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PODCAST

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

Welcome to Uncanny Valley—an insider look at the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley—where each week, WIRED’s writers and editors bring you original reporting and analysis about some of the biggest stories in tech. On Tuesdays, WIRED’s Global Editorial Director Katie Drummond sits down with influential figures in culture, politics, business, science, and beyond for a discussion captured through the WIRED lens.On Thursdays, Lauren Goode and Michael Calore to break down a recent

technology

All Episodes

38:57

Nothin’ but Bluesky

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/05/04

In the months since Elon Musk took over Twitter and started making all kinds of unpopular changes, people have been looking for other places online where they can hang out instead.Of all the Twitter-like social platforms to emerge as safe havens for the hordes—Mastodon, T2, Post, Notes—the one with the most buzz is Bluesky. It’s popular because ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is one of the people behind it, but also because it’s still in beta and sign-ups are invitation-only. Scarcity breeds

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37:17

This Episode Is Nuts

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/04/27

The most successful industries out there are the ones that play to consumers' insecurities. Many self-care companies prey on people’s anxieties about how they look and smell, offering products that purport to make the wearer more appealing to romantic prospects and the rest of society by making them more attractive and less smelly. For much of the modern era, these products have been aimed at women, reinforcing dominant beauty standards and making bucket loads of money as sales have soared

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28:16

I Know What You Did With That Bitcoin

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/04/20

If you’ve committed any internet crimes lately, you probably shouldn’t have paid for them with Bitcoin. While many crypto-evangelists have long thought of digital currency as a means of buying legal and illicit goods on the web with total anonymity, the fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency transactions leave a digital trail behind them that can point to your true identity. No matter how hard you try to hide, a dedicated sleuth with the right resources can find you.This week on Gadget Lab,

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35:43

Send in the Clones

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/04/13

Artificial intelligence continues to seep into every aspect of our lives: search results, chatbots, images on social media, viral videos, documentaries about dead celebrities. Of course, it’s also seeping into our ears through our podcast clients.A new class of emerging AI-powered services can take audio clips from voice recordings and build models off them. Anything you type into a computer can be spit out as an impression of that person’s voice. Proponents of AI voice cloning see these

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28:26

Like, Follow, Subscribe to Cars

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/04/06

It used to be that when you bought a car, you just picked out the model and color you wanted and selected the optional extras. When the dealer rang up the total, that’s all you had to pay. Now, it’s becoming more common to pay a base price for a car and then subscribe to those extras. Big stuff like driver assistance features or fast-charging capability and even smaller stuff like heated seats and dash cams can be unlocked in a new car by paying the automaker a yearly or monthly fee. This

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36:24

Sidewalk Surfin’

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/03/30

Amazon has sold a lot of connected devices, and now it’s putting those devices to work. Millions of Ring cameras and Echo speakers sitting in homes across the US have the potential to share a little bit of their internet bandwidth with other Amazon devices that need it. This network, made up almost entirely of consumer gadgets installed in people’s homes, is called Amazon Sidewalk. The company has been bolstering Sidewalk for years, adding device after device to this sleeper army of

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38:59

The Sacred Mountain of Chip-Making

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/03/23

If you're reading this, you can thank a semiconductor. Phones, tablets, computers—really any device more digital than pen and paper—all depend on the tiny chips inside them to function. The semiconductor industry is massive, and at the center of it all is one massive firm that makes the bulk of the chips we all rely on: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The company, known widely as just TSMC, is not only the most important enterprise in the chip industry, but it’s also a powerful

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44:49

I Love You, I Hate You, Don’t Call Me

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/03/16

Our smartphones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact that we’re buying far fewer of them than we used to.This week, we talk about what the future looks like for smartphones. They’ll likely get more foldable, their voice features could grow chattier, and they might even come with a chip to recognize AI-generated nonsense

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47:39

ChatGPT in Schools

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/03/09

The worst part of going to school is all the homework. Nothing strikes dread in a student’s heart quite like facing down a deadline on a seven-page essay. That’s why some of them may find it tempting to turn those hours of work into a task that can be breezed through in a matter of seconds by an AI-powered app. Generative tools like ChatGPT have wormed their way into the school system, causing panic among teachers and administrators. While some schools have banned the tech outright, others

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34:21

We Really Recommend This Episode

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/03/02

The modern internet is powered by recommendation algorithms. They're everywhere from Facebook to YouTube, from search engines to shopping websites. These systems track your online consumption and use that data to suggest the next piece of content for you to absorb. Their goal is to keep users on a platform by presenting them with things they'll spend more time engaging with. Trouble is, those link chains can lead to some weird places, occasionally taking users down dark internet rabbit

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31:31

Netflix Is No Longer Chill

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/02/23

The promise of streaming TV was that you could watch whatever you wanted, when you wanted. And for a while, that was mostly true. But recently, streaming services have started to dial back the nice-guy stuff and reel in the freebies. Companies across the stream-o-sphere are tweaking subscription tiers, raising prices, and canceling unprofitable shows. Netflix has introduced an ad-supported tier to its formerly ad-free service, and even started cracking down on people sharing account

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32:53

Real Humans Chat About Chatbots

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/02/16

The unstoppable march of artificial intelligence carries on. In mere weeks, AI has oozed into nearly everything we interact with on the internet, from conversations, to journalism, to how we look stuff up online. It's even got Google scrambling to reclaim its spot on the search throne after Microsoft implemented its own AI tools to miraculously make Bing feel relevant again.This week, we talk with WIRED senior writer Will Knight about how generative AI is changing how we search for

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27:28

I Know What You Did With That Bitcoin

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/02/09

If you’ve committed any internet crimes lately, you probably shouldn’t have paid for them with Bitcoin. While many crypto-evangelists have long thought of digital currency as a means of buying legal and illicit goods on the web with total anonymity, the fact is that nearly all cryptocurrency transactions leave a digital trail behind them that can point to your true identity. No matter how hard you try to hide, a dedicated sleuth with the right resources can find you.This week on Gadget Lab,

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35:05

Have We Reached Peak Smartphone?

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/02/02

Phones have been pretty boring for a long time. Don’t get us wrong—phones are still amazing little devices! It just feels like we haven’t seen any truly innovative phone designs or new standout features in a long while. This year’s phone looks and works a lot like last year’s phone. Your phone looks and works a lot like my phone. Have phones actually plateaued, leveled off, or chilled out? Is their transition from fetish object to commodity complete?The perfectly fine boringness of phones

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36:33

Why the Kids Love TikTok Search

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/01/26

TikTok’s influence is expanding well beyond the social sphere. The app is increasingly being used for the types of internet searches one would normally rely on a web search engine for. The video-based social app might not seem like the best place to find answers to your burning questions, but many users have made it their tool of choice for finding bars and restaurants to visit, movies to watch, or clothes to wear. It's a trend that has companies like Google more than a little concerned

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22:36

We Need to Talk About Your Stove

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/01/19

Gas stoves are so hot right now. A recent report found that emissions from gas cooktops are worsening both the environmental crisis and the health of the humans who use them. This knowledge has stoked a heated cultural debate in the US. Some people have piped up to advocate for phasing out gas stoves, while others have fired back that the government can pry gas stoves out of their cold (presumably because they stopped paying the gas bill) dead hands. While the controversy has blown up, the

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31:49

Oh, Deere!

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/01/12

The tractor company John Deere has faced a lot of criticism for the tight hold it keeps over its products. If someone needs to repair their tractor, they’ve got to do it through John Deere’s official channels, which farmers say creates unnecessary hassles. If a problem arises during harvest time, a days-long wait for a sanctioned repair could spell financial ruin. Now, in an effort to stave off lawsuits from right-to-repair advocates, John Deere is making some concessions about

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32:35

CES 2023: We Live Here Now

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2023/01/05

In the world of consumer tech, there’s no palette-cleanser for the new year quite like the annual CES, the giant electronics show. What better way to kick off 2023 than to find your way through the maze of metal and screens (and germs) and Alexa-equipped toothbrushes and pet-feeding robots (and germs) and hyper-futuristic electric vehicles that may never actually ship (also, probably germs)? Our WIRED editors on the ground at CES, keeping an eye out for the most important developments to

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39:38

Is It 2023 Yet?

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2022/12/29

Keeping on theme with the roaring ‘20s, this year has been a doozy. Social media sites are aflame, all that hype over the metaverse has fizzled, the cryptocurrency economy has all but collapsed, and you can't always tell if a piece of art was created by a person or an eerily human bot. The future is now, and there sure is a lot of it.On this final Gadget Lab episode of the year, we discuss 2022’s biggest stories and guess at what wild tech frontiers might be awaiting us all in 2023.Show

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38:23

Plastic Rap

Uncanny Valley | WIRED ·

2022/12/22

Plastic waste never really breaks down. It just splits into tinier and tinier pieces until it becomes trillions of microscopic bits scattered across the world. Microplastics are everywhere: In the air we breathe and the water we drink, atop the highest mountains and in the deepest parts of the ocean. Microplastics are even coursing through our bloodstreams and sitting in our digestive systems. It's a problem we have only recently begun to understand, and are still trying to figure out how

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