When humans and robots cross paths, the results aren’t just frustrating—the autonomous car, say, that’s too shy to turn left—they can also be fatal. Consider last year’s Uber crash, in which the self-driving algorithms weren’t coded to yield to an unexpected human jaywalker.At the WIRED25 conference Friday, Anca Dragan, a professor who studies human-robot interaction…

We don’t mean to be impolite, but—your personal data is showing. It’s everywhere. Facebook and Google and Amazon and a million other companies scoop it up and then dish it out, for billions of dollars, to advertisers and analysts and anyone else who wants to buy it. It’s owned by people you’ve never heard of…

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, thinks that the best way to convey to executives the importance of new employee orientation is through a story about a brutal prison murder.At the WIRED25 Festival in San Francisco on Friday, Horowitz said that when it comes to explaining these concepts to CEOs, the straightforward…

Uma Valeti makes a lot of promises, but one weighs heavier on his mind than others. He’s only got a few years to make good on the pledge he recently made to his daughter. That on the day she graduates high school, he’ll throw a party for her and her friends where they can chow…

Stewart Butterfield, one of the cofounders of Slack, acknowledged at the WIRED25 conference in San Francisco on Friday that it’s difficult to tell whether the company’s workplace-messaging software actually makes companies more productive.“Economic measures of the impact of productivity in IT investment, for like 35 years or so, have been kind of hard to do,”…

At the G7 meeting in Montreal last year, Justin Trudeau told WIRED he would look into why more than 100 African artificial intelligence researchers had been barred from visiting that city to attend their field’s most important annual event, the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, or NeurIPS.Now the same thing has happened again. More than…

If you post a picture, and no one sees how many people liked it, does it still exist? Instagram users in the United States are going to find out next week. Months after the company tested hiding "like" counts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Ireland, Italy, and Brazil, CEO Adam Mosseri announced today at…

For years, the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare maintained that as a sort of internet utility—providing speed, reliability, and security services to sites around the world—it had no role in moderating content online. But more recently, Cloudflare has stoked controversy by removing support, first for the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer in August 2017 and…

Make way for the future. Friday, WIRED25 returns to San Francisco for two days packed with forward-thinking talks and activities by some of the world’s most innovative and influential people.We’ll have climate activists and CEOs, actors and authors, scientists and engineers—plus a guy who can teach you to make the world's best paper airplane. (Check…

The Roku remote is coming to your wrist. The company announced today the launch of an Apple Watch app that lets you control your Roku device, including Roku media players…