the wired world in 2024

In 2024, social media will get small.Not small in influence, of course. As the US weathers an election likely to be both divisive and often divorced from reality, social media will again be a battleground for public opinion and…

Can you imagine what a digital white ethnostate or a cyber caliphate might look like? Having spent most of my career on the inside of online extremist movements, I certainly can. The year 2024 might be the one in which neo-Nazis,…

Many years before ChatGPT was released, my research group, the University of Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory, wondered whether it was possible to have neural networks generate misinformation. To achieve this, we trained…

A recent global study, which surveyed 10,000 young people from 10 countries, showed that nearly 60 percent of them were extremely worried about the future state of the planet. The report, which was published in the medical journal The…

The platform is the canonical form of internet business: a two-sided market that facilitates connections between end-users and business customers. Uber connects drivers with riders; Amazon and eBay connect sellers with buyers; TikTok and…

Every November, the Global Carbon Project publishes the year’s global CO2 emissions. It’s never good news. At a time when the world needs to be reducing emissions, the numbers continue to climb. However, while emissions have been moving…

Earlier this year, Parkinson’s disease (PD) research entered a new era when the Michael J. Fox Foundation announced a momentous scientific breakthrough—the discovery of a biomarker for PD. It meant that, for the first time ever, we can…

In 2024, we will see courts and regulators around the world demonstrate that tech exceptionalism, when it comes to the applicability of legal rules, is magical thinking. The tide has already started to turn on the assumption that law and…

“It might be the best time for any kind of business in any industry to raise money for all of history, like since the time of the ancient Egyptians,” an excitable Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, told Farhad Manjoo in The New York Times…

In 2016, I wrote about an internet that affected the world in a direct, physical manner. It was connected to your smartphone. It had sensors like cameras and thermostats. It had actuators: thermostats, drones, autonomous cars. And it had…