LETTER FROM
THE EDITORS
READ NOW
PHYSICS
THE QUANTUM APOCALYPSE
IS COMING. BE VERY AFRAID
by AMIT KATWALA
What happens when quantum computers can finally crack encryption and break into the world’s best-kept secrets? It’s called Q-Day—the worst holiday maybe ever.
by WILL KNIGHT
Guillaume Verdon is building a new kind of chip to accelerate AI. His alter ego wants to accelerate humanity itself.
Hot New Thermodynamic Chips
Could Trump Classical Computers
The
WEIGHT
of the
INTERNET
Will Shock You
Depending on who you ask, the internet weighs no more than a potato, a strawberry—or something much, much smaller. WIRED investigates.
by SAMANTHA SPENGLER
QUANTUM COMPUTING IS DEAD.
LONG LIVE QUANTUM
COMPUTING!
ARCHITECTURES
by WIRED STAFF
Schrödinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time. Ironically enough, so is quantum computing.
by WIRED STAFF
by CLAIRE L . EVANS
One of the simplest, most over-studied organisms
in the world is the C. elegans nematode. For 13 years, a project called OpenWorm has tried—and
utterly failed—to simulate it.
The Worm That No Computer Scientist Can Crack
ANGELINA JOLIE
WAS RIGHT ABOUT COMPUTERS
by JASON KEHE
“RISC architecture is gonna change everything.” Those absurdly geeky, incredibly prophetic words were spoken 30 years ago. Today, they’re somehow truer than ever.
How Software Engineers Actually Use AI
Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative
PLATFORM IN All of Science
by SHEON HAN
Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.
If Anthropic Succeeds, a Nation of
Benevolent AI Geniuses Could Be Born
by STEVEN LEVY
The brother goes on vision quests. The sister is a former English major. Together, they defected
from OpenAI, started Anthropic, and built (they say) AI’s most upstanding citizen, Claude.
The Tech You Need to
Level Up Your Humanity
by CHRIS HASLAM + JEREMY WHITE
Advancements in computing and robotics are changing how people live. Here are our favorite prosthetics, smart glasses, exoskeletons, and fitness trackers.
Tech companies don’t care whether you know how their products work. In fact, they don’t want you to know. The more you assume technology is conjured into existence by a priest class of techno-mystics whose powers dwarf your own, the more you allow yourself to be controlled by it (and them). Don’t let this happen. Though they seem to get more brain-fryingly complicated every year, computers are not, ultimately, magical devices. They are physics plus engineering, and they’re easy enough to break down. In this special edition of WIRED—with stories that map to a computer’s famous “layers of abstraction,” from the bitwise logic of circuits and gates up to the fancy products themselves—we go deep inside the modern machine, where incredible things are happening. Freaky-deaky things, yes, but grokkable just the same. So take the plunge. It’s time to get computers, people—before computers get you. —THE EDITORS
We surveyed 730 coders and developers about how (and how often) they use AI chatbots on the job. The results amazed and disturbed us.
COMING MARCH 25
GATES + CIRCUITS
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Once the grid goes down, an old programming language called Forth—and a new operating system called Collapse OS—may be our only salvation.
The Best Programming Language for the End of the World
by TIFFANY NG
OPERATING SYSTEMS
PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGES
ALGORITHMS +
APPLICATIONS
PRODUCTS
COMING MARCH 26
COMING MARCH 26
COMING MARCH 27
COMING MARCH 28
COMING MARCH 28