

better understand the conditions in 

which the virus might develop transmitability 

in the wild. Such experiments 

can head off certain risks but 

create an arguably greater one, in that 

the modified organism might escape 

the lab and cause a global pandemic. 

The risk here is particularly great 

because it is self-replicating. Whereas 

a nuclear explosion is localised, in our 

highly connected world a synthetic, 

incurable virus could spread around 

the planet in days. In the past, natural 

pandemics such as the black death 

have killed millions and effected 

wholesale social changes. In the 21st 

century, advanced biotechnology could 

create something that makes the 

black death look like a nasty cold. 

The FHI has studied the “pipeline 

risk” for how such viruses might 

escape. One possibility is the 

disgruntled individual, perhaps a lab 

employee, who might create or steal 

a virus and travel around the world 

releasing it. Researcher and author 

Anders Sandberg is working on a paper 

exploring the motives of people who, in 

a Bond-villain mould, want to destroy 

humanity. “It’s hard going actually 

because relatively few people want 

to do it. There is very little source 

material,” Sandberg says. This has 

led him to analyse the extent to which 

religions and cults might sanction 

mass murder (most don’t, according 

to Sandberg). When CSER carried out 

similar research, it led to an important, 

practical present-time insight: biotech 

labs have no provision for psychological 

profiling of their employees. 

Sandberg suspects that because of the 

divergent conditions that would need 

to coincide, the “lone person” scenario 

is far less likely than “a disgruntled 

post-doc, or a laboratory accident due 

to a biotech startup cutting corners”. 

likely date: today 

priority: very high

‘It’s possible to imagine a world where you wake up in the morning to news that another list of 

cities has been destroyed, and no-one knows who is behind the attacks.’ Jaan Tallinn

3. 

4. 

AI-EMPOWERED 

WEAPONS SEIZE 

CONTROL AND 

FORM A MILITIA 

South Korea currently maintains the 

border with its northern neighbour 

using Samsung-built robot sentries 

that can fire bullets, so it’s safe to say 

autonomous weapons are already in 

use. It’s easy to conceive future versions 

that could, say, use facial-recognition 

software to hunt down targets and 

3D-printing technology that would 

make arms stockpiling easy for any 

kleptocrat or terrorist. 

As ever, there is a paradox. The cold 

war nuclear arms race involved states 

building big bombs (blast areas had 

NUCLEAR 

CONFLICT BRINGS 

ABOUT THE END OF 

CIVILISATION 

Although nuclear conflicts are far less 

discussed now than during the cold war, 

many thousands of nuclear weapons 

still exist, and there are serious tensions 

– in Kashmir, Taiwan and Ukraine, for 

example – between nuclear states. 

The GCRI studies the subject closely, 

paying particular attention to the possibility 

of an accidental war between 

Russia and the US. The countries own 90 

per cent of the world’s nuclear arsenal 

between them. An accidental war 

happens when one side mistakes a false 

alarm for a real attack and retaliates 

with an actual first strike. For 90 per 

cent of the scenarios the GCRI studied, 

to be maximised because the targeting 

technology was so poor) and using 

human troops who suffered and acted 

irrationally. Robotic arms allow for 

specific targeting and robot soldiers 

would not suffer or intimidate locals. 

However, they will also be so small 

and cheap that ownership will be 

decoupled from statehood. The most 

dystopian scenario is that military 

power would become so removed 

from the size of a state that, as Tallinn 

says: “You might have five guys with two 

truckfuls of tiny automated weapons 

taking out whole cities. It’s possible to 

imagine a world where you wake up in the 

morning to news that another list of cities 

has been destroyed, and no one knows 

for certain who is behind the attacks.” 

Stuart Russell, a computer-science 

professor at the University of California, 

Berkeley, worries that an arms-race 

mentality will kick in before rational 

debate and consensus-building leads 

to the UN ban of autonomous weapons 

currently under discussion. Russell 

recalls hearing a US military figure say 

at a conference, “Bring it on. We already 

have stuff that China can only dream of.” 

If that seems scary, consider too that 

a new arms race could speed the development 

of risky AI, including machines 

capable of acquiring arms. 

likely date: any time 

priority: low 

the annual probability was between 

0.07 and 0.00001. The 0.07 figure means 

that, logically, an accidental nuclear war 

could occur on average every 14 years. 

Radiation from nuclear strikes is 

not necessarily a threat to the whole of 

humanity, just the sections of it unlucky 

enough to be targets. The risk comes 

from the nuclear winter that could occur 

if the bombing of enough cities (roughly 

100) sent a soot cloud into the stratosphere, 

blocking the Sun’s heat and 

reducing Earth’s temperature. (The 

“nuclear” prefix here is a misnomer, 

because any explosion could cause 

this were it big enough. Some scientists 

say wildfires already cause localised 

“winters” that reduce the Earth’s 

temperature by a degree or more.) 

The resulting fall in temperatures 

could reduce food production in the 

affected areas. If this were to occur in 

the US, Russia and Europe, the decrease 

in food supply could be sufficient to 

trigger the collapse of the remaining 

intact societies around the world, and 

thus bring about the end of civilisation. 


priority: low to medium 

5. 

2016 was on 

course to be the 

hottest year on 

record, according 

to the World 

Meteorological 

Organisation 

EXTREME CLIMATE 

CHANGE TRIGGERS 

A COLLAPSE IN 

INFRASTRUCTURE 

1 0 1 

You may be surprised to learn that, 

for X-risk scholars, climate change 

is not classed as an urgent problem. 

For instance, the FHI used to refuse 

to deal with it because “it’s too small 

a problem,” according to Sandberg. 

That’s partly because there are 

already so many others researching 

the subject and the fact that climate 

change is risky is well established – 

but also, paradoxically, because there 

are too many unknowns. “It’s possible 

that this century we’ll get technology 

that will fix climate change,” Sandberg 

says. “But then again, we might also get 

technology that makes it much worse. 

We don’t know how much temperatures 

will change as a result of human 

activity, so it’s actually very hard to 

model predictions accurately.” 

Many of the potentially disastrous 

effects commonly associated with 

climate change are of little interest 

to those studying X-risk. However, 

the greatest risk, barring a temperature 

rise that causes people to die of 

heatstroke en masse (very unlikely), 

lies in its potential to trigger the 

collapse of human and natural infrastructure 

– for example, a species 

dying out and causing the collapse of 

an ecosystem through knock-on effects. 

In other words, what could wipe us out 

is the resultant pandemics or nuclear 

wars over dwindling resources. 

This kind of catastrophic knock-on 

effect is known as systemic risk, 

currently the subject of collaborative 

research by Sandberg and the Global 

Catastrophic Risk Institute in New York. 


priority: low to medium

1 02 

AN ASTEROID 

LIFE AS WE 

6. 7. 

IMPACT 

KNOW IT PROVES 

DESTROYS ALL A COMPLEX 

TRACES OF LIFE SIMULATION 

Earth would be hit by small asteroids 

constantly were it not for the atmosphere, 

which burns up anything less 

than ten metres in width. This is 

convenient, as even a ten-metre rock 

builds up kinetic energy equivalent to 

that of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. 

The planet is hit by an asteroid or 

comet measuring more than ten metres 

once or twice every 1,000 years. Every 

million years an asteroid spanning 

at least one kilometre will also hit 

Earth, which can be enough to affect 

its climate and cause crop failures that 

would put the population at risk. 

The really serious, existentialthreat-level 

strikes, such as the 180km 

Chicxulub impactor, which wiped out the 

dinosaurs around 66 million years ago, 

come once every 50 to 100 million years. 

That may be enough to cause worry, but 

it’s reassuring to know that a) astronomers 

keep a close eye on larger objects 

posing a danger to Earth, and b) there is 

a whole interdisciplinary community of 

scientists working out what to do if they 

get too close. (“It’s a pretty wonderful 

community actually,” Sandberg says.) 

Astronomers look for asteroids, 

mathematicians calculate their orbits, 

geophysicists think about impacts and 

consequences and space engineers 

work out the best ways to deflect one. 

Possible tactics include: painting the 

asteroid white so the reflections of solar 

wind radiation drive it out of orbit; using 

gravity tractor spacecraft to push it 

away; crashing spacecraft into it; and the 

use of lasers or thermonuclear bombs. 

X-risk scientists are unlikely to 

study Earth-threatening asteroids. 

Instead, they might ask specialists in 

pandemics or biosecurity to look at 

the knock-on effects of a strike. 

likely date: 50 to 100 million years 

priority (in 2017): low 

This is similar to 

the “Brain in a 

vat” experiment 

used to explain 

scepticism 

or solipsism 

8. 

Worried readers 

can look to Nasa’s 

Near-Earth Object 

Program, which 

lists potential 

Earth impacts 

In order to calculate some complex 

risks accurately, X-risk researchers 

have to factor in the limitations on what 

they can know for sure. At the most 

esoteric end of such work lie the possibilities 

that far from being the most 

intelligent life forms in the Universe 

(at least until computers overtake us), 

we are in fact minor players caught up 

in something we cannot understand. 

The simulation hypothesis is the 

supposition that humans, with all our 

history and culture, are just an experiment 

or plaything of a bigger entity, as 

FOOD 

SHORTAGES 

CAUSE MASS 

STARVATION 

The global population is forecast to 

hit 9.6 billion by 2050. Some observers 

argue that to avoid mass starvation, we 

will need to increase food production 

by 70 per cent in just over 30 years. 

The challenge is that advances in 

food-production techniques, which 

have allowed humans to keep pace 

with population growth since 1950, 

largely relied on fossil fuels. In 

addition, cultivable land is being 

reduced by factors including topsoil 

erosion and contamination. 

There are also risks associated 

directly with the nature of the foods 

we eat. It’s widely believed that humans 

explored in The Truman Show. At the 

FHI, Bostrom says that this thinking is 

considered because it “is a constraint 

on what you might believe about the 

future and our place in the world”. 

Similar is the Boltzmann brain 

concept, named in 2004 after the 

physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Essentially, 

it is the idea that humans are one 

random coming-together of matter 

in a multiverse where there are many 

more things than we will ever know 

about. Quantum mechanics suggest 

that the smallest amounts of energy 

can occasionally generate a molecule of 

matter. It therefore follows that given 

infinite time, they could randomly 

generate a self-aware brain, but it 

wouldn’t necessarily comprehend 

anything beyond its own experience. 

Some proponents use this concept 

to explain why the Universe seems so 

incredibly well-ordered. Other philosophers 

and scientists work hard at 

proving why Boltzmann brains cannot 

exist. “Very few people take Boltzmann 

brains very seriously,” Sandberg says, 

“but they are an annoying issue.” They 

are rarely investigated as existential 

risks, partly because there’s nothing 

anyone could do about them even if they 

were true and, as Sandberg adds, “there 

are only 24 hours in the day, after all.” 

likely date: unknowable 

priority: very low 

will need to eat less meat and more 

grains. However, whereas advances 

in crop development have produced 

varieties that can grow in inhospitable 

places, scientists warn that 

they’ve also increased vulnerability 

to disease. Whole tracts of wheat, the 

world’s third-most popular cereal crop, 

could be wiped out by fungal infections, 

for example: synthetic viruses can only 

increase the risk of catastrophe. 

Experts have predicted that the 

impact will begin to be felt through 

sharp price rises around 2020, with 

the situation becoming critical 

in developing countries by the 

middle of the century. 

Typically, food shortages lead to 

riots and political instability, but 

surprisingly little work has been 

done to model the resulting social 

breakdown than might be imagined. 

“It is one of CSER’s ambitions,” says 

Shahar Avin, a research associate, 

“to get a holistic picture of these 

catastrophes that includes technology, 

media, ecosystems and health shocks.” 

likely date: 2050 

priority: high

A TRUE VACUUM 9. 

SUCKS UP THE 

UNIVERSE AT THE 

SPEED OF LIGHT 

In the esoteric world of existential 

risk analysis there is a point at 

which technically serious, doomsday 

scenarios can easily begin to merge 

with sci-fi speculation. Particle-accelerator 

accidents are a case in point. 

This is a complex area. For the past ten 

years there has been conjecture that the 

particle collisions in accelerators could 

trigger a reaction that would change the 

make-up of all matter and the laws of 

physics. Recently, some academics have 

argued that what we previously thought 

were vacuums actually contained 

particles, and that the Universe does 

contain a “true vacuum” of absolute 

nothingness. The true vacuum, so the 

argument goes, has the potential to suck 

in the Universe at the speed of light, 

in a process called vacuum decay. The 

reason it doesn’t is that it is resting in 

a meta-stable state – but particle accelerators 

have the potential to disturb it 

and thus cause it to suck us all up and 

wipe out our world. Some physicists 

disagree, saying that Earth has always 

coped with cosmic rays that potentially 

have more power to alter matter than a 

collider. Earth is still here, they argue, 

so it must be sufficiently robust. 

But at the FHI, that argument doesn’t 

convince. Bostrom’s PhD dissertation 

explored how probability calculations 

can be skewed by our own perspective. 

His researchers say that our existence 

cannot be used to prove the impossibility 

of this kind of decay, because 

millions of other Earths could have 

been wiped out by it in the past. 

This led to a paper examining the risk 

of other scientific papers being wrong. 

It found that one per cent should be 

retracted because of calculation and 

modelling errors. “So even a reassuring 

paper should only ever make you 99 per 

cent certain there is no risk,” Sandberg 

says. “One per cent is always unknown.” 

likely date: technically now 

priority: very low 

10. 

A concerned 

biochemist tried to 

delay experiments 

at the Large 

Hadron Collider 

before it opened 

by petitioning 

EU and US courts 

A TYRANNICAL 

LEADER 

UNDERMINES 

GLOBAL STABILITY 

The morning after Donald Trump 

was elected US president, staff at 

CSER held a group meeting to discuss 

whether his election constituted an 

existential threat. They held a similar 

meeting following the EU referendum. 

Such events can have significant 

effects on humankind, in particular 

their implications on our ability to 

co-ordinate globally to tackle problems 

such as climate change and to avoid 

potentially disastrous conflicts. Even 

more important, however, are the 

ways in which events like this impact 

upon how policy decisions will be 

made and communicated, such as the 

rise of “post-factualism”, as CSER’s 

Weitzdörfer puts it. “With Trump, 

we are moving away from a world 

in which scientific evidence counts 

in debates,” he says. “That impedes 

our ability to deal with any kind of 

threats. It makes our governance 

worse and increases risk.” 

Some political observers in the X-risk 

community, such as CSER’s Simon 

Beard, argue that the idea that the US 

as a whole now represents a greater 

threat to global stability might have 

an element of overreaction to it, given 

that Hillary Clinton won the popular 

vote. There may even be a very slight 

benefit, at least for the public profile 

of X-risk as a discipline. “Artificial 

intelligence draws a lot of attention 

for us,” Weitzdörfer says. “But with 

the Trump situation it’s becoming 

plausible to more and more people 

that there are other serious risks we 

need to think about.” 

likely date: now 

priority: medium 

Millions of other Earths could have been wiped out 

in the past, leaving no trace. Sorry about that 

Richard Benson is a freelance 

journalist. He wrote about 

TheLADbible in issue 09.16

LIFE 

MARCUS KRAUS E WAS PREPARING F OR THE WORS T AF TER HIS LUNG CANCER KEPT GROWING. 

THEN HE TOOK A NEW KIND OF BLOOD TES T. THE TES T, BY S TARTUP GUARDANT HEALTH, MONITORS 

A TUMOUR'S OWN DNA. AND THAT COULD OFFER A WHOLE NEW APPROACH TO S AVING LIVES

B LOOD 

BY J O Ã O MEDEIROS 

PHOTOGRAPHY: B ENEDIC T E VANS 

BLOOD PHOTOGRAPHY: PAUL ZAK

106 

IN LATE AUGUST 201 4, MARCUS KRAUSE, A 53-YEAR- OLD 

PHOTOGRAPHER FROM ATLANTA, RECEIVED A PHONE 

CALL FROM HIS ONCOLOGIST. KRAUSE HAD BEEN WAITING FOR 

THIS CALL FOR MORE THAN TWO WEEKS. HE WAS TO BE 

INFORMED WHETHER HIS LUNG CANCER WAS TREATABLE OR NOT. 

K 

RAUSE’S CONDITION HAD BEEN RELATIVELY 

asymptomatic. Looking back, however, there had been 

some signs that he didn’t pick up. For instance, he had 

been oblivious to a persistent dry cough he had 

developed. He had also been feeling slightly out of shape 

– he regularly cycled long distances but lately it would 

take him longer to recover. Until one day, in mid July, 

when he was forced to stop abruptly during a bike sprint 

to the top of a hill. He felt out of breath and had to sit 

down for several minutes to recover. In the next few days, he developed flu-like 

symptoms and went to see his doctor. An X-ray revealed that his right lung 

was being compressed by pleural fluid. The following morning, the doctor 

extracted a few litres of liquid. “They couldn’t remove all of it at once because 

my body had grown accustomed to having that fluid in there,” Krause says. 

The doctor installed a catheter on his ribs and instructed his wife, Amy, on 

how to drain the rest of the fluid at home. A couple of days later, Krause 

underwent a PET scan. It revealed the culprit for the pleural effusion: a 2.8cm 

tumour lodged on his bronchial tube. Given the location of the tumour, 

performing a tissue biopsy would have been complicated, so the oncologist 

collected tumour cells from the pleural fluid. The diagnosis: Krause 

had stage-four lung adenocarcinoma. In other words, lung cancer. 

The question now was whether his cancer had a gene mutation that could be 

targeted by existing drugs or not. Targeted cancer therapies interfere with 

the genetic mutation that causes the tumour to grow. They outperform more 

traditional treatments such as chemotherapy and are generally effective if you 

have the right drug for the specific cancer mutation. Of the 150 genetic mutations 

known to cause cancer, 70 are currently treatable by targeted drug therapies. 

Krause had done his homework and thought it was likely that for 

someone in his fifties and healthy, who had never smoked, he would have a 

targetable mutation. When he finally got a call from his oncologist, 

however, he received some bad news. There was nothing they could target. 

Initially, Krause responded well to chemotherapy. “It was a new 

treatment that hadn’t yet been approved, but it was being fast-tracked,” 

he says. “My oncologist really wanted me to do that and made an appeal to the 

insurance company on my behalf, so they granted me an exception.” After 12 

weeks of chemotherapy, his first CAT scan showed a 70 per cent tumour 

reduction. His second scan in December 2015, however, showed that it 

had grown to five centimetres. Krause’s wife cried when she heard the 

news. Krause, on the other hand, felt relieved. “I didn’t want more chemotherapy,” 

he says. “It just makes you so sick and I knew that it wasn’t going 

to cure me. So the question was: do I just want to feel like hell and then 

die, or do I want to maybe feel OK and then die?” 

At this point, Krause’s doctor 

referred him to an oncologist at the 

Sarah Cannon Research Institute in 

Nashville, in the hope that he could at 

least enrol him in upcoming clinical 

trials. The Nashville oncologist, 

however, wasn’t convinced about 

Krause’s biopsy results and asked him 

if he was willing to undergo another 

test. It wouldn’t be a tissue biopsy, 

but a blood test instead. The test was 

new but early studies had shown 

promising results. Unlike a tissue 

biopsy, it wasn’t invasive. All they 

needed was two vials of blood. 

Krause had nothing to lose. He agreed. 

In the meantime, he was put on 

another course of chemotherapy. He 

was busy at work, his eldest daughter’s 

wedding was coming up and he 

needed something to keep him going. 

“The wedding was emotional,” Krause 

says. “Everybody knew things were 

not looking good at that point.” The 

new chemotherapy soon also proved 

ineffective. By then, Krause had 

forgotten about the blood biopsy test. 

“When I called my oncologist to ask 

‘What now?’, he said, ‘You remember 

that blood test we did?’” The test had 

revealed a mutation, an epidermal 

growth factor receptor (EGFR), 

that the first biopsy had missed. 

Krause had reason to hope again. 

RIGHT: 

MARCUS KRAUSE IN 

THE GARDEN OF HIS 

ATLANTA HOME, 2016 

PREVIOUS SPREAD: SET DESIGN: VICKY LEES

NE DAY IN 2013, HELMY ELTOUKHY, A 34-YEAR-OLD 

electrical engineer from California, flew to Spain 

to meet a Swiss researcher named Maurice Stroun. 

Eltoukhy had just started his second company, 

Guardant Health, with former PhD colleague AmirAli 

Talasaz, but he didn’t have a product yet. Instead, 

he had a vision – to invent a new test that would 

replace tissue biopsies with a blood test. And Stroun, 

O 

one of the scientists who had discovered the 

existence of cancer DNA in blood, could help him. 

Eltoukhy had studied at Stanford University, 

where he was involved in projects that used 

semiconductors to make cheaper and faster DNA 

sequencers. His group, headed by Iranian molecular 

biologist Mostafa Ronaghi, had received $10 

million (£7.7m) in grants. With that money, 

Eltoukhy and Ronaghi spun out a company, Avantome, in 2007. A year later, 

they sold Avantome to Illumina, the world’s leading manufacturer of sequencing 

machines. Eltoukhy and Ronaghi joined the company, where they 

supervised half of the projects at its R&D department. 

In 2011, Eltoukhy felt ill. The list of symptoms was unusual: brain fog, 

arthritis, stomach pains and exhaustion. He went to 12 specialists, undergoing 

multiple blood tests, a colonoscopy, an endoscopy and a CT scan. No one 

could tell him what was wrong with him. “I was freaking out,” he admits. 

One evening, his wife organised a make-your-own-pizza party at home for 

their friends. Eltoukhy binged on pizza and bagels and, later that night, a rash 

broke out, covering his entire body. 

After seeing him, his doctor suggested 

he might want to try cutting gluten 

out of his diet. Four weeks later, his 

health was restored. 

The appointments with various 

physicians during those six months 

made Eltoukhy reflect that they had 

poor technological tools to help in 

diagnosing and treating disease. 

“I always considered physicians to 

be the heroes on the front line,” 

Eltoukhy says. “They are on call, they 

are helping people at their time of 

most desperate need and yet they 

don’t have the tools to ask and answer 

the right questions.” 

Eltoukhy decided to quit his job 

and do something about it. “It was 

all about reducing the cost of 

sequencing,” he says. “Can we get to 

the $500 genome? The $250 genome? 

I just felt we were killing ourselves 

with advanced physics while there 

was a lot that we could be doing closer 

to patient care. I felt that if I wasn’t a 

part of this revolution I would always 

regret it.” He decided instead to focus 

on the disease that had taken his 

grandmother at 40, and still one of 

the biggest killers in the world. 

“Cancer is a disease of the genome,” 

adds Eltoukhy. “I figured that’s the 

one area where our knowledge of 

advanced genomic sequencing would 

make a big difference.” 

From his perspective as an engineer, 

how oncologists diagnose and treat 

cancer constitutes what Eltoukhy 

considers a faulty feedback loop. 

“When you think about diseases that 

we have been able to combat effectively, 

whether infectious diseases, 

HIV or even blood cancers such as 

leukaemia and lymphoma, which have 

fairly high survival rates now, it’s 

because we have access to information 

about the disease through a simple 

blood test,” Eltoukhy says. “We can 

access and sample the disease continuously. 

Unfortunately, in solid tumour 

cancers, it takes three to nine months 

to figure out if a drug works. The 

feedback loop is enormously slow.” 

Furthermore, this slow feedback 

loop doesn’t even track the underlying 

genomics of the disease. A cancer 

genome evolves all the time – the early 

mutation that drives the initial stages 

of the cancer will not be the same a 

few years down the line. Its genome 

can change, adapt to treatments and 

multiply into various mutations 

that evolve independently from the 

original one. “Cancer is the one disease 

where you will do an initial tissue 

biopsy and use that information for

109 

BELOW: 

BLOOD SAMPLES IN GUARDANT’S 

REDWOOD LAB. 

FAR LEFT: THE COMPANY’S 

CO-FOUNDER AMIRALI TALASAZ 

the rest of that patient’s life,” Eltoukhy 

says. “By then the cancer has grown 

and evolved, acquiring different 

mutations, and the physician may have 

no idea. It could be five or ten years, 

and we’re still acting on the original 

diagnostic. Unless you keep testing, 

you are not going to be able to effectively 

correct the treatment and 

change the drugs every time it’s 

required. We have to manage the 

disease dynamically and adaptively.” 

He soon found out that a blood test 

could provide one possible way to 

measure cancer mutations without 

the need for an invasive tissue biopsy. 

It would allow doctors to test patients 

more regularly to track the cancer’s 

evolution. This would avoid the need 

for several painful and invasive tissue 

biopsies that were detrimental to the 

health of the patient. It could also 

be available as part of an annual 

checkup, something that would work 

equally for early diagnosis and the 

sickest patients. When he searched 

academic literature for articles on 

cancer DNA in the circulatory system, 

all the references pointed towards 

one name: Maurice Stroun. 

Stroun wasn’t a cancer expert. He 

was a plant physiologist at the 

University of Geneva. In the 60s, he 

had studied tumours caused by 

bacteria in plants and found genetic 

material of the bacteria in the sap of 

tomato plants. This led him to study 

animal species and, in 1972, he found 

bacterial DNA in the circulatory 

system of frogs. This showed Stroun 

that it was possible to detect genetic 

material from a foreign body such as 

a bacterial tumour in an organism’s 

circulatory system. When he came 

across a study that showed that cancer 

patients possessed higher quantities 

of DNA in their blood serum than 

non-patients, Stroun wondered 

whether that extra DNA was from the 

cancer tumour itself. In 1994, his group 

became one of the first to successfully 

detect DNA from cancer tumours, so 

called cell-free DNA, in the cardiovascular 

system of cancer patients. 

“The theory was that, as a cancerous 

tumour grows and its cells multiply, it 

begins outgrowing its blood supply,” 

Eltoukhy says. “Even in early-stage 

cancers, its cellular growth rate is only 

narrowly higher than its death rate. As

cells die, they shed their contents into 

the blood stream, including its DNA.” 

When Eltoukhy met Stroun, they 

immediately hit it off. Guardant Health 

subsequently acquired several of 

Stroun’s patents and he became the 

company’s founding adviser. In 2014, 

Guardant launched its first blood 

biopsy test. “Stroun’s a guy who didn’t 

get a lot of credit and respect from the 

cancer community, because of his 

background as a plant physiologist,” 

Eltoukhy says. “Of course, a lot of the 

sequencing technology had to be 

developed to make comprehensive 

liquid biopsies happen. I think people 

are now looking back and realising 

he was right about a lot of things.” 

I 

T’S JULY 15, 2016, AND WIRED IS 

attending a meeting at Guardant 

Health’s offices in Redwood, California. 

Some challenging case studies are 

discussed. Richard Lanman, Guardant’s 

chief medical officer, leads the 

group. “Every week, new employees 

join the company,” Lanman says. 

“Reviewing cases is a way to introduce 

them to our technology.” 

Lanman is in his fifties and has been 

at Guardant since September 2014. 

One of the first studies he conducted 

was an analysis of the costs of biopsies 

which was recently published in the 

Clinical Lung Cancer journal. The 

study reported that a lung biopsy cost, 

on average, $14,634. This included the 

cost of subsequent complications from 

the surgery, experienced by one in five 

patients who undertake the procedure. 

Guardant Health’s test costs $5,800. 

“Today’s physicians want more 

tissue, so the needles are getting 

bigger, which only increases the 

complication rate,” Lanman says. “If 

you go to a top hospital you should have 

no problem getting a comprehensive 

sequencing of your tumour. But what 

about patients who don’t have such 

access?” For a blood test such as 

Guardant’s all you need is a nurse, 

FedEx and $5,800. “We’re democratising 

access to biopsies.” 

A few weeks before WIRED’s visit, at the annual American 

Society of Clinical Oncology meeting, Helmy Eltoukhy 

had announced the results of a study involving 15,000 

cancer patients. The study demonstrated that Guardant’s 

blood-test results agreed 99 per cent of the time with the 

results of a standard invasive tissue biopsy. This concordance 

level dropped to 67 per cent when a Guardant test was 

compared to tissue biopsies taken more than six months 

earlier. “That’s what you would expect,” Eltoukhy tells 

WIRED. “It tells you that the original mutation has 

evolved and the original biopsy result no longer applies.” 

This secondary wave of mutations is what Lanman calls 

“the landscape of resistance”. “These mutations are why 

treatments almost always fail,” he says. The first genetic 

mutation that leads to cancer might be caused by a variety 

of factors: environmental, chemical, gamma radiations from 

space, viruses or inherited defects that impair our ability to 

repair DNA. “When enough of those mutations happen in the 

right way it causes cells to go out of control,” he says. This 

initial mutation will continue to grow unimpeded until it’s 

resisted by medical treatment. “Until then, cancer cells had 

no reason to mutate,” Lanman continues. “Medical treatment 

forces the cancer to evolve, to get around the treatment.” 

It’s this landscape of resistance that Guardant is 

starting to map. The more clinicians know about the type 

of mutations that arise after the first mutation, the better 

these mutations can be targeted throughout a patient’s 

lifetime. “Because our blood test is used most often when 

the first line of treatment has failed, we have the largest 

database of resistance mutations,” Lanman says. 

His hope is not for a cure, but for management of the 

disease much as we manage HIV. “People have talked 

about cures since 1980,” Lanman explains. “I don’t think 

that will happen any time soon. I do, however, think we’re 

on the verge of managing cancer.” 

After his introduction at the meeting, 

Lanman presents a few case studies. The 

first was a patient – male, 55 years old, 

based in Tel Aviv – with metastatic lung 

cancer. They found an EGFR L858R 

mutation for which there is a match 

therapy, a drug called erlotinib. “He did 

well for a while, but then the cancer 

evolved,” Lanman says. “When they 

biopsied the patient again, 13 months 

later, they found eight new mutations.” 

None had a treatment at the time. In July 

2014, the patient took a blood test with 

Guardant. The test found another 

mutation, T790M, in the EGFR gene. “It 

was driving all the resistance to the treatments,” 

Lanman explains. “We tried to 

get into a clinical trial for a new drug for 

that mutation, but the company didn’t 

enrol him.” Guardant had just launched 

and the pharmaceutical company was 

unwilling to take a risk on a new 

diagnostic tool. A few months later, the 

patient’s tumour metastasised, invading the liver. In September 

2014, a standard liver tissue biopsy detected the EGFR-T790M 

mutation, confirming Guardant’s result. They put him on a 

clinical trial and, by January 2015, the tumour had shrunk by 

40 per cent. “He did well until they did another lung tissue 

biopsy. They stuck a needle in him, caused a lung collapse, 

and he died.” The biopsy – not the cancer – killed the patient. 

Another case study presented by Lanman was a 60-year-old 

male patient with metastatic colorectal cancer. The patient 

110 

had received treatment, but it was 

stopped when he developed complications. 

“He was frail and ready for palliative 

care,” Lanman says. The tissue 

biopsy, however, hadn’t detected an 

ERBB2 gene amplification, an alteration 

in the number of copies of the gene. This 

is one of four types of cancer mutations. 

The basic one is just a letter change in 

the four-letter genomic code. The 

second type is a fusion of two genes, 

and a third happens when a letter is 

inserted or deleted from the code. The 

fourth type is an alteration on the 

number of copies for each gene, of which 

the ERBB2 amplification is one example. 

“We all have two copies of every gene 

in our genome,” Lanman says. “In some 

cancers, you can have eight, 15 or 100 

copies. These can be hard to detect.” 

Guardant’s is the only test that can 

detect the four types of mutations. 

The patient was put on trastuzumab, 

an extremely efficient drug. “The 

tumour dissolved,” Lanman says. “The 

results can be dramatic even when 

you are on death’s door.” 

A final case study: a 58-year-old 

female with lung cancer and bone metastasis. 

“She received chemo and three 

biopsies,” Lanman explains. “But they 

FOR A BLOOD TEST 

SUCH AS GUARDANT’S, 

ALL YOU NEED IS 

A NURSE, FEDEX 

AND $5,800: ‘WE’RE 

DEMOCRATISING 

ACCESS TO BIOPSIES’ 

couldn’t get enough tissue to sequence.” 

Her oncologist ordered a blood test; 

the results showed the presence of 

two molecules with a EML4-ALK 

fusion mutation in ten millilitres of 

blood. “It was a low amount,” Lanman 

says. “But if it’s there, it’s a detection.” 

Guardant’s blood biopsies have a 

specificity of 99.999999 per cent –

which means that the test reports no 

false positives – thanks to a method it 

developed called digital sequencing. 

“We barcode each of the two complementary 

strands of DNA and make sure 

they match up. Most sequencing 

methods do not include this step, and 

can get false positives. There’s nothing 

like this in diagnostics,” Lanman says. 

The patient was treated with a drug 

called crizotinib and recovered. “She 

went from no options to a great response 

to treatment because of a blood test.” 

BELOW: GUARDANT 

HEALTH CO-FOUNDER 

HELMY ELTOUKHY 

AFTER HIS GUARDANT TEST IN 2015, 

Marcus Krause begun a treatment with 

erlotinib. Before, he had to take narcotics 

to alleviate the pain. Within two days 

of starting on the drug, he no longer felt 

pain. After eight weeks, he took a CAT 

scan. His previous scan had shown a 

five-centimetre tumour, with nodules 

invading his chest cavity and a cancerous 

lymph node on his liver. The new 

scan showed that the lymph node had 

cleared, the nodules were gone and the 

tumour had shrunk to one centimetre. 

In May 2016, at the invitation of 

Helmy Eltoukhy, Krause visited Guardant’s 

offices in Redwood to meet the 

team and share his story. That day 

Guardant was launching a new initiative 

called Project Lunar in collaboration 

with the University of California, 

San Francisco, South Korea’s Samsung 

Medical Centre, the University of 

Pennsylvania and the University of 

Colorado. The study involves, at an 

early stage, hundreds of pre-symptomatic, 

high-risk individuals for breast, 

ovarian, colorectal, pancreatic and 

lung cancer. “These are patients who, 

like Angelina Jolie, have a BRCA 

mutation for breast cancer,” Eltoukhy 

says. “Most of these women have to 

make a choice about removing their 

breasts and ovaries. What the study 

will do with those having surgery is to 

take a blood sample and compare 

it with the tissue that has been 

removed, where sometimes you find 

early stage-cancer lesions.” With 

Lunar, Guardant is focusing not on 

the landscape of resistance, but on 

the original mutation. If successful, 

the study will be a step in the direction 

of Eltoukhy’s original vision: a tool 

for early detection of cancer. “They 

will be able to use our test for active 

surveillance rather than make a 

big decision to surgically remove 

their organs,” Eltoukhy says. 

That afternoon, Krause took part in 

a panel discussion. He recounted his 

story to an audience of Guardant 

scientists and lab technicians: how 

his mutation had been missed with a 

standard tissue biopsy; the bad 

shape he was in when the chemotherapy 

stopped having an effect; and 

how the blood test had saved him. He 

knows that erlotinib won’t last forever. 

At some point, the cancer will mutate 

and become resistant to the drug. 

There’s a 60 per cent chance that the 

new mutation will be T790M, in which 

case the prescribed treatment will be 

a drug called osimertinib. He can live 

like this, he says. Managing the disease. 

He feels like he’s not even sick. 

“My story made such a big 

impression,” Krause remembers. “The 

scientists spend most of their time 

in the lab and to hear such an incredible 

turnaround story from a person 

standing in front of them was a big 

deal.” At the end, he told the audience: 

“When things get rough again, I’m just 

going to remember standing here 

looking at each of you. That’s going 

to inspire me to keep going.” 

João Medeiros is WIRED’s science 

editor. He wrote about Team Sky in 07.16

Facebook and Twitter wield huge influence over how people understand the world around them. 

This is the year we confront that 

THE 

SOCIAL 

MEDIUM 

IS 

THE 

MESSAGE 

Social networks have been exposed. No one can pretend 

that they are simply neutral platforms – mere tubes and 

pathways, like phone lines, that allow us to share snippets 

of our lives. That fiction was laid bare on November 8, 2016. 

Over the next year mainstream culture will grapple, for 

real, with the civic and political effects of our lives online. 

Many intellectuals, with eyebrows cocked, have warned 

that this reckoning was coming. But it took the US election 

– and the ascent of Donald Trump, the insult-hurling, falsehood-circulating 

tweeter-in-chief – to shine a blinding arc 

light on technology’s role on the political stage. 

We are thus heading into a very McLuhanesque year. 

Marshall McLuhan – the Patron Saint of WIRED – made 

his name in the 60s, studying how pivotal technologies 

produced widespread, non-obvious changes. The Gutenberg 

press, he argued, created a spirit of “detachment” that 

propelled science while giving a new sense of agency to 

individuals. Electricity had a “tactile” effect, keeping us in 

constant contact with the world via the telegraph, telephone 

and TV. The photocopier imposed a “reign of terror” on 

publishers by letting everyday folks copy documents. 

By 

Clive Thompson 

People assume McLuhan was always a cheerleader for these 

shifts. But his thinking could vibrate with anxiety at the coming 

impact of electronic media. He suspected we could have too 

much contact with each other – that we’d become fearful and 

angry by incessant exposure to the world. He might have 

looked at Trump’s rise on Twitter and nodded in recognition; 

a young McLuhan had watched European fascists in the 40s 

inject hypernationalism into supporters’ souls, via the radio. 

When Trump won last year to widespread shock, liberal 

critics attacked the major social networks for enabling 

several unsettling trends. Platforms such as Facebook and 

Twitter were viral hotbeds for conspiracy theories and 

disinformation. Memes that reared to life on image boards 

and fringe political sites – jittery with misogyny and white 

nationalism and hatred of Hillary Clinton – made the leap 

to the mainstream on social networks. Dangerous falsehoods, 

such as the idea that Clinton ran a child-trafficking 

ring out of a pizzeria, spread widely; indeed, on Facebook, 

the top 20 fabricated stories netted more engagement than 

real stories from news sources that actually did factual 

reporting, as BuzzFeed found. (This isn’t a problem only in 

Illustration: 

Eddie Guy

the US: anti-Muslim conspiracy stories are avidly circulated 

on Facebook in Myanmar, and Germans trade Facebook 

posts claiming Angela Merkel is Adolf Hitler’s daughter.) 

The same was true on Twitter, which became a tool for small 

numbers of people to propagate abuse and hate speech. 

Meanwhile, the “filter-bubble” effect, which writer Eli 

Pariser had pinpointed years before, arrived in full force. 

As my friend Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University 

of North Carolina and author of an upcoming book about 

political organising in the digital age, says, “I’m Facebook 

friends with some people who support Trump, but I don’t 

recall seeing their Facebook updates – it appears the 

algorithms assumed I wouldn’t be interested.” 

We can’t indict social media alone, or even primarily, for 

the rise of disinformation and politically abusive behaviour. 

Traditional media – cable TV, radio, newspapers – recklessly 

amplified nonsense this 

political season (and 

were played shamelessly 

by Russia’s email 

hacking). They need 

their own reckoning. 

But social networks 

FACEBOOK 

increasingly influence 

Use 

platform 67% 

how people learn about 

the world. According to 

the Pew Research Center, 

Get 

about 44 per cent of 

news 44% 

Americans cite Facebook 

there 

as a news source. It is a 

crucial part of “where 

we put the cursor of our 

16% 

attention all day long,” 

says Tim Wu, author of 

9% 

The Attention Merchants 

and The Master Switch. 

It seems the question 

TWITTER 

that’s lingering in the 

air is: how should social 

networks grapple with 

their civic impact? As we 

will discover, these issues will be devilishly hard to resolve. 

The optimistic view is that there’s good precedent for 

fighting crap online. Back in the aughts, internet giants waged 

a war against spam and content farms. To cut down on spam 

entreaties from Nigerian princes and the like, email providers 

used machine learning to detect spam-like content; they also 

created shared blacklists. To quash content farms – low-quality 

insta-websites designed to game its top slot – Google 

created an ambitious ranking scheme called Panda. This 

down-ranked sites that employed tricks such as keyword 

stuffing (putting lots of invisible, unrelated phrases on a 

page). Remarkably, it worked: content farms vanished and 

bulk spam is now mostly a marginal problem. 

Social networks could use similar strategies to solve 

their current civic dilemmas. Consider fake news, an area 

T H E NEW NEWS OUTL ETS 

Percentage of US adults who… 

where, as scholars have shown, algorithmic analysis could 

help identify crap. Software created by Kate Starbird, a 

professor of design and engineering, was able to distinguish 

with 88 per cent accuracy whether a tweet was spreading 

a rumour or correcting it when analysing chatter about 

a 2014 hostage crisis in Sydney. And Filippo Menczer, a 

professor of informatics at Indiana University, has found 

that Twitter accounts posting political fakery have a heat 

signature: they tweet relentlessly and rarely reply to others. 

Social networks sit atop piles of data that can help 

identify bogus memes – and they can rely on their users’ 

eagerness to help too. Sure enough, Facebook has already 

begun to develop tools along these lines. In December 

2016, it unveiled a system that makes it easier for anyone 

to flag a post if it seems like deliberate misinformation. 

If a link that purports to be a news story is flagged by 

many users, it’s sent to 

a human Facebook team. 

The team adds it to a 

YOUTUBE 

48% 

10% 

4% 

2% 

REDDIT 

queue, where external 

fact-checking firms, 

including Snopes and 

Politifact, can check 

if they think the story 

is suspect. If they do, 

Facebook warns that it 

is “disputed by thirdparty 

fact checkers” and 

offers links to rebuttals 

by Snopes or others. If 

a user tries to share the 

story later, Facebook 

warns them that it’s 

disputed. The goal isn’t 

to catch all falsehoods; 

the system targets the 

most blatant posts. 

There are plenty of 

other tweaks platforms 

could make. Craig 

Silverman, a BuzzFeed 

editor who has closely studied fake news, argues that Facebook 

and Twitter ought to make it easier to see the provenance 

of a link; right now, those from carefully reported sources 

such as The Wall Street Journal look the same as ones from 

conspiracy sites. The platforms could instead emphasise logos 

and names so a user might realise, Silverman says, “Wait a 

minute, this domain name is hillaryclintonstartedaids.com.” 

Now let’s look at the filter-bubble phenomenon. Social 

media platforms could design algorithms that would expose 

us to people, ideas and posts that aren’t in such lockstep 

with our views. Then, when a platform such as Facebook 

suggests related content, “You could use these mechanisms 

to surface ideas that are ideologically challenging,” 

Pariser explains. Or as Tufekci argues: “Show more crosscutting 

stuff! I’m not saying drown users in it. But the 

default shouldn’t be: ‘We’re just gonna feed you candy.’” 

INFOGRAPHIC SOURCE: PEW RESEARCH CENTER

Let your imagination go wild and you can concoct even 

more aggressive, more ambitious reforms. Imagine if you 

got rid of all the markers of virality: no counts of likes 

on Facebook, retweets on Twitter, or upvotes on Reddit! 

Artist Ben Grosser created a playful browser plug-in called 

the Facebook Demetricator that does precisely this. It’s 

fascinating to try: suddenly, social media stops being a 

popularity contest. You start assessing posts based on what 

they say instead of because they racked up 23,000 reposts. 

Some scholars argue Facebook should hire human teams 

to more comprehensively review trending stories, deleting 

ones built on lies. In fact, Facebook did just that last year 

until a conservative outcry ended the practice. 

The biggest impediment to all this change, though, is 

economic. Traditional media organisations publish and 

broadcast nonsense because it attracts eyeballs for ads. 

New media have inherited this problem in spades: they 

know – in vivid, quantitative detail – just how much their users 

prefer to see posts they agree with ideologically, seductive 

falsehoods included. Spam got on 

people’s nerves, so companies were 

eager to stamp it out; on some level, 

social platforms’ attempts to fight 

fake news and confirmation bias 

will come into conflict with their 

users’ appetite for them. 

Nonetheless, public pressure did, 

in fact, prod Facebook to action 

after the US election. Imagine if 

greater pressure impelled 

platforms to take an even stronger 

stand against falsehoods and filter 

bubbles. Would we like the result? 

It’s unclear. Waging war on disinformation 

isn’t easy, because not 

everyone agrees on what disinformation 

is. It’s unambiguous that 

“the Pope endorses Donald Trump” isn’t true. But how about 

“Hillary Clinton lied about having pneumonia, so she’s a lying 

snake”? The most effective disinformation usually begins with 

a fact then amplifies, distorts, or elides; ban the distortion and 

you risk looking like you’re banning the nugget of truth too. 

Online interactions are conversation, and conversation has 

always been filled with bluster and canards. “The idea that only 

truth should be allowed on social networks is antithetical to 

how people socially interact,” says Karen North, a professor of 

digital social media at the University of Southern California. 

Or consider this example raised by New York University 

media theorist Clay Shirky: in 2016, supporters of the Dakota 

Pipeline protests were encouraged to “check in” on Facebook 

at that location to confuse police. Those false check-ins “are 

fake news”, Shirky notes. Any policy aimed at enforcing truth 

on Facebook could easily be used to quash that activity. 

“Look, fake news is a real problem,” he says. “But do 

liberals really want to hand the decisions over to a single large 

corporation?” Asking the platforms to be granular arbiters 

THE MOST 

EFFECTIVE 

DISINFORMATION 

HIDES AMID 

ACTUAL FACTS 

of truth would endow them with even more power. 

Whatever one can say about Donald Trump, he understands 

– and masterfully plays – the media, old and new. 

He uses Twitter to perform an end run around journalism, 

to utter falsehoods that are repeated by his followers and 

circulated further by mainstream news. When he attacks 

someone in a tweet, his supporters harass the target. Like 

other merchants of disinformation online, Trump exhales 

such a cloud of half-baked assertions that it leaves people 

mistrustful of everything. If you can do that, hey, what does 

it matter if social networks slap a “Disputed” label on the 

post you wrote? As Jon Favreau, one of Barack Obama’s 

former speechwriters, puts it: “Donald Trump doesn’t 

care if we think he’s telling the truth – he just wants his 

supporters to doubt that anyone’s telling the truth.” 

And yet Trump has millions of eager followers. This is 

what gives pause to Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at 

New York University. “You have to think about the demand 

side,” he says. It’s not enough to ask why people spread 

political disinformation, he 

adds. You also have to ask, “Why 

do people want to consume this 

stuff so much?” 

Ponder that and you realise, 

there are limits to what technological 

fixes can achieve in civic 

life. Though social networks 

amplify American partisanship 

and distrust of institutions, 

those problems have been rising 

for years. There are plenty of 

drivers: say, 20 years of rightwing 

messaging about how 

mainstream institutions – 

media, universities, scientists 

– cannot be trusted (a “retreat 

from empiricism”, says Rosen). 

As danah boyd, head of the Data 

and Society think tank, notes, we have lost many of the 

mechanisms that once used to bridge the various cultural 

gaps between people from many different walks of life, 

including widespread military service, affordable colleges 

and mixed neighbourhoods. 

The old order was flawed and elitist. It also locked 

out too many voices; it produced seeming consensus by 

preventing many from being heard. We are fumbling around 

for mechanisms that can replace and also improve upon 

that order, Pariser says. “It reminds me of how the secular 

world hasn’t found a replacement for some of the uses 

and tools that religions served. And the new media world 

hasn’t found a replacement for the ways that consensus 

was manufactured in the old world,” he adds. This is the 

year that we need to begin rebuilding those connections – 

on our platforms and in ourselves. 

Clive Thompson is a contributing editor to WIRED US and 

the author of Smarter Than You Think 

115

A local farmer cycles from Shaoxing 

to Zan Gong village, where Qiu Sai Zhen 

runs a Ule-connected general store

By David Rowan 

Photography: 

Stefen Chow 

GLOBAL VILLAGE 

How rural Chinese stores became the world’s 

most connected retailers – thanks to a 

billionaire investor, a data-crunching genius... 

and thousands of local postmen

LOU WENER WORKS DAMN HARD. “FIVE AM 

to 10pm, seven days a week, including 

national holidays,” the 45-year-old 

shopkeeper says distractedly behind the 

cluttered counter of her Xiabao village 

general store in Zhejiang province, a 

couple of hours’ drive west of Hangzhou 

city. In fact, she explains as she checks a 

customer’s egg delivery for freshness, 

she and her husband don’t close the 

shop, not even for Chinese New Year. “Of 

course we stay open,” she says, smiling 

tolerantly as an elderly customer 

holding detergent looks on bemused 

at a western journalist’s presence. 

“That’s a very busy day for us.” 

Lou grew up here in Xiabao, a 

village of around 1,000 people set 

among paddy fields and hectares of 

longjing tea, its outskirts marked by 

roadside stalls selling locally grown 

melons and apples. She’s run the store 

for 21 years and lives upstairs with 

her farmer husband, his father, and 

their 21-year-old son. “When we first 

opened, business was good, as people 

didn’t often go to town to buy things,” 

she says. “But in recent years it’s got 

much harder. It’s [e-commerce website] 

Taobao. People started learning how 

to buy online around 2014; their kids 

taught them. Then the smartphone 

arrived. They just stopped buying 

daily goods. We felt the pressure: it 

was only old people coming in to the 

store. If we didn’t change, we would 

be eliminated by the internet.” Then, 

in July 2015, the local postman offered 

to turn Lou’s simple store into a 

TYPOGRAPHY: SU LIQUN DAVID

Below: Lou Wener serves customers 

at the store she has run for 21 years 

in Xiabao village, Zhejiang province 

data-enabled, real-time-responsive, 

globally connected e-commerce hub of 

its own. With help from the postman, 

she plugged an electronic pointof-sale 

laser scanner, a till-receipt 

printer and a digital weighing scale 

into a new Asus laptop that sits 

between a router, a cash register and 

a landline towered over by western 

and Chinese cigarette packs. Now 

whenever a customer pays for a Funkid 

Grapefruit Juice or a Hazelive Soap, 

their purchase is tracked instantly on 

a central database. It is linked to both 

the shopkeeper and that particular 

customer, whose membership card 

is then credited with loyalty points 

that can be redeemed for a purchase 

of blueberry juice or rice wine. 

A wall-mounted 42” Sanyo TV 

displays the WeChat group that Lou 

maintains for the store: a special offer 

on trainers if ten villagers will commit; 

prices for latex pillows and organic 

duck eggs that the postman can deliver 

to the store by next morning. WeChat 

lets her tell customers that their order 

has arrived. On hot days she may 

deliver locally. There is a China Post 

logo on the shop awning above a red 

lantern, which sits alongside a red logo 

containing the web address “ule.com”. 

These are clues to the ambitious 

retail experiment that has embraced 

this village store. On the floor sit two 

half-opened boxes of yams that the 

postman brought today for Lou’s 

customers from a neighbouring 

province. They lie next to a large box 

of packed tea brought to the store by 

a local farmer to be sold on Lou’s store 

website and collected for delivery by 

the same postman on his way back 

into town. These are what Lou calls 

her “virtual SKUs”, or stock-keeping 

units, that give her customers access 

to thousands more lines than can fit 

in her cluttered physical store: cotton 

shirts, denim jeans, dry beef jerky, 

flowerpots, adhesive tape, chopsticks, 

dragonfruit, socks, cooking oil, 

doormats… all brought reliably by 

next-day China Post delivery. 

In one month in 2015, Lou says, her 

website sold 800 pairs of shoes to 

this 1,000-person village. And that 

she credits entirely to her membership 

of Ule – the fast-growing commerce 

platform created by the postal service 

and a Hong Kong multibillionaire, 

which aims to transform a million 

village stores into the world’s biggest 

real-time searchable retail database. 

So far today, according to Ule’s 

mobile app, Lou’s taken 40 orders, 

earning 1,719RMB (£200) in revenue 

and 116RMB (£13) in profit. Yesterday, 

71 orders brought in 3,295RMB and 

180RMB profit. Ule’s point-of-sale 

device lets customers pay utility bills 

in the store and manage their Postal 

Bank accounts, further boosting Lou’s 

income. A quarter of her turnover is 

now online, with a growing trade 

in outbound sales of local farmers’ 

shredded bamboo, fungus and dried 

vegetables. There are so many 

products that she’s had to rent the 

warehouse opposite to store them. 

Because Lou’s trading data is transparent 

within Ule’s network, the Postal 

Bank has offered her a 90,000RMB 

revolving credit line at a preferable 

Above: Warehouse facilities in 

Yuhang district, from where 

400 local Ule clients are served 

119 

interest rate. The offline, non-Ule 

store next door, meanwhile, “isn’t 

doing well”, according to Lou. She 

says her revenue has doubled since 

she joined Ule. “I was going to close 

down as business was so hard,” she 

says. “Young people weren’t coming, 

but now with mobile sharing they know 

there’s a promotion on milk, and we can 

sell 80 boxes of milk in a day. Or they tell 

me what they want. I search on Ule for 

it and it comes in the next day. It may 

be a bit more expensive than Taobao, 

but you don’t have to worry about fake 

products. I take care of everything. 

It’s a long, hard day but I feel fulfilled. 

With the mobile, we’re very busy. Before 

it was so boring that I wanted to cry.” 

SAMSON YEUNG WON’T RELENT IN 

connecting China’s village stores 

until he’s reached saturation. “A million 

stores would be a very good number to 

dominate the market,” he says as we 

drive along the winding hills that lead to 

the last remaining store in the village of 

Yaocun. It’s 20km past the nearest small 

town. “China has 700,000 villages, and 

we are planning to have one Ule store 

per village, plus 20 or 30 per city. Then 

we’ll cover all China’s rural areas and the 

best parts of the city,” he adds. 

As Ule’s chief operating officer, Yeung 

is moving fast to build the world’s most 

ambitious real-time retail-data network. 

In August, when WIRED tours the 

villages of Zhejiang province, there are 

250,000 stores on the Ule system; by late 

December, that will rise to 330,000. And 

because each store owner scans every

1 20 

product variation into the system, to 

identify everything from Coke to local 

cabbage, Ule now tracks more than 

three million individual SKUs. “Pointof-sale 

is just the beginning,” Yeung 

explains. “Being on the network makes 

each store a virtual Walmart: they can 

sell what they like, even if it’s not in the 

shop, to turn themselves into internet 

businesses. Plus we’re capturing every 

transaction that’s made in the store, 

to help the shop-owner. We know who 

they are selling to, at what time of day 

and in what weather. We work with 

the owners to decide where to shelve 

products for maximum impact.” 

The Yaocun store is open even longer 

hours than Lou Wener’s: from 6am to 

midnight, 365 days a year. This is a 

village of just 150 households, where 

flowers and wood have brought relative 

wealth: a 60” TV is visible through an 

open door in a house in the small market 

square. “There used to be three stores 

in this village, but the other two have 

closed,” explains shop owner Han Guo 

Min, 47, who lives upstairs with his wife, 

mother and 21-year-old son, who is also 

their delivery driver. After 20 years 

here, he joined Ule on May 20, 2015. 

“It’s increased the wealth of the village 

and given us better-quality SKUs,” 

western consumer-insight businesses 

can only dream of. By recording millions 

of daily purchases and linking them to 

individual customers via loyalty cards 

or phone payments, Ule is building 

an unprecedented view of Chinese 

consumer purchases. Let’s say you’re 

a beer firm wanting to optimise distribution 

when demand rises on an 

unusually hot April day. Ule knows 

where to send your trucks. Or imagine 

you’re Chanel and you want to know 

which 44- to 48-year-old women, in 

villages a few hours from the nearest 

city, have today bought a Dior product. 

Ule’s data can potentially identify them, 

perhaps allowing you to send a Chanel 

discount voucher to their phone. 

That’s a rich feature set that makes 

Tesco’s Clubcard look quaintly Victorian. 

Clockwise from above: Qiu Sai Zhen 

behind the counter of her Ule store 

in Zan Gong village; a rural worker 

harvests crops in Shaoxing, a 

prefecture-level city; Han Guo 

Min and wife Qian Mei Ya, who own 

a Ule store in Yuhang district 

Han says. “Ule has meant a 25 per 

cent growth in revenue, with utilities 

payment and China Post insurance sales 

bringing more people into the store. The 

inventory is automated. Before, I had 

to memorise prices: if I wasn’t in the 

store, we couldn’t sell something.” 

On an Android phone, Yeung scans 

the store’s daily stats. It’s 4pm and Han 

has taken 22 orders worth 1,500RMB, 

resulting in 152RMB profit. His seven 

online orders – including rice wine, cups 

and a pillow – amount to 436RMB. Store 

data is updated every five minutes. 

That level of near-real-time data from 

stores across China opens doors that 

“WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU HAD ALL 

the retail data in the world?” Kerry 

Liu, founder of a Toronto analytics 

company called Rubikloud, is sitting 

across a Hangzhou conference table 

explaining how he’s turning villagestore 

data into power. “First, there’s 

retail optimisation – you can change 

how large mass retailers connect 

with customers and influence them. 

Retailers need to build relationships 

with customers in the same way Netflix, 

Amazon Prime or Facebook treat their 

customer base, constantly tuning their 

parameters. Facebook wouldn’t say, 

‘You clicked on an update from your 

cousin, so now we will show you your 

cousin every time you log in.’ 

“Second, you can influence brand 

and product development – we did a 

pilot for a big pharmacy chain – and 

can influence consumer spending, 

say, to encourage healthier foods.

And third, you can shape new product 

launches. A razor company wanted to 

launch a new product without cannibalising 

sales, so we found the 25,000 

most likely customers from the retailer’s 

database, scraped online price data, 

used reinforcement learning. The result 

was a 42 per cent rise in product spend.” 

Rubikloud launched in April 2013 

with a mission “to index and predict the 

world’s retail behaviour while turning 

data into revenue”. So far its machinelearning 

PhDs and data scientists have 

processed $250 billion (£195bn) in 

transactional data, which adds up to 

500TB. Its first product, largely for the 

north American market, took pointof-sale 

data, inventory data, promotional 

data, customer loyalty data 

and more to help retailers predict the 

behaviour of individual customers 

at scale. And then Liu, 31, met Solina 

Chau of Horizons Ventures, the Hong 

Kong-based fund which manages the 

tech investments of Li Ka-shing, one 

of Asia’s wealthiest men. “After five 

minutes of our demo, Solina said she 

wanted to know how we sucked data 

out. She asked if we’d settle for being 

acquired by a big company – or whether 

we wanted to build a proper platform on 

top of that first framework.” Horizons 

Ventures quickly led a seed investment 

round. But Chau had bigger plans for 

Rubikloud. Li’s internet and media 

company, TOM Group, embarked on a 

huge joint venture in 2010 with stateowned 

China Post, which has a million 

workers, to digitise commerce across 

the nation. They named it “Ule”, translated 

roughly as “Happy post”. 

Today, Ule and TOM Group each 

own 7.5 per cent of Rubikloud, now at 

55 people. They have also both invested 

in a Hong Kong-based finance-tech 

startup called WeLab, which uses mobile 

and offline analytics to determine 

whether a shopkeeper or a customer 

is a good credit risk for Ule to offer a 

loan. According to WeLab co-founder 

Simon Loong, a former banker, 64 per 

cent of rural Chinese have no access 

to banks, and store owners lack the 

credit history to borrow. So his business 

evaluates them with data from credit 

bureau and social apps, but also from 

their mobile devices. “We’ve processed 

five million members, and haven’t lost 

a case in fraud,” Loong explains. Shop 

owners can take unsecured cash loans 

at nine per cent APR and use them to 

buy stock from Ule; the postal bank 

provides the cash. And shop customers 

give WeLab’s WeLend business access to 

a vast amount of mobile data for a loan 

decision within five minutes. 

“We look for personality traits, level 

of responsibility, by collecting 800 data 

points,” Loong explains. “The model 

of phone, your apps, how you interact 

with others, the structure of your social 

networks, how you fill in your address. 

Whether you use capital letters correlates 

with bankruptcy – we think that’s 

education level. Even what time you 

apply affects credit performance: 1am 

to 6am applicants are more likely to be 

bad customers compared with 8am to 

1pm. We work with telcos to measure 

inbound call frequency, the longest 

gap and variability between calls – as 

very talkative customers are not good 

borrowers. We even look at messaging, 

and connections between the phone 

numbers of poor credit users – as they 

influence each other.” Prospective 

customers are also asked to take a selfie, 

which is matched using face recognition 

to the police ID system. “We aspire to 

provide affordable credit to 30 per cent 

of China by 2018,” Loong says. 

And so a country-wide retail-data 

and logistics business is also building 

a data-led money-lending division 

to oil the wheels of commerce. 

“What the hell is a Toronto-based 

data company doing in Hangzou?” 

Rubikloud’s Liu reflects. “You can’t 

ignore the world’s largest consumer 

market. A cookie company we talked to 

missed their forecast by $50 million in 

ten major cities, because they underestimated 

local demand for other brands, 

got the pricing wrong and mistargeted 

promotions. Today they need a Ule – 

competition is too high. It’s very difficult 

to predict demand: one company lost 

$100 million this year because it had no 

visibility of demand. They need a more 

real-time system.” That comes down to 

knowing who the customers are, what 

they are buying, and where. “Ultimately 

we want to sell real-time placement in 

the physical store,” Liu says. “Nielsen, 

dunnhumby – they’re up for disruption.”

Top: Qiu and her husband Lu Gen 

Fu, who is a carpenter, in 

their Ule-logo-decorated store 

Bottom: Staff at Ule’s Yuhang district 

warehouse, which has moved to a 

bigger site three times in two years

Top: Lou Wener gives villagers 

access to thousands of additional 

online goods via the postman 

Bottom: Han Guo Min in his store, 

which brings in the equivalent of £800 

daily, despite being outside the city

Left: Chen Qing, Ule chairman and 

China Post general manager, 

photographed by WIRED in Beijing 

“THIS IS INNOVATION FROM CHINA. 

It’s China IP. Internet companies are 

copying us.” Chen Qing, founding 

member and chairman of Ule, as well 

as China Post’s general manager in the 

province, is explaining over a lunch 

that includes snake soup (like bony white 

fish, actually) how he’s modernising 

a million-person, 150-year-old enterprise 

that stretches from a postal 

savings bank to insurance. 

“Ule is a major weapon, a catalyst, 

for China Post renewal,” Chen, 50, 

continues. “To change a culture, you 

need to use innovative tech and a 

market-driven mindset. Our parcel 

business has grown 450 per cent in this 

province because of Ule. Now I demand 

at least 100 per cent growth every year. 

I’ve been with China Post for 20 years. 

I’ve never failed. I won’t fail this one.” 

Zhejiang province was chosen as the 

test bed for Ule because it’s an established 

e-commerce hub: Alibaba is 

based in Hangzhou, as are more than 

a third of China’s e-commerce sites, 

according to the Hangzhou Daily. And 

now, Chen says, it’s ready to roll out 

nationally – with central- and regionalgovernment 

backing. “The government 

is endorsing Ule, to back its rural policy, 

for instance, subsidising the capex 

of each store to upgrade computers and 

encouraging farmers to list produce 

on Ule,” he explains. “Seventy per cent 

of the population is rural and there 

are lots of gaps: how do rural people 

get quality goods? How do farmers 

sell back to cities efficiently? Then 

there’s information asymmetry. If you 

harvest when everyone else is, your 

price can collapse. China Post is the 

only entity in China that has complete 

coverage down to the last mile. We want 

to use tech to solve those problems.” 

Plus, of course, it’s very good for 

business to reinvent China Post as the 

backbone of a national retail-commerce 

transport network. “The main China 

Post business gets a significant uplift, 

with boosts to the financial business and 

the logistics business,” Chen explains. 

“Our transactions on Ule will soon 

exceed 200 billion RMB. The farmers 

get more business, which creates more 

logistics volume for us and more cash on 

deposit for the postal bank. In 2015, the 

postal bank had 150 billion RMB in cash 

deposits. In 2016, it was 200 billion. Ule 

has contributed half of that growth.” 

In 2017, he says, the goal is to connect 

500,000 rural stores. “After that, the 

next 500,000 will be urban. Imagine 

anyone in a city being able to order 

organic greens from farmers via Ule. 

We have cold storage – so we’ll deliver 

to the neighbourhood shop in the city. 

And think of the benefit to the farmer.” 

In the city today, Chen explains, ginger 

is selling for 6RMB per half a kilo, of 

which the farmer gets 1.5RMB. “We will 

pay the farmer 3RMB and then sell it on 

Ule for 4.5RMB. China Post provides 

the lending capital, Ule provides sales 

and we all share the profit.”

There is the small matter of 

persuading postal workers to upgrade 

from bicycle to minivan. And also 

ensuring that the workers buy the 

vans. “We’re encouraging postmen to 

borrow money from the postal bank to 

buy their vans,” Chen says, enthusiastically. 

“China Post outsources delivery to 

them, even as employees, and subsidises 

their gas. But staff own the car. He’ll take 

good care of his own car! They get extra 

income for delivering wholesale goods. 

No other postal service is doing this!” 

He grins. “Changing people is disruptive. 

You need to change their brain.” 

And if workers refuse to buy their 

van? “All staff are Communist Party 

members,” he says solemnly. “We have 

no unions here. They know what is in 

the best interests of China.” He smiles. 

“Or – I can move them to another job.” 

room. “We analyse data patterns, 

and work with suppliers to get bulk 

discounts,” he says. “The biggest retail 

chain in China, Sinopec, has 25,000 

gas stations with convenience stores. 

After that there’s a gap. So we’re using 

technology to give retailers cheaper 

prices on cookies, shampoo, noodles...” 

The TOM Group, which owns 42 per 

cent of Ule, “is here to empower China 

Post”, which owns 43.7 per cent. “We 

put in people with a tech background 

and they run ground operations,” he 

says. “We were running eBay in China. 

We understand e-commerce. So we’re 

digitising retail. We have feedback from 

300,000 retailers. Postmen travel to 15 

villages daily, so we roll out fast. ” 

The results are demonstrable. Ule’s 

gross merchandise value in the first 

half of 2016 was 28.2 billion RMB, a 

threefold increase on the previous 

year. Politicians are coming to pay 

their respects: Wang Yang, one of 

China’s vice-premiers, visited JiuDu 

township, Sichuan, in May with Lu 

Jiajin, Postal Savings Bank president. 

“Alibaba is also trying to connect the last 

mile,” Yeung says. “They thought they’d 

have 200,000 outlets after two years. 

They have just 17,000 after 18 months. 

“But Alibaba is a transaction 

company. Ule is a data company.” 

David Rowan is editor of WIRED. 

He wrote about China’s most 

inventive startups in issue 04.16 

1 25 

“IT’S HOW COMMUNISM STARTED. THE 

revolution began with the farmers.” 

Ken Yeung, brother of Samson, is 

explaining how Ule’s particular model 

will solve China’s “rural problem” 

before scaling fast to the cities. Yeung 

is the Hong Kong-based CEO of the 

TOM Group and an enthusiast of his 

time at Singularity University. He is 

walking past stacked boxes of Wahaha 

water, Victory Vitamin Water, El Sotillo 

wine, Funkid Grapefruit Juice, Red Tea 

and a thousand other SKUs of snacks, 

sauces and toiletries in a 550-squaremetre 

former letter-sorting warehouse 

in Yuhang county that’s about to be 

replaced by one five times the size. This 

is one of 400 China Post warehouses 

across China that work with Ule to stock 

village stores directly. Local specialities 

include lotus fruit, sausage and duck. 

Food authenticity is guaranteed. 

“This morning they’ve processed 

80 orders, which we deliver in the 

afternoon,” says Yeung, scrolling 

through a PC in the order-processing 

Left: Qiu Sai Zhen shows products to 

her customers on her smartphone via 

a WeChat group featuring 115 people 

Above: Ken Yeung, CEO of the 

TOM Group, photographed by 

WIRED in the village of Zan Gong

THE WAR IN 

UKRAINE IS 

BEING FOUGHT 

BY BATALLIONS 

USING HIGH 

STREET UAVS 

WIRED REPORTS 

FROM THE 

FRONT LINE 

BY MICHIEL DRIEBERGEN 

PHOTOGRAPHY: 

ALEX MASI

127

o you see that?” asks a heavily built soldier 

everyone calls Master. “The heavy artillery is 

getting closer. They are only six kilometres away. 

We are within their range now.” 

Master is wheezing from the effort of 

launching an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Its 

owner bellows, “Three, two, one – go!” The drone 

– which measures about one metre by one 

metre – shoots off, propelled by an engine 

that buzzes energetically. For a short time 

it’s possible to follow its progress out over the 

sea, but pretty soon it’s out of sight. 

Now Master and another fighter sit on two small 

folding chairs, mesmerised by the images on 

two small monitors in the open boot of their 

4x4. Bird, as Master has fondly named the 

plane, sends back real-time images of an area it 

would be impossible for either of the men to 

reconnoitre: the other side of the front line. The 

images reveal fields full of craters of various sizes. 

Beyond them, there are trenches in a zigzag 

pattern. These are enemy positions. 

“Bird flies a course preprogrammed by us,” 

Master says. “But during the flight, we can adjust 

its path, vary the altitude and make the camera 

turn in any direction. We can zoom in as well.” 

The incoming images are razor sharp; 

way down below, treetops sway in the wind and 

a flock of birds swarms by. 

Flying is Master’s hobby. Two and a half years 

ago, when fighting broke out in eastern Ukraine 

with the Russian Federation, he quit his 

job as a policeman and joined the Donbas 

Battalion, an army unit of volunteers. He applies 

his past experience as a pilot when he reconnoitres 

the front line with UAVs, and offers 

any information he collects to the army. 

Today, the men are situated in a field on a cliff by 

the sea, ten kilometres east of the port of Mariupol. 

The front line – a village named Shyrokyne – lies 

nearby, below them. It’s not visible but, from time 

to time, it’s possible to hear an explosion. “Don’t 

worry, they can’t see us,” Master says. 

“Look, a BMP,” Master’s comrade says excitedly. 

The men readjust their camera and stare intently 

at the screen. Sure enough, the infantry fighting 

vehicle – known as a BMP – has been located, 

half-buried ready for an ambush. BMPs are illegal 

under the Minsk Agreement – a document, signed 

in 2014, intended to end the fighting in the Donbass 

region of Ukraine. Further down, behind the village, 

they spot more tank-like vehicles. 

Master isn’t willing to reveal if Ukraine is also 

using forbidden weaponry, but the images from 

the drone show craters around Russian trenches. 

There is a lot of shooting going on, from both sides. 

This zone near Mariupol has been the scene 

of heavy fighting in the past few months. The 

soldiers call this artillery bombardment 

“the concert” as it happens in the dark. As soon 

as the controllers of the Organization for Security 

and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) – an international 

monitoring group – leave the area at 

night, the heavy weapons come out. Then there’s 

non-stop firing from both sides until dawn. 

Ukraine’s belief is that the Russians want to seize 

Mariupol to create a land connection between 

Crimea – which has been annexed by Russia – and 

the rebel territories in southeast Ukraine. 

“Last night we had to deal with 122mm mortar 

shells and – to judge by the size of the splinters 

– tank fire,” says Volodymyr Hrynyuk, deputy 

commander of the Eighth Army battalion. His 

unit of about 400 men is stationed around the 

village of Hranitne, 50 kilometres north of 

Mariupol. Each night, a section of his soldiers 

mans the trenches at the front line. “At night 

we must be on standby at our positions, ready to 

defend ourselves, if necessary.” 

Now, in the daytime, his men rest at the army 

base. Or, if they are in their battle positions, they 

Previous page: a volunteer with a militia group recovers 

a landed drone. Right: Master and his team set up to 

launch a drone near Berdyans’ke, southeast Ukraine

Above: Master prepares to launch a drone. The visual data collected from it of pro-Russia separatists’ positions 

will be used by his team in collaboration with the Ukrainian army and volunteers’ groups in southeast Ukraine 

clean and maintain their weapons and shore up 

the earthen trench walls with wooden stakes. 

Hrynyuk and his unit have neither drones nor 

reconnaissance planes as the Ukrainian army has 

a shortage of the most basic equipment. 

“With a drone it would be so much easier to 

observe the enemy and pinpoint their weaponry,” 

he says. “That reduces the risk of our men 

being killed by shelling.” There have been no 

fatalities since his unit deployed, he says, but they 

have only been in the area for a month. 

The frustrating part is that the enemy has 

access to this kind of technology. “We consistently 

see them flying overhead,” he says. “When 

we do, we can almost be sure that, two hours later, 

our positions will be bombed.” 

Indeed, the following night, every Ukrainian 

position is attacked. The explosions are deafening 

and shrapnel splinters fly through the air. 

The soldiers huddle, waiting in the trenches 

for the bombardment to finish. 

Returning fire is difficult. “Without drones, our 

army is blind,” Master says. Hrynyuk’s men are 

forced to locate the enemy positions in the 

old-fashioned way: on foot, by sending out 

reconnaissance patrols. “That entails walking 

large distances and risking our lives to detect the 

enemy positions. A reconnoitre takes two days. 

With a drone you can have much more information 

within two hours,” Hrynyuk says. 

After two flights, Master and his colleagues pack 

it in for that afternoon. “We immediately pass on 

any information we gather to the leaders of the 

battalion nearby. They can then take decisions,” 

he says. “It’s no secret that we are dealing with 

Master isn’t willing to reveal if Ukraine 

is using forbidden weaponry, but the 

images from the drone show craters 

around Russian trenches. There’s a lot 

of shooting going on, from both sides 

129

Above: a soldier discusses the morning’s enemy movements from the trenches on the front line 

of Hranitne, near Mariupol, southeast Ukraine 

Russian armed forces. They have more resources 

and material. He who sees the enemy first wins.” 

Far from the front, in his workshop in the capital 

city of Kiev, 31-year-old drone technician Aleksandr 

is busy screwing parts of a UAV together. “The war 

is not like the second world war – that is, pitching 

one massive force against another,” he says. 

“Today it is about taking the right positions and 

manoeuvring based on incoming information 

about the whereabouts of your enemy.” 

Aleksandr comes from Stakhanov, a town in the 

region that has now been occupied by pro-Russian 

militias. For that reason, he doesn’t want to reveal 

his family name or have his photo taken: “This is 

to protect my family.” With two colleagues, 

Aleksandr runs a company that assembles and 

repairs drones. It was originally for business 

clients, but his clients now include the army. 

Aleksandr points to his computer screen. “Look 

how buildings have been destroyed,” he says. You 

can see drone images of the outskirts of Avdiivka, 

a city of Donetsk – the militias’ capital. “People 

used to live here, but now these buildings have 

been blown to bits and only their skeletons remain.” 

The drone that Aleksandr is repairing is a 

common consumer drone – in-store it would cost 

€1,000 (£900). The UAV can fly at 200 metres with 

a range of five kilometres. But it’s different from 

the retail version: Aleksandr has modified the 

drone. “Where a civilian drone can’t fly any more, 

ours still works. The mechanisms are similar 

but we make changes to its electrical systems. 

What we do exactly, that’s a secret.” 

Unlike Master’s unmanned aircraft, which maps 

entire areas and costs €12,000, these drones 

are mainly used to fly to a specific point, take 

photos and return straight away. 

The Ukrainian army depends on volunteers such 

as Aleksandr to provide them with UAVs. They 

help to collect money for their acquisition and any 

repair work necessary if the vehicles are damaged. 

“Fortunately, this drone returned,” he says. 

“But often they don’t. It takes off, but once in 

sight of the enemy, there’s a ‘boom’ and then 

it bursts into a thousand little chips.” 

Because most soldiers have no experience with 

drones, Aleksandr also offers training. “In the 

early 2000s, the army had a fully functioning 

division dedicated to unmanned reconnaissance 

flights,” Aleksandr says. “But that unit disappeared 

before the conflict with Russia started.” 

In Ukraine, it’s generally assumed that Russia’s 

secret service has been infiltrating the army for 

years in order to weaken it. Many official army 

‘The war is not like the second world 

war… Today it is about taking the 

right positions and manoeuvring 

based on incoming information 

about the whereabouts of your enemy’ 

130

Above: a soldier using binoculars to watch over the front line 

Below: Master and his team set up signal transmission poles for the drone they prepare to launch

units surrendered without resistance to the 

pro-Russian militias as soon as the conflict began. 

“When the fighting erupted, it quickly became 

apparent that we were needed,” Aleksandr says. 

He works six days a week, and is, by his own account, 

compelled to put his own money into the reparation 

of the drones. “We’ve never had any support from 

the Ministry of Defence or the army,” he says. 

“We can’t do anything without volunteers,” 

Master says. His “bird” was donated to the 

battalion by the Victory Sisters Foundation, which 

has donors in the UK. But the drone pilot adds 

that it’s becoming difficult to find sponsors. “Many 

people are fed up with the war and are short of 

money because of the crisis.” Aleksandr agrees: 

“Organising a collection, targeted at funding a 

drone for a battalion, for instance, is the only 

thing that still works. But it’s time-consuming.” 

The most motivated volunteers come from the 

regions occupied by militants. “I’ve been attacked, 

so I have to defend myself,” Aleksandr says. After 

the war broke out, he fled with his family to Kiev. 

“During a drone mission last autumn, I had 

just a glimpse of my city, far away on the horizon. 

But a drone can’t narrow that distance for me.” 

Below: Master handles an unmanned surveillance aircraft two kilometres 

from front line town Shyrokyne in southeast Ukraine 

In this, the third year of conflict in eastern 

Ukraine, Aleksandr’s drones have become increasingly 

visible in the combat zone. “In the airspace 

over the Donbas region it’s like a drone party in 

full swing,” Alexander Hug, who heads the 

OSCE mission, said in September 2016. The group 

doesn’t fly unmanned aircraft any more because 

they’re shot down. As a result, exercising 

any supervision over the use of heavy weapons 

has become practically impossible. 

“Military drones have a great future,” Aleksandr 

says. “Drones have no fear and are capable of 

executing almost any task the army requires. 

That’s something the government should think 

about.” He is convinced that, in the future, wars 

will be fought with unmanned aerial vehicles. 

For now, the army has to deal with the everyday 

reality of limited resources: the front line is 

hundreds of kilometres long and drone teams 

such as Master’s are scarce. Frustration is 

mounting on the front line. “It’s exhausting for 

soldiers to be bombarded daily by artillery fire,” 

Master says. “There have been examples of 

boys being blown up by mines. Some lose their 

nerves and break; they have to be demobilised.” 

“We feel as if our hands are tied,” adds Hrynyuk. 

“In principle, we comply with the Minsk 

Agreement. But sometimes we have to return 

fire, to save the lives of our soldiers.” 

“We achieve nothing by signing ceasefires and 

Minsk Agreements, anyway,” Aleksandr sighs. 

“We have to use violence to recover our territory, 

that is the only option. But how? I don’t know.” 

He pats the drone affectionately. “I give him 

kisses and love and then I send this drone back to 

the east again. You’ll see, as soon as it gets there, 

it’ll show some defects again. Sometimes it seems 

they don’t want to return to the front line.” 

Michiel Driebergen is a freelance journalist based 

between Krakow, Poland, and Lviv in Ukraine

133

At 14, he started his 

first business. At 23, 

he began making millions 

for Enron. At 28, 

he launched his own 

Photography: 

Brent Humphreys 

hedge fund. At 33, 

he became the youngest 

billionaire in America. 

At 38, he retired. 

By Sam Apple 

John Arnold’s next 

mission? 

WAGING WAR ON BAD SCIENCE

1 

Brian Nosek had pretty much given 

up on finding a funder. For two years 

he had sent out grant proposals for 

his software project. And for two 

years they had been rejected again 

and again – which was, by 2011, 

discouraging but not all that surprising 

to the 38-year-old scientist. An associate 

professor at the University of Virginia, 

Nosek had made a name for himself in 

a hot sub-field of social psychology, 

studying people’s unconscious biases. 

But that’s not what this project was 

about. At least, not exactly. 

Like a number of up-and-coming 

researchers in his generation, Nosek 

was troubled by mounting evidence 

that science itself – through its systems 

of publication, funding and 

advancement – had become biased 

towards generating a certain kind of 

finding: novel, attention-grabbing, but 

ultimately unreliable. The incentives 

to produce positive results were 

so great, Nosek and others worried, 

that some scientists were simply 

locking their inconvenient data away. 

The problem even had a name: the 

file-drawer effect. And Nosek’s project 

was an attempt to head it off at the pass. 

He and a graduate student were 

developing an online system that would 

allow researchers to keep a public log 

of the experiments they were running, 

where they could register their 

hypotheses, methods, workflows and 

data as they worked. That way, it would 

be harder for them to go back and 

cherry-pick their sexiest data after the 

fact – and easier for other researchers 

to replicate the experiment later. 

Nosek was so taken with the 

importance of redoing old experiments 

that he had also rallied more than 

50 like-minded researchers across the 

country to participate in something 

he called the Reproducibility Project. 

The aim was to redo about 50 studies 

from three prominent psychology 

journals to establish an estimate 

of how often modern psychology 

turns up false positive results. 

It was little wonder, then, that 

funders didn’t come running to support 

Nosek: he wasn’t promising novel 

findings, he was promising to question 

them. So he ran his projects on a 

shoestring budget, self-financing them 

with his own earnings from corporatespeaking 

engagements on his research. 

But in July 2012, Nosek received an 

email from an institution whose name 

he didn’t recognise: the Laura and John 

Arnold Foundation. A Google search 

told him that the Arnolds were a young 

billionaire couple in Houston, Texas. 

John, Nosek learned, had made his 

first millions as a wunderkind 

natural-gas trader at Enron, the 

infamous energy company, and he’d 

managed to walk away from Enron’s 

2001 collapse with a seven-figure 

bonus and no accusations of 

wrongdoing attached to his name. 

After that, Arnold started his own 

hedge fund, Centaurus Energy, where 

he became, in the words of one 

hedge-fund competitor, “The best 

trader that ever lived, full stop.” Then 

Arnold abruptly retired at the ripe age 

of 38 to focus full-time on philanthropy. 

As Nosek tells it, John Arnold had 

read about the Reproducibility Project 

in The Chronicle of Higher Education 

and wanted to talk. By the following 

year, Nosek was co-founding an 

institution called the Center for Open 

Science with an initial $5.25 million 

(£4.3m) grant from the Arnold 

Foundation. More than $10 million more 

in Arnold Foundation grants have come 

since. “It transformed what we could 

imagine doing,” Nosek says. Projects 

that Nosek had once envisioned as 

modest efforts carried out in his lab 

were now being conducted on an 

entirely different scale at the centre’s 

startup-like offices in downtown 

Charlottesville, with some 70 employees 

and interns churning out code and 

poring over research. The skeletal 

software behind the data-sharing 

project became a slick cloud-based 

platform, which has now been used 

by more than 30,000 researchers. 

The Reproducibility Project, 

meanwhile, swelled to include more 

than 270 researchers working to 

reproduce 100 psychology experiments 

– and in August 2015, Nosek revealed 

its results. Ultimately his army of 

volunteers could verify the findings of 

only about 40 per cent of the studies. 

Media reports declared the field of 

psychology, if not all of science, to be 

in a state of crisis. It became one of the 

biggest science stories of the year. 

But as it happens, Nosek is just one 

of many researchers who have received 

unsolicited emails from the Arnold 

Foundation in the past few years – 

researchers involved in similar rounds 

of soul-searching and critique in their 

own fields, who have loosely amounted 

to a movement to fix science. 

John Ioannidis was put in touch with 

the Arnolds in 2013. A childhood maths 

prodigy turned medical researcher, 

Ioannidis became a kind of godfather 

to the science reform crowd in 2005, 

when he published two devastating

137 

papers – one of them titled simply Why 

Most Published Research Findings 

Are False. Now, with a $6 million 

initial grant from the Arnold 

Foundation, Ioannidis and his colleague 

Steven Goodman are setting out to 

turn the study of scientific practice – 

known as meta-research – into a fullyfledged 

field in its own right, with a 

new research centre at Stanford. 

British doctor Ben Goldacre also 

received an email from the Arnold 

Foundation in 2013. Known as a sharpwitted 

scourge of “bad science”, 

Goldacre spent years building up a case 

that pharmaceutical companies, by 

refusing to reveal all their data, have 

essentially deceived the public into 

paying for worthless therapies. 

Now, with multiple grants from the 

Arnolds, he is leading an effort to build 

an open, searchable database that will 

link all publicly available information 

on every clinical trial in the world. 

A number of the Arnolds’ reform 

efforts have focused on fixing nutrition 

science. In 2011, science journalist Gary 

Taubes received an email from Arnold 

himself. Having spent more than a 

decade picking apart nutrition science, 

Taubes soon found himself co-founding 

an organisation with a substantial 

grant from the Arnold Foundation to 

rebuild the study of obesity from the 

ground up. And in 2015 the Arnold 

Foundation paid journalist Nina 

Teicholz to investigate the scientific 

review process that informs the US 

Dietary Guidelines. Just weeks before 

the federal guidelines were due for an 

update, Teicholz’s blistering report 

appeared in the prominent medical 

journal BMJ, charging that the 

government’s panel of scientists had 

failed to consider evidence that would 

have done away with long-held worries 

about eating saturated fat. 

And those are just a few of the 

people who are calling out iffy science 

with Arnold funding. Laura and John 

Arnold didn’t start the movement to 

reform science, but they have done 

more than anyone else to amplify its 

capabilities – typically by approaching 

researchers and asking whether they 

might be able to do more with more 

money. “The Arnold Foundation has 

been the Medici of meta-research,” 

Ioannidis says. All told, the 

foundation’s Research Integrity 

initiative has given more than $80 

million to science critics and reformers 

in the past five years alone. 

Not surprisingly, researchers who 

don’t see a crisis in science have started 

to fight back. In a 2014 tweet, Harvard 

psychologist Daniel Gilbert referred 

to researchers who had tried and 

failed to replicate the findings of a 

senior lecturer at the University of 

Cambridge as “shameless little 

bullies”. After Nosek published the 

results of his reproducibility initiative, 

four social scientists, including 

Gilbert, published a critique of the 

project, claiming, among other things, 

that it had failed to accurately 

replicate many of the original studies. 

The BMJ investigation, in turn, met 

with angry denunciations from 

nutrition experts who had worked 

on the US Dietary Guidelines; a 

petition asking the journal to retract 

Teicholz’s work was signed by more 

than 180 credited professionals. (After 

an external and internal review, 

BMJ published a correction but 

chose not to retract the investigation.) 

The backlash against Teicholz also 

furnished one of the few occasions 

when anyone has raised an eyebrow 

at the Arnolds’ funding of science 

critics. On the morning of October 7, 

2015, the US House Agriculture 

Committee convened a hearing on the 

controversy surrounding the dietary 

guidelines, fuelled by the BMJ article. 

For two and a half hours, a roomful of 

testy representatives asked why certain 

nutrition studies had been privileged 

over others. But about an hour in, 

Massachusetts representative Jim 

McGovern leaned into his microphone. 

Aiming to defend the science behind 

the guidelines, McGovern suggested 

that the doubts that had been cast over 

America’s nutrition science were being 

driven by a “former Enron executive”. 

“I don’t know what Enron knows 

about dietary guidelines,” McGovern 

‘IF ARNOLD 

DECIDED HE 

WANTED TO 

BEAT HUNGER 

I WOULDN , T 

WANT TO BET 

ON HUNGER’ 

– JOHN D ’A GOSTINO 

said. But “powerful special interests” 

are “trying to question science”. 

McGovern’s quip about Enron, a 

company that hasn’t existed for 15 

years, was a bit of a potshot. But given 

the long history of deep-pocketed 

business interests sowing doubt 

in research, his underlying question 

was a fair one: who is John Arnold, 

and why is he spending so much money 

to raise questions about science? 

Fortune magazine once described 

Arnold as “one of the least-known 

billionaires in the US”. His profile in the 

public consciousness is almost 

non-existent, and he rarely gives 

interviews. But among hedge funders 

and energy traders, Arnold is a 

legend. John D’Agostino, former 

head of strategy of the New York 

Mercantile Exchange, says that in 

Arnold’s heyday, people in the industry 

would discuss him in “hushed and 

reverent tones”. In 2006, Centaurus 

reportedly saw returns of more than 

300 per cent; the next year Arnold 

became the youngest billionaire in the 

country. “If Arnold decided he wanted 

to beat hunger,” D’Agostino says, 

“I wouldn’t want to bet on hunger.” 

For all the swagger of that 

description, Arnold himself has 

virtually none. He is universally 

described as quiet and introspective. 

At Enron, a company famous for its 

brash, testosterone-laced cowboy 

culture, the perennially boyish-looking 

trader was reportedly so softly spoken 

that his colleagues had to gather in 

close to hear him at restaurants. 

“People would read into it, and they 

would say he’s just being cagey,” 

D’Agostino says. “And then, after 

a couple of years, people were like, 

‘Oh, no, he’s actually like that.’” 

Arnold is still quiet. “Usually the 

division of labour in most of our work 

is that I talk,” Laura Arnold says in 

a phone interview. By all accounts, 

Laura, who attended Harvard College 

and Yale Law School and worked as an 

oil executive, has been equally 

influential in setting the direction 

for the foundation. But when WIRED 

visits the Arnold Foundation’s Houston 

headquarters in June, Laura has 

been called away on a family emergency, 

leaving John to do the talking. Arnold 

is 175 centimetres tall, trim and

conventionally good looking, his 

youthful appearance now somewhat 

concealed by a salt-and-pepper beard. 

Arnold grew up in Dallas. His mother 

was an accountant (she would later 

help manage the books at his hedge 

fund). His father, who died when Arnold 

was 18, was a lawyer. By preschool, 

Arnold’s talent for mathematics was 

apparent. “I think I was just born with 

a natural gift for seeing numbers in a 

special way,” he says. Gregg Fleisher, 

who taught him calculus in high school, 

recalls an occasion when Arnold 

instantly solved a maths puzzle that 

had been known to stump PhDs. But he 

also stood out for his scepticism. “He 

questioned everything,” Fleisher says. 

By the time he was 14, Arnold was 

running his first company, selling 

collectible sports cards across state 

lines. Those were the early days of the 

internet, and he managed to gain access 

to an online bulletin board intended 

only for card dealers. The listings let 

him see that the same cards were sold 

at different prices in different parts of 

the country – which presented an 

opportunity for arbitrage. “Hockey 

cards didn’t have much of a market in 

Texas,” he tells me. “I would buy up all 

the premium hockey cards and send 

them to Canada or upstate New York.” 

He called the company Blue Chip 

Cards. Arnold estimates that he made 

$50,000 before he finished high school. 

Arnold graduated from Vanderbilt 

University in 1995, taking only three 

years to finish his degree. He started 

working at Enron four days later. A year 

after that, at age 22, he was overseeing 

Enron’s Texas natural-gas trading desk, 

one of the company’s core businesses. 

Arnold’s work at Enron – seeking to 

capitalise on seasonal price differences 

in natural gas – wasn’t all that different 

from what he’d done as a teenager 

selling sports cards. In Hedge Hogs, 

a 2013 book about hedge-fund traders, 

Jeff Shankman, another star trader 

at Enron, is quoted describing Arnold 

as “the most thoughtful, deliberate 

and inquisitive person” he worked 

with. But Shankman recognised that 

he and Arnold were different in one 

key respect: Arnold had a greater 

appetite for risk. On some days at 

Enron, Arnold would trade more than 

a billion dollars’ worth of gas contracts. 

In 2001, even as Enron was collapsing 

amid an accounting scandal that 

covered up billions in debt, he was 

reported to have earned $750 million 

for the company. A former executive 

at Salomon Brothers later told The New 

BURN BRIGHT 

1996 

At 22, begins overseeing Enron’s 

Texas natural-gas trading desk. 

York Times that there were very few 

incidents in the history of Wall Street 

comparable to Arnold’s success. 

As Enron neared bankruptcy, 

executives scrambled to hold its 

operation together, offering bonuses 

to keep traders on board. Arnold was 

given $8 million, the biggest payout of 

all, just days before Enron filed for 

bankruptcy. He started Centaurus the 

following year, bringing along a 

small group of former Enron traders 

who worked out of a single large room. 

Arnold says he wasn’t sure if he could 

match the success he’d enjoyed as a 

futures trader at Enron. As a pipeline 

company, Enron had a direct view on 

many of the factors that influence gas 

prices. Now he’d have to rely purely on 

his prowess with data. By law, 

natural-gas pipelines had to make much 

of their information public, and around 

the time Centaurus was forming, more 

of that information began to appear 

online. “A lot of people didn’t know it 

was out there,” Arnold says. “People 

who did, didn’t know how to clean it up 

and analyse it as well as we did.” 

It wasn’t long before Arnold had the 

answer to his doubts. In 2006, 

Centaurus reportedly generated a 317 

per cent return overall, after taking the 

opposite side of a risky bet that another 

hedge fund, Amaranth, had made on 

fluctuations in natural gas prices. 

John Arnold’s brief but legendary career in finance MARLEY WALKER 

1995 

Starts a job at Enron four days 

after graduating from college. 

2002 

Starts his own hedge fund, Centaurus Energy. 

Amaranth, which was gambling with 

money from large pension funds, 

suffered a $6 billion loss and collapsed. 

By 2009, Centaurus was managing 

more than $5 billion and had more than 

70 employees. In its first seven years, 

according to Fortune, the fund never 

returned less than 50 per cent. 

But Arnold had to come down 

to earth eventually. In 2010, Centaurus 

experienced its first annual loss. 

And though the fund bounced back the 

next year, tighter regulations on 

trading and a far less volatile market 

made it unlikely that Arnold would 

again see the astonishing returns 

of only a few years earlier. And so, at

139 

1988 

Starts his first company at 

the age of 14, selling collectible 

sports cards across state lines. 

2001 

Pulls in a reported $750 million for Enron even 

as the company goes down in flames. 

$ 

2006 

Goes head-to-head with a rival 

hedge fund, which loses and 

collapses; Centaurus boasts a 

317 per cent annual return. 

2007 

Becomes the youngest billionaire 

in the US at 33 years old. 

2010 

After seven years of reportedly 

yielding 50 per cent returns or 

higher, Centaurus experiences 

its first annual loss. 

the age of 38, Arnold walked away from 

it all. He announced that he was closing 

Centaurus in a letter to investors: “After 

17 years as an energy trader, I feel that 

it is time to pursue other interests.” 

Arnold tells me that he had lost some 

of his passion for trading. At the time, 

his net worth was estimated to be 

around $3 billion. In 2010 the Arnolds 

had signed the Giving Pledge, promising 

to give away at least half their wealth 

– and he wanted to be as strategic about 

that goal as he had once been about 

trading. Arnold has said that the first 

phase of his life was “100 per cent 

trying to make money” and that it’s 

now “100 per cent trying to do good”. 

As The Wall Street Journal noted, in 

“US history, there may have never been 

a self-made individual with so much 

money who devoted himself to 

philanthropy at such a young age”. 

The Arnolds had been dabbling in 

philanthropy for years, supporting 

a few handpicked programmes in 

education, criminal justice reform and 

other areas that were important to them. 

But now, with their stepped-up 

ambitions, the couple entered a new 

realm. Arnold had always been ready 

to make huge bets, but it was his hunger 

for reliable data that made him a 

brilliant trader. That same hunger would 

make large-scale philanthropy more 

challenging than he had anticipated. 

In a glass conference room at the 

Arnold Foundation’s offices – which 

occupy the same space as the old 

Centaurus trading floor – Arnold 

explains that his and Laura’s initial plan 

had been to simply locate the most 

effective organisations and write them 

cheques. But figuring out which 

organisations were most effective 

turned out to be vexing. Nonprofits are 

good at reporting their success rates, 

but dig into their claims and you find 

that they often omit relevant context 

or confuse correlation with causation. 

“The more you read the research, the 

less you know,” Arnold says. 

“It became frustrating.” Then, one 

day in November 2011, he was listening 

to the podcast EconTalk, hosted by 

libertarian economist Russ Roberts. 

The guest that day was science 

journalist Gary Taubes, and he was 

talking about how the prevailing 

dietary wisdom of the past 40 years – 

that eating too much fat leads to 

obesity and heart disease – arose from 

the flimsiest of scientific evidence. The 

foundational studies, Taubes said, 

looked at the diets and disease rates 

in various countries, then essentially 

guessed at which items in the diet were 

responsible for the country’s good 

or bad health statistics. Worse yet, 

whenever evidence came along that 

contradicted the consensus about 

the dangers of eating fat – often 

evidence that was much stronger than 

the evidence for the dangers – it was 

ignored or not even published. Hardly 

anyone in the world of nutrition science 

seemed willing to question the 

science behind the low-fat diet, even 

after westerners grew fat and diabetic 

in record numbers. The picture Taubes 

painted wasn’t of a flawed study 

here or there but of a fundamentally 

broken scientific culture. 

During the podcast, Taubes 

mentioned that he was raising money 

in the hope of funding experiments that 

might deepen our understanding of the 

root causes of obesity. Not long after 

the podcast went online, he received a 

five-line email from Arnold. “From the 

little I know about the science of 

nutrition, your study makes a lot of 

sense,” Arnold wrote. Like Nosek, 

Taubes had to Google Arnold to learn 

who he was. Six months later, the Arnold 

Foundation made a $4.7 million seed 

grant to the Nutrition Science Initiative 

(NuSI), the nonprofit Taubes 

co-founded to support fundamental 

research on diet and health. The next 

year the Arnolds promised another 

$35.5 million. Arnold is careful not to 

lump all researchers together when he 

talks about the problems in science. But 

he tells WIRED that listening to Taubes 

and reading his book, Good Calories, 

Bad Calories, had been an “aha 

moment” for him. “Science is built like 

a building,” Arnold says. “One floor on 

2012 

Arnold closes shop and retires 

from Centaurus at the 

age of 38, dedicating himself 

to strategic philanthropy.

top of the next.” In nutrition, “the whole 

foundation of the research had been 

flawed. All these things that we thought 

we knew – when we step back and look 

at the evidence base – it’s just not there.” 

Arnold says that now, unless 

he trusts a researcher’s work, he no 

longer believes the findings of any 

scientific study until he or someone 

on the staff carefully vets the paper. 

Together with Taubes’ work, Arnold 

was also reading Ioannidis’s and 

Goldacre’s equally devastating 

analyses. These critiques of science 

amounted to a deep philosophical 

quandary for the Arnolds, 

philanthropists who had dedicated 

their lives to a data-based approach 

to giving. “In everything they do, they 

want to be evidence-driven,” says 

Stuart Buck, vice president of research 

integrity at the Arnold Foundation. But 

JOHN AND 

LAURA ARNOLD’S 

ARMY OF SCIENCE 

REFORMERS 

Science is broken. 

Here are some of the 

prominent people 

trying to fix it – with 

funding from the 

Arnold Foundation. MW 

John Ioannidis and 

Steven Goodman 

Medical professors 

Launched a new Stanford 

centre dedicated to metaresearch 

– the study 

of the practice of science. 

Arnold funding: $6 million 

Gary Taubes 

Journalist 

Helped set up and run 

a research centre called 

the Nutrition Science 

Initiative to investigate 

the causes of obesity. 

Arnold funding: 

$29 million 

if you look at the studies that can’t be 

reproduced and other issues facing 

science, “you start to think: ‘What is 

evidence? What do we actually know?’” 

The Arnolds had already decided 

that, with decades of life ahead of them 

and almost unlimited resources, they 

had the time and money to evaluate 

charitable programmes properly, 

even when that meant paying for 

expensive randomised controlled trials 

that could take years to complete. But 

now they were widening their scope. 

If they wanted to embark on truly 

“transformational change”, as their 

foundation literature states, it 

wouldn’t be enough to properly 

evaluate this or that education or 

criminal justice programme. They 

would also have to take on a far more 

ambitious project: the Arnolds 

would have to try and fix science itself. 

Ben Goldacre 

Doctor 

Creating a searchable 

online repository of 

data from all the world’s 

clinical trials. 

Center for Open Science 

funding: $590,000 

Tim Errington 

Cancer biologist 

Starting a project to 

redo a large number 

of cancer studies and 

see how many hold 

up to replication. 

Center for Open Science 

funding: $1.9 million 

Brian Nosek 

Psychologist 

Runs the Center for Open 

Science, a major hub of 

the science-reform 

movement, which pushes for 

transparency and mounts 

efforts to replicate studies. 

Arnold funding: 

$17.6 million 

Nina Teicholz 

Journalist 

Investigated the science 

behind the US Dietary 

Guidelines for a report 

published in the BMJ. 

Arnold funding: $15,000 

In their philanthropy, the Arnolds 

like to say, they follow data where it 

leads rather than let themselves 

be guided by ideology. And it’s true that, 

when it comes to political leanings, 

they are somewhat hard to pin down. 

The Arnolds identify as Democrats 

and were major financial supporters 

of Barack Obama. In 2013 they donated 

$10 million to keep Head Start, the 

early-childhood education programme 

for low-income kids, running through 

the federal government shutdown, and 

many of the issues they’ve taken on, 

from criminal justice reform to making 

prescription drugs more affordable, 

are decidedly progressive. Yet 

the foundation is also focused on 

reforming what the Arnolds see as 

a broken public-pension system – a 

project that, in practice, usually means 

cutting payments to retirees, raising 

retirement ages and switching 

new workers to 401(k)-style plans. That 

focus led Rolling Stone to call Arnold 

a “young right-wing kingmaker 

with clear designs on becoming 

the next generation’s Koch brothers.” 

If John Arnold does have an 

identifiable ideology, it is that of a 

lifelong trader and quantitative 

analyst: unsentimental, metricsfocused, 

interventionist. He is 

unapologetic about having worked at 

Enron, and he can be defensive about 

the moral standing of Wall Street in the 

public mind. In 2015, after a cancer 

researcher was found to have falsified 

research data and defrauded the 

government out of millions of dollars, 

Arnold complained on Twitter that the 

penalty, a five-year funding restriction, 

was too light. Had something similar 

happened on Wall Street, he tweeted, 

the perpetrator would have been 

sentenced to ten years in jail and the 

bank would have been fined a billion 

dollars. “Is there something special 

about frauds in the securities biz 

that they should be penalised infinitely 

more harshly than other business 

frauds?” he went on. “Or is Wall 

Street an easy target while cancer 

researchers and universities are not?” 

So it’s no surprise that, in practice, 

the Arnolds’ approach to giving has 

a lot in common with John Arnold’s 

approach to investing. Laura says she 

sees her husband’s appetite for risk –

141 

an appetite she says she shares – as 

the most obvious link between his 

approach to trading and philanthropy. 

Once the foundation has identified 

areas where they believe they can 

make the biggest difference, they go 

all in. “We’re not looking to create 

an organisation of safe success,” she 

says. “We’re looking to create an 

organisation of thoughtful failure 

and fantastic success.” 

Arnold is, in at least one respect, 

trying to make science a little more 

like finance. In recent decades, maths 

and science whizzes such as Arnold 

have invaded Wall Street, bringing 

a level of scientific precision to trading 

and often making fortunes in the 

process. And good traders, as Arnold 

sees it, naturally come to appreciate 

something that researchers too often 

miss: it’s very easy to be fooled by 

your own data. They internalise the 

risk of mistaking correlation for 

causation – not because they’re 

smarter than scientists but because 

they have money riding on 

the outcome. “As a general rule, the 

incentives related to quantitative 

research are very different in the social 

sciences and in financial practice,” says 

James Owen Weatherall, author of The 

Physics of Wall Street. “In the sciences, 

one is mostly incentivised to publish 

journal articles, and especially 

to publish the sorts of attentiongrabbing 

and controversial articles 

that get widely cited and picked up 

by the popular media. The articles have 

to appear methodologically sound, 

but this is generally a lower standard 

than being completely convincing. 

In finance, meanwhile, at least when 

one is trading with one’s own money, 

there are strong incentives to work 

to that stronger standard. One is 

literally betting on one’s research.” 

In conversations with Arnold and 

his grantees, the word incentives 

seems to come up more than any other. 

The problem, they claim, isn’t that 

scientists don’t want to do the right 

thing. On the contrary, Arnold says he 

believes that most researchers go into 

their work with the best of intentions, 

only to be led astray by a system that 

rewards the wrong behaviours. 

“Scientists really do want to discover 

things that make a difference in 

people’s lives,” says Goodman. “In a 

sense, that’s the strongest weapon that 

we have. We can feed off that.” Figuring 

out exactly what rewards work best 

and how to simultaneously change the 

incentives for researchers, institutions, 

RESEARCHERS 

HAVE THE BEST OF 

INTENTIONS 

BUT THE SYSTEM 

REWARDS 

THE WRONG 

BEHAVIOURS 

journals and funders is now a key area 

of interest for Goodman and Ioannidis. 

At the Center for Open Science, 

Nosek has already begun to experiment 

with new incentives for scientists. 

Because investigating and replicating 

research begins with having the data 

and materials necessary to do so, he 

is focused on making science more 

transparent. In 2014 he partnered 

with the journal Psychological Science 

to offer colourful “Open Data” and 

“Open Materials” badges for papers 

that met specific criteria for sharing. 

A 2016 study to determine the 

effectiveness of the badges showed 

that the number of articles that 

reported publicly available data had 

increased tenfold. “It’s a stupid 

little badge,” Nosek says, but it works. 

Nosek is also still campaigning to 

convince researchers to preregister 

what they plan to analyse and report 

in a study, so that they can’t adjust their 

experiment on the fly or hide less-thandazzling 

results – a problem that 

Goldacre is also tackling. To promote 

preregistration, the Center for Open 

Science offered the first 1,000 scientists 

who preregister their studies with the 

organisation $1,000 each. Nosek says 

that the cash offers were Arnold’s idea. 

Denis Calabrese, the Arnold 

Foundation’s president, says they don’t 

expect immediate results. The Arnolds 

have a “multiple-decade timeline to 

work on problems”. Yet the most 

remarkable thing about the Arnold 

Foundation’s research integrity 

projects is that they already appear to 

be paying off. For one thing, the 

problems plaguing scientific research 

are now increasingly well known. Of 

1,576 researchers who responded to 

a recent online survey from Nature, 

more than half agreed there is “a 

significant crisis” of reproducibility. 

The comedian John Oliver spent 20 

prime-time minutes on HBO last May 

mocking the reign of terrible science 

on TV news shows and in public debate: 

“After a certain point, all that ridiculous 

information can make you wonder: ‘Is 

science bullshit?’ To which the answer 

is clearly no, but there’s a lot of bullshit 

masquerading as science.” (Some of 

the background footage in the segment 

came from the Arnold Foundation.) 

Ioannidis, whose name is almost 

synonymous with scientific scepticism, 

says he has seen immense progress in 

recent years. The journals Science and 

Nature have started bringing in 

statisticians to review their papers. The 

National Institutes of Health (NIH) is 

moving forward with new requirements 

for data sharing; starting as early as 

this year, all NIH-funded training 

programmes must include plans for 

teaching researchers the principles of 

reproducibility. “Now everybody says 

we need replication; we need 

reproducibility,” Ioannidis says. 

“Otherwise our field is built on thin air.” 

The Center for Open Science’s next 

undertaking is another reproducibility 

project – this one for cancer studies. 

In 2012, the former head of cancer 

research at the biotech firm Amgen 

revealed the results of the company’s 

effort to replicate 53 “landmark” papers 

in hematology and oncology; only 

six studies’ findings could be confirmed. 

So there is already widespread concern 

about reproducibility in the field. 

The centre’s replication efforts, in 

turn, have inspired economists and 

even tropical ecologists to plan 

reproducibility projects of their own. 

Whether all this momentum will lead 

to transformational change decades 

from now is impossible to know. 

Arnold figures that some of his specific 

grants might not work out as planned. 

(The foundation’s funding of the 

Nutrition Science Initiative is now 

scheduled to end in November.) More 

generally, it may not be possible to truly 

reform a system where the incentives 

are already so deeply embedded. 

“It’s probably too big a lift for us to 

expect we’re going to change 

researchers who have been around for 

decades,” he says. Plus, systems of 

prestige and advancement die hard. 

“You don’t shift a culture overnight,” 

Nosek says. But as many Wall Street 

veterans can testify, betting against 

John Arnold is usually a bad idea. 

Sam Apple teaches science writing at 

the University of Pennsylvania

142 / DETA ILS / OVERHEARD / CONTACTS 

OVERHEARD 

THIS MONTH 

“What’s this 

overdue China 

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Journalists: pitch 

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“I’d like to point 

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was predicted 

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Some you’ll 

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It’s not an order. 

Just a preference.” 

“If humans 

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definitely can’t be 

trusted with cars.” 

HOW THE WORLD 

ENDS THIS MONTH 

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Twitter 

Self-driving cars 

Southern Rail 

José Mourinho 

Donald Trump 

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144 / INFORMA TION / WE SOURCE EVERYTHING. SEE RIGHT 

The number of identical robots that danced together 

at a beer festival in Shandong, China, setting a world 

record for the most robots moving simultaneously 

Proportion of US adults who 

would be enthusiastic 

about using chips to enhance 

their brains, according to 

a Pew Research Center poll 

Proportion of US adults who 

think such enhancements will 

further increase inequality in 

society, as they will only be 

affordable for the very wealthy 

The time it takes, on average, for drivers to react to an autonomous vehicle’s request to take over 

the wheel, according to a 2015 study by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 

Energy saved by its data centres 

after Google’s DeepMind assessed 

its consumption patterns 

The year in which computer transistors 

are expected to stop shrinking, 

thus putting an end to Moore’s law, 

according to the International Technology 

Roadmap for Semiconductors 

The amount by which HTC increased the UK price of its Vive VR 

headset, from £689 to £759, in the aftermath of Brexit 

Amount of time it will still take for mathematicians to verify a 500-page 

mathematical proof, a 2012-published solution to the abc conjecture about 

whole numbers, according to its author, Shinichi Mochizuki 

Increased risk 

of death to 

cardiovascular 

disease among 

astronauts who have 

taken part in Nasa’s 

Apollo missions 

The number of mouse genes 

associated with a propensity 

for alcoholism, according 

to a study by researchers from 

Purdue and Indiana University 

The age of the oldest known human cancer, an 

osteosarcoma found on a hominid bone in South Africa 

Salary offered (plus benefits) by the Smithsonian 

Institution’s National Museum of American History for 

the position of beer historian. The successful candidate 

requires a sound knowledge of the craft industry 

WORDS: GIAN VOLPICELLI. ILLUSTRATION: GIACOMO GAMBINERI. SOURCES: WWW.PEWINTERNET.ORG; HTC VIVE; NATIONAL HIGHWAY TRAFFIC SAFETY ADMINISTRATION; SAJS.CO.ZA; NATURE.COM; PLOS GENETICS; 

SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY ASSOCIATION; SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION’S NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY

“Ars comes up with insight 

that no one else has.” 

Sergey Brin, cofounder, Google 

Ars Technica, founded in 1998, is the 

world’s most influential technology website 

and community, providing deep analysis and 

impartial reporting of the confluence of 

science, technology, policy, and the Internet. 

Tech news with real impact 

ARSTECHNICA.CO.UK

W-i-r-ed_UK_-_March_2017

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