Gadget Lab: Weekly Tech News from WIRED

If you haven’t heard of it before, you’re about to become intimately familiar with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. This system of currents—which brings water up the Atlantic from the southern tip of South America, through the tropics, and all the way to the coast of Iceland before looping back down south—plays a key role in keeping our planet’s climate stable. It keeps northern European winters relatively mild, it provides nutrients to ocean life, and it brings much-needed rain to agricultural systems in equatorial zones.

Researchers who study the AMOC say this system is showing signs of instability, and it could shut down entirely—and soon. If the current slows down or stops, it would potentially kick off an ecological disaster of epic proportions. Deep cold spells, crushed food systems, entire regions in drought. 

This week, we bring WIRED features editor Sandra Upson onto the show to talk about the AMOC, the research that’s being done on it, and what life would be like on Earth if the current reaches its tipping point. Buckle up. 

Show Notes:

Read “How Soon Will the Atlantic Ocean Break? Two Sibling Scientists Tried to Answer That—and Shook the World,” Sandra Upson’s WIRED feature on the researchers who are studying the AMOC and who have estimated the current could collapse in the next 30 years or so. Read our previous coverage of the AMOC research that kicked off the present debate about when it could reach the tipping point.

Recommendations:

Sandra recommends watching trashy reality shows in a language you’re trying to learn as an informal and entertaining study aid. Mike recommends embracing Brat Summer—IYKYK. Lauren recommends the book The Wave by Susan Casey, which is about the science and joy and terror of big waves.

Sandra Upson can be found on social media @sandraupson. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Voice assistants have become a constant presence in our lives. Maybe you talk to Alexa or Gemini or Siri to ask a question or to perform a task. Maybe you have to do a little back and forth with a voice bot whenever you call your pharmacy, or when you book a service appointment at your car dealership. You may even get frustrated and start pleading with the robot on the other end of the line to connect you with a real human.

That’s the catch, though: These voice bots are starting to sound a lot more like actual humans, with emotions in their voice, little ticks and giggles in between phrases, and the occasional flirty aside. Today’s voice-powered chatbots are blurring the lines between what’s real and what’s not, which prompts a complicated ethical question: Can you trust a bot that insists it’s actually human?

This week, Lauren Goode tells us about her recent news story on a bot that was easily tricked into lying and saying it was a human. And WIRED senior writer Paresh Dave tells us how AI watchdogs and government regulators are trying to prevent natural-sounding chatbots from misrepresenting themselves.

Show Notes:

Read more about the Bland AI chatbot, which lied and said it was human. Read Will Kight’s story about researchers’ warnings of the manipulative power of emotionally expressive chatbots.

Recommendations:

Lauren recommends The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. (Again.) Paresh recommends subscribing to your great local journalism newsletter or Substack to stay informed on important local issues. 

Mike recommends Winter Journal, a memoir by Paul Auster.

Paresh Dave can be found on social media @peard33. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Ozempic has been hailed as a miracle drug. It is the most well known of the GLP-1 medications, a class of drugs that can help regulate appetite, digestion, and blood sugar—and help those suffering from obesity or diabetes lose weight. Naturally, these drugs are very much in demand. But now there is a shortage of Ozempic and other GLP-1s, which has led to a swell of clones that purport to offer the same benefits and the same key ingredient, semaglutide, at lower prices. These clone drugs are easy to procure from telehealth providers, even if a buyer needs to lie about themselves a little bit to buy them.

In this brave new weight-loss world, we're still coming to grips with how these drugs fit into our society. Part of that journey is the continued study about how GLP-1 drugs work—much of how they affect us is still unknown—and the continued debate about how much we should regulate and control their use.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with WIRED writers Kate Knibbs and Emily Mullin about how GLP-1 medications like Ozempic work and what happens when they don’t. We also talk about the current drug shortage and how that may get resolved.

Show Notes:

Read Kate’s story about buying cloned Ozempic online. Read Emily’s story about how Ozempic doesn’t work for everyone. Read all the stories in WIRED’s The Age of Ozempic series.

Recommendations:

Emily recommends staying cool this summer however you can. Kate recommends the HBO series John Adams, starring Paul Giamatti. Mike recommends buying a used 35-mm film camera and shooting some rolls to flex your creativity.

Kate Knibbs can be found on social media @Knibbs. Emily Mullin is @emilylmullin. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Back in March, the US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a long in the works rule requiring automakers here to dramatically increase the number of battery-powered vehicles they’re putting on the roads. The government has mandated that by 2032, more than half of new cars sold must be electric. There are some caveats, namely that plug-in hybrid cars will fulfill the federal requirements for what a “battery-powered” vehicle is. 

This has led to a flood of hybrid cars hitting the market. This week, we talk about what this means for people who are considering buying a new car now, or in the next few years. We explain the differences between plug-in hybrids, full hybrids, and electrics, and we tell you what your options are if you live in an apartment without a convenient place to plug in your car while it’s parked. 

We are joined this week by WIRED staff writer Aarian Marshall, who breaks down the facts, shatters the myths, and turns us all into hybrid car experts.

This episode originally aired on April 2, 2024. Read the transcript.

Show Notes:

Read Aarian’s story about the new US emissions rules. Also read her story about automakers struggling to hit their US sales targets for electric cars.

Recommendations:

Aarian recommends going to one of those baseball games where you also bring your dog. (They let you run the bases!) Mike recommends The New York Trilogy by novelist Paul Auster, who died this week at 77. Lauren recommends The Lights, the newest book of poetry and prose by Ben Lerner.

Aarian Marshall can be found on social media @aarianmarshall. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Even if you’ve never taken a puff from a vape in your life, you know about Juul. At the company’s peak in 2018, its e-cigarette was one of the most recognizable consumer devices on the planet, and Juul Labs was worth $38 billion. Just a few short years later, after being squeezed by government regulators and prohibition-minded anti-tobacco advocates, Juul’s valuation plummeted and its market share vaporized.

The story of Juul—and its thousands of imitators—is outlined in Backfired: The Vaping Wars, a new nine-part podcast from Prologue Projects. The show traces the history of e-cigarettes, nicotine vaporizers, and synthetic nicotine by following the paths of Juul and its thousands of competitors as the vape companies gain public acceptance, fight for market share, and butt heads with government agencies. It’s a fascinating ride filled with new reporting, so even if you’ve read and listened to everything about Juul and vaping, you’ll hear some shocking new information in this series.

This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with Backfired’s hosts, Arielle Pardes and Leon Neyfakh. 

Show Notes:

Backfired is an Audible original, so go to audible.com/backfired to listen. Also check out Louise Matsakis’ story about the next generation of cheap, illegal vapes coming from China.

Recommendations:

Arielle recommends Timeshifter’s Jet Lag App. Leon recommends the Yoto Player for getting kids into podcasts. Lauren recommends The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray. Mike recommends Subpar Pool, a game by Holedown creator Martin Jonasson.

Arielle Pardes can be found on social media @pardesoteric. Leon Neyfakh is @leoncrawl. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Web crawling—the act of indexing information across the internet—has been around for decades. It has primarily been used by search engines like Google and nonprofits like Internet Archive and Common Crawl to catalog the contents of the open internet and make it searchable. Until recently, the practice of web crawling has rarely been seen as controversial, as websites depended on the process as a way for people to find their content. But now crawling tech has been subsumed by the great AI-ening of everything, and is being used by companies like Google and Perplexity AI to absorb whole articles that are fed into their summarizing machines.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs joins the show to talk about web crawling and the controversy over Common Crawl. Then we talk with Forbes’ chief content officer and editor Randall Lane about how Perplexity.AI repurposed a Forbes article and presented it as its own story, without first asking permission or properly citing the source.

Show Notes:

Read Kate’s story about how publishers are going after Common Crawl over AI training data. Read Randall’s story about how Preplexity.AI copied the work of two Forbes reporters.

Recommendations:

Randall recommends his new horse racing league, the National Thoroughbred League. Kate recommends the book Victim by Andrew Boryga. Lauren recommends the show Hacks on Max.

Randall Lane can be found on social media @RandallLane. Kate Knibbs is @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

This week, Apple executives used the keynote address of the company’s annual developers conference to debut all of the artificial intelligence capabilities that are coming to iPhones, iPads, and Macs. The team showed off how generative tools will help users write emails, clean up iPhone photos, illustrate presentations, and make custom emoji characters. 

Adding AI to everything is par for the course in 2024, as all of the big tech companies have been loading up their software with similar generative features. But Apple is late to this particular party. The company has been perceived as being “behind” in generative AI, since OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and a whole bunch of startups have already made massive inroads. But is Apple really behind? And what makes Apple’s AI—cheekily named Apple Intelligence—different?

This week, we welcome WIRED senior writer Will Knight back onto the show to talk about Apple Intelligence, the new Siri, and how Apple is trying to differentiate itself in the AI race.

Show Notes:

Read Will’s new story about Apple Intelligence’s launch, and his news analysis piece on how Apple will need to make sure its AI doesn’t disappoint, annoy, or offend iPhone users. Read Boone Ashworth’s roundup of everything Apple announced at WWDC. Lauren tells us why Apple’s AI play is also its best shot at getting you to upgrade your iPhone. Julian Chokkattu has a comprehensive overview of all the AI features coming to iOS. Read all of our WWDC coverage.

Recommendations:

Will recommends the AutoGen multi-agent conversational framework. Mike recommends Klean Kanteen’s Rise Food Box. Lauren recommends the Lunya washable silk sleep mask. 

Will Knight can be found on X @willknight. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Google has spent the past year lustily rolling out AI features across its platforms. But with each launch, it is becoming more clear that some of these so-called enhancements should have simmered a little longer. The latest update to stoke equal parts excitement and ridicule is AI Overviews, the new auto-generated summary boxes that appear at the top of some Google search results.

In theory, AI Overviews are meant to answer questions and neatly summarize key information about people's search queries, offering links to the sources the summaries were pulled from and making search more immediately useful. In reality, these AI Overviews have been kinda messy. The information the summary confidently displays can be simply, and sometimes comically, wrong. Even when the AI Overview is correct, it typically only offers a slim account of the topic without the added context—or attribution—contained in the web pages it’s pulling from. The resulting criticisms have forced Google to reportedly dial back the number of search queries that trigger AI Overviews, and they are now being seen less frequently than they were at launch.

This week, we talk with WIRED writers Kate Knibbs and Reece Rogers about the rollout, how Google has been managing it, and what it's like to watch our journalism get gobbled up by these hungry, hungry infobots.

Show Notes:

Read Kate’s story about Google trimming the frequency of its AI Overviews. Read Reece’s story about how Google’s AI Overviews copied his original work. Read Lauren’s story about the end of Google Search as we know it.

Recommendations:

Kate recommends Token Supremacy by Zachary Small. Reece recommends the game Balatro. Lauren recommends the poetry book Technelegy by Sasha Stiles. Mike recommends the book Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock by Christoph Dallach.

Kate Knibbs can be found on social media @Knibbs (X) or @extremeknibbs (Threads/IG). Reece Rogers is @reece___rogers. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Domain names have value, even when the websites that were once hosted there are shut down or abandoned. Prospectors will often swoop in and snatch up an unused domain, then erect a new website filled with clickbait articles. If the domain name used to rank highly in search results, the new clickbait articles will also rank highly, guaranteeing the prospector a steady stream of visitors searching the web for common phrases. 

These zombie sites are all over the web; you’ve probably landed on them many times yourself. But this shady market is poised to grow exponentially thanks to the proliferation of generative AI tools. Text generators like ChatGPT make it easier for prospectors to crank out clickbait articles at greater speed, feeding an already raging river of pablum.

This week, Kate Knibbs tells us about her WIRED story on one of these entrepreneurs in the world of AI-generated clickbait hosted on squatted domains.

This episode originally aired February 15, 2024. Read the full transcript.

Show Notes:

Read Kate’s story about Nebojša Vujinović Vujo and his clickbait empire. Also read Kate’s original investigation into what happened to The Hairpin, a popular blog for womens’ writing that went defunct and was then reborn as a content mill.

Recommendations:

Kate recommends the novella Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler. Brian recommends the novel The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Lauren recommends giving up fancy, creamy coffee drinks for Lent. Mike recommends the social media platform BlueSky, which is now open to everyone.

Kate Knibbs can be found on social media @Knibbs. Brian Barrett is @brbarrett. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

People everywhere are hot for heat pumps. These electric appliances—which perform the same heating and cooling tasks as traditional HVAC systems, just much more efficiently—have been outselling gas furnaces over the past couple of years. Their proliferation seems to be pointing more towards an energy-conscious electric future in people’s homes. And, four months ago, nine states in the US signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030.

But, what exactly is a heat pump? How does it work? How much does it cost to replace your furnace with one, and how much money does making the switch actually save you in the long run? Let’s also consider the same question we’re asking about AI: how much will this change or displace existing jobs for the people who have been trained to install and service traditional HVAC systems?

WIRED staff writer Matt Simon is our in-house heat pump expert. He joins us this week to tell us everything we need to know about these appliances he calls “climate superheroes.”

Show Notes:

Read all of our heat pump coverage. Don’t miss Matt’s story about the heat pump technician shortage. Matt also took a look at the in-window heat pumps now hitting the market that look and operate like in-window AC units. WIRED’s Rhett Alain digs into the physics of heat pumps.

Recommendations:

Matt recommends the book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Edward Slingerland. Mike recommends the book Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna. Lauren recommends taking a staycation.

Matt Simon can be found on social media @mrmattsimon. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.