a manifester redirecting the future of silicon valley's most important magazine. next enew a startup competes for the x prize of education trying to find the best way to teach in trying times. and artificial intelligence shows up in show media. that's this week on "press: here." ♪♪ ♪♪ good morninryone. i'm scott mcgrew. i started 25 years ago. i can still rememberle logo tha

said "pray." so many people were worried apple would go out of business. now, normally "wired" was very, very optimistic, a bit of techo utopianism, somebody called it. the magazine spoke to the possibilities of silicon valley. it's where i first learned about the existence of a magical place called fry's electronics. now a lot has changed between then and now. i live in silicon valley. fry's is gone. "wired" looks a lot more mainstream. and tech, well, tech has offered us less and less to cheer for sometimes. and that's what led me to "wired" global editorial director to give some thought about what the future of "wired" should be. he joins me now. good morning, gideon. the question is so serious in your mind, you've actually

written a manifesto about this. welcome to the new wired, the future begins here again, is the title you gave it. why so serious? >> well, i think that we're in a time when there's a lot of hope and also a lot of fear around technology and what it could do for us. and you described just now the "wired" of the '90s as the techno utopian publication. we went through the tech lash, the reverse of that attitude in the 2010s. "wired" and other tech media were fearful of what tec bringi much damage it was doing to society. now coming out of the pandemic there's a lot of excitement around the possibility of, for instance, mrna vaccines and other treatments. and at the same time there's, again, a lot of fear about what the impact of social media could be do on democracy. so what i'm trying to do with "wired" is steer a kind of

middle ground, if you like, and say, look, when we talk about technology's going to change everything and make the world a better place or when we say technology is going to destroy everything, both of those are wrong. what we're really about is the biggest problem the world faces and how people fix them and the role that technology plays in them. and sometimes that role is positive, sometimes it's negative. but we need to get out of this binary of always either hailing technology or blaming technology. >> i want to get to that binary in just a second because i agree with you that that exists and it causes so many problems. but there's nothing wrong with popular mechanics praising tools or "wired" praising tech. it's looking for the best, "wired"'s not a fan magazine, but it's always been a pro-tech publication. >> yeah. and i think -- look, there's something that i think is always constant in "wired," which is we're about how do you make the

future better. and we realized the potential of technology to do that. and one of the stories we just published, for instance, is about this attempt to store electricity on the grid using essentially gravity, using very heavy weights that are hoisted up by electric power, and then lowered to release electricity. and this might be a more sustainable long-term way of storing energy than batteries, which tend to degrade. we're all about things that could make a difference. but at the same time we also want to look at the potential downside. and so another story that we did recently is about carbon capture, about extracting co2 directly from the atmosphere to reduce global warming. and there is a very, very controversial debate about it going on with one side saying, this is going to be essential for us to combat climate change, and the other side saying, no, it's just a huge boondoggle because it actually helps the oil industry. and our story looks into both

sides of that. and i think we need to have that kind of nuance on what we're covering. >> that sounds like so many different things that are going on in tech. there's this -- you know, half the world seems breathless about some new invention, and they say damn if you if you don't believe me sort of attitude. there was a "wired" cover in the '90s about push. but fast forward a few decades, and there are people out there pushing the blockchain or pushing metaverse. and if you question it and point out metaverse is just virtual reality or you say something incredibly controversial like you know there are better cars than tesla, in my own opinion, people really lose their minds. there is that binary that it's either complete nonsense or it's the future. >> look, i think that part of our job is to help people just, you know, make sense of whereof this future is going. crypto and blockchain or the

metaverse are great examples. we very quickly have fallen into this position where either people are only interested in how much of the crypto world is speculative bubble that is only going to pull people in to lose their money versus the people who think that crypto and blockchain are going to transform the nature of governance and the nature of society and the nature of finance. and i think it's natural for people and natural for journalists as well to try to chart a course for one or the other of the narratives. they want to find out who's right. and of course the reality is always it's some mix of the two. i think a hell a lot of the crypto world is hype. i think a lot of people are going to lose their money. i think a lot of things are scams. and i don't think you can ignore it, i think there are going to be changes, longlasting ones from this, and it's incumbent on us to take those seriously and try to map out where they're going to go. i think it's going to be neither

as transformative as some people think, nor do i think it's just going to evaporate. >> it's such an important thing in journalism. i can't imagine a "wired" cover that says this new technology could be good, might be not, we're not quite sure. that's not a "wired" cover. >> no, it's true. but i think you can tell interesting stories about what happens when a new technology comes into the world and interacts with it. i think, again, the narrative of the past around technology was somebody invents something and it changes everything, or it changes things. and that misses out the role of people, it misses out the role of power structures. what's important is for us to examine what happens when you take technology and then it collides with social structures, with economic incentives, with

people's psychology, how all of that far plays out. >> and of course you're doing this at a time in which magazines are just undergoing a tremendous change. >> and every media organization is undergoing a lot of change. i like to think of "wired," in its best form, it's a place that helps bring people together for conversations about how to solve these problems. it's not only through the journalism that we do, but it's also through the way that we interact with our audiences, doing events. every media company is trying different ways to connect with its audiences and to become more sustainable. and i think what i want to do with "wired" is connect that with a mission of trying to help people make a difference in the world. >> well, gideon is "wired's" global editorial director. it's been a pleasure. i wish you the best of luck in moving forward with the magazine. and "press: here" will be right back.

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welcome back to "press: here." anyone who spends a lot of time on, say, twitter has probably seen angry or misleading posts from twitter users who have eight digits after their name, like dave 12783436. these are most likely computer-generated accounts. and while there may be real

people behind them, they may be automated. we've seen plenty of examples of foreign intelligence agencies manipulating americans online, and now the concern is those agencies may be able to automate much of that. let's bring in a former white house chief information officer and now the ceo of fort alice solutions. thanks for being with us. you know, ai and social media is one of your predictions of 2022. how concerned should we be? >> incredibly concerned. because what i learned in doing the research on these misinformation, manipulation, and disinformation campaigns for almost ten years now is they are starting to make loads of money. so every time you or i react, whether it's positively or negatively, to one of their campaigns on social media, they make pennies on the click on click-bait, on ads, on reactions. and they get exactly what they

want, sort of an intended reaction, but, at the same time, they get wealthy in the process. >> my first thought, was you know, foreign intelligence agencies, people who want to interfere with what we're doing because that's been well-documented. but there are a lot of situations in which it's just simple marketing, one way or the other. >> yes. and so the challenge we have going into 2022 is artificial intelligence as a technology is maturing. and so the availability to set up an artificial intelligence algorithm to actually scan the headlines of social media platforms to see what hashtags are trending, what topics are trending, and then to leverage these algorithms in such a way to produce what looks lying news stories, to produce headlines, to produce the click-bait. we will start to have manipulation campaigns run by ai

algorithms that basically run the internet and create these misinformation and disinformation campaigns. and it'll be on every topic imaginable. >> well, and i would imagine, you know, from an ai point of view that's fairly simple. you know, to get an ai to drive a car is a lot of factors. but dealing with something that, you know, keywords vaccine and then figuring out an account or an article is pro or anti, that kind of thing is pretty low-hanging fruit for ai developers. >> it really is. and they know within minutes whether or not their campaign is working. they know the moment nobody picks it up to the moment that, oh, wow, people are really picking this up, so this is what's trending, here's what's hot, here's what's not. and what'll happen is ai is contextually aware and self-learning. is so as the engineers behind the ai algorithms conducting the

misinformation, disinformation campaigns, as they build these algorithms, they will continue to feed them through machine learning, and the algorithms will get better and better at mimicking human behavior, which means they will fly below the radar of the governance models that each of the social media platforms have and be tricking people into sort of getting upset or, you know, walking away from a particular topic. >> that was going to be my next question, is that radar. twitter and facebook know this is coming or exists already. are they going to have the tools in order to fight it? >> this is going to be an ongoing battle, and it's going to feel a lot like the whack-a-mole game. so, although each of the social media companies does a good job today doing their best trying to combat misinformation and disinformation, things do slip through. and, again, it's free and

relatively easy to reverse-engineer your ai chatbots, your ai algorithms to mimic human behavior so that you fly under the radar. one of the things i found as far as very influential misinformation campaigns for sort of antivaccine and sort of perpetuating covid-19 conspiracy theories was the ai chat bots actually leveraging the accounts of people that had small numbers of followers but actually belonged to a lot of different affinity groups. posts seem fairly innocuous but they belong to a lot of different affinity groups, they post and repost a lot of things, it just takes one, and then you find yourself in this virtual community, it goes viral. and not only do you get your point across and sort of you win in the moment on that issue of

influence, but you also make loads of money in the process. >> yeah. i hadn't thought of using people or targeting specific people to do that. one of your other predictions of 2022 is an explosion of hacking in virtual reality. and notice i am not using the marketing word metaverse. but virtual reality, perhaps an entire vr platform could be hacked. certainly makes sense. >> yes. and this is going to be the new gold mine that cyber criminals are going to sort of try to achieve to go after. what makes virtual reality really work in a way that you and i want to use it and it seems realistic, whether it's conducting a business meeting, having a family get-together for people who can't or shouldn't travel and creating these incredible experiences using enhanced technology, in order to do that, it has to capture what many are starting to call the

internet of behaviors. so in addition to having your passwords, your favorite device that you use when you connect to the internet, whether or not you're a fast swiper or not or prefer a keyboard, in addition to that your emotions, your pulse rate, whether or not you hold your breath when something happens, all of those different emotions, the internet of behaviors are being captured when you interact with this technology. this digital gold mine that exists on these extended reality platforms will be targeted by cyber criminals, will be hacked, and, if so, we have a real identity theft crisis on our hands for years to come. because if i have more than just your biometrics but also your emotions, i can ostensibly do a digital walk-in on your life, and your own family members would have a hard time knowing if it was you or somebody nefarious acting like you.

>> it sounds like there's a movie to be read there. finally, i was reading a reddit post, and one of the questions was, should i put tape over my laptop's web cam? i started doing that to my laptop when i noticed that mark zuckerberg had done that to his laptop. >> one of the things that i always tell people is if you have a device that has a voicea or audio turned on either through voice or through an app, that means that is a device that is trained to turn on. and they can turn on at the most unexpected times and potentially livestream who you are, what you're doing, or record and send that information out. and it has happened, and it will continue to happen more in the future. so, think about things like disabling audio, disabling video, using a camera recording

cover so you can get something that looks nicer than a post-it note or a piece of tape. but certainly a piece of tape will do the job. it doesn't stop the audio from recording, but it does stop the video and the photographs from recording, and that can be a great way to protect your personal and work privacy. the other thing to think about as well is digital devices that have audio or video capability have no place in private spaces such as dressing rooms, children's rooms, and bathrooms. >> no, that makes perfect sense that some people are using their phones as alarm clocks or what not, maybe facedown would be okay but not a display and not a video display either. >> yeah, you're right. a lot of people do use them as alarm clocks. and one trick that people can think about is before you go to bed at night, you can set that alarm clock, instead of having it by your dressing area, by your table, you could move it to another part of the room where

you ostensibly while you're sleeping or, you know, just kind of hanging out in your room, the phone cannot record and watch you but yet you can hear it as an alarm clock. >> or just use an alarm clock. >> old school sometimes rules. >> i appreciate you being with us this morning. and "press: here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press: here." when you think about remote learning, kids attending class from home, you can see it's a direct analog of kids attending class in school instead of sitting in the classroom listening to the teacher, they're sitting on zoom listening to the teacher. but the bottom line is not much has changed when our children moved online and online learning. we use the same overall model. now, to solve that, the department of education and the x prize organization are encouraging educators to find new ways to teach in the modern online world. the x prize may sound familiar. it's the organization that awarded a prize for the first launch of a private human gone on to award all kinds of money for pioneering technology. one of the 33 contestants in the education version of the next x prize competition is physio-x which uses virtual reality to teach children with autism.

and some of its leaders join me this morning. good morning, ladies. talk to me generally about the challenges of teaching online before we get to the specifics. i mean, the advantages are obvious, it's safer, you can reach children around the world. but you really can't just take what you would do in a classroom and repeat it online. you got to do so much more than that. >> exactly, you're correct. students need something they can grasp and is more tangible. so we're here to redefine education by those needs. >> one of the ways you're doing that is virtual reality. was that driven by the consideration that you're teaching children with autism? or is that just the best way to do modern instruction online? >> so, in one of our studies we learned that children with autism, some like online video games and they tend to play video games for hours. so we are looking at not just autistic students, we're also looking at nonautistic students.

but it looks like a high percentage are also inclined to play video games. the reason we chose virtual reality and roblox, because we found that 67% of students under 16 spent at least three hours a day on roblox. this seemed like the most intuitive and logical step forward in terms of designing classes via roblox. >> roblox is a household word in so many households these days. but for those who don't know what roblox is, explain the basics to me. >> it's a platform for computer gaming. multiple users can play on it at the same time. it also has a vr extension that is something that we're looking into. and you can use your desktop or your ipad. so in terms of accessibility it goes a long way. >> and there are lots of different games that are just beyond shoot-em-ups or

traditional video games. they're thinking-type games. and you're experimenting with virtual reality. now that's going to add a cost. not everyone at home is going to have a vr headset. how do you get around that? >> that's why we started with roblox because a lot of the games that we're creating does not need virtual reality at this first step. that is our vision that more people will have access to virtual reality headsets in the future. but right away we are just on roblox using your desktop, using your ipad, you can basically learn how to do computer programming. so our first game actually looks into python programming. and as a game, buying pizza, paying your rent, like this would be turned into a game where essentially you're answering questions and learning about how to program in python. >> and the bottom line is -- and this was sort of my thesis as we begin, is you really cannot take when we're talking about online learning, you cannot just get a

bunch of kids in a brady bunch window much like we are at this very minute, in fact, and have an instructor and 20 little pictures. that works in the classroom but it doesn't really work online. we've got to rethink schooling if we're going to do it online. i see a lot of nodding heads there. >> yes. and i think in social research, i work in machine learning and data analysis. there is something called the technology adoption model. so, we are looking -- and kind of getting their opinion on not just the experience if it works for them. we're actually figuring out how to enhance that experience, make, like desiree said, make it more tangible, something they can take home at the end of the day. so how are we recreating that experience. >> and for other instructors that are watching this that maybe not necessarily using virtual reality, and maybe are not students with autism, but, generally speaking, as you do

your studies, what sort of things surprised you that you can pass on to other educators about online learning? >> well, as a general observation, students are very creative. so, any time you have the chance to create something or even pass the torch, like allow them to create as they learn. that's the best way for students to take on any kind of applied learning skill or any kind of, i guess, instructional, any kind of information you want them to digest when they have the chance to create alongside with you, that's the best way for students to learn. >> it reminds me a little bit of montessori of which i was a student many, many years ago. i appreciate you both being with me this morning. i wish you the best of luck with your x prize competition and physio-x. thanks for being there. "press: here" will be back in just a minute. on the next episode of

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that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests, and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. ♪♪ ♪♪ tour, and primetime's number one

show "sunday night football" only on nbc. it's a lovely d in the lone star state, a beautiful blue sky day to go indycar racing. we you to the xpel 375 at texas motor speedway in fort worth, texas, for round two of the ntt indycar series for 2022. hi, folks. leigh diffey