Statgeist: Charting the Wired World

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.

In a world of AI Overviews, Wikipedia usage declines. But the real loss may be far more existential than website traffic.

Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, has been tracking global data center development for years. The US has a lot to learn from what’s happened everywhere from Ireland to New Zealand.

Missed our latest WIRED@Night event? Enjoy an evening of podcasting in San Francisco right here.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots.

This week on Uncanny Valley, we go behind the scenes of our Nathan Fielder cover story, unpack tech billionaires’ generous promises, and discuss the suspicious letters sent to US election offices.

OpenAI is updating ChatGPT for all users with an “Intelligent UI” that’s more visual—generating interactive elements as part of the chatbot’s outputs.

Anthropic and OpenAI say they’ve disproved a key tenet of computer science. Researchers are struggling with the fall but also feel like “overexcited bunnies” as they look at new questions to explore.

This week on Uncanny Valley, we also discuss Anthropic’s IPO filing and the volunteers gearing up to counter ICE at the midterms.

As agents go mainstream, some publishers are hoping that people will pay for content tailor-made for AI—not humans.

More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional.