WIRED25: Stories of People Who Are Racing to Save Us
WIRED, October 15, 2019
Business
By WIRED Staff
“Humanity is facing thorny problems on all fronts. These folks are working to solve them—and trying to avoid the unintended consequences this time.”
Climate change. Flawed algorithms. Deadly diseases. Tech monopolies. We are facing many existential challenges that need to be tackled head-on before it’s too late. Many of these problems are of our own making, consequences of our relentless push for progress. Fortunately, there are lots of people who are racing to save us from ourselves—progress we can definitely get behind.
Whether it’s arming the immune system’s T-cells to precisely target tumors, developing eco-friendly alternatives to livestock-industry meat, or monitoring the internet’s hell sites to sniff out trouble, the 25 people and groups here offer real hope that we can fix the mistakes of the past and still have a chance for a future we can survive. —The Editors
Internet Salmagundi has selected several of the people and groups featured in the article as of particular interest to the interests of this website. Below are the names and brief idea each is focused on. To read each in full please read the article.
Wendell Lim
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGIST / UC San Francisco
MEDICINE – Arming the Immune System to Kill Cancer—and More
Joy Buolamwini
FOUNDER / Algorithmic Justice League
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – Calling Out Bias Hidden in Facial-Recognition Technology
Guillaume Chaslot
FOUNDER / AlgoTransparency
FILTER BUBBLES – Pushing Big Tech to Clean Up Its Algorithms
Eva Galperin
HEAD OF THREAT LAB / Electronic Frontier Foundation
CYBERSECURITY – Protecting the Rest of Us From Hackers and Spies
The youth plaintiffs in Juliana v. United States
ACTIVISM – Suing the US Government Over Climate Change
Lina Khan
MAJORITY COUNSEL / The US House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law
ANTITRUST – Laying the Foundation to Break Up Big Tech
Mariana Mazzucato
FOUNDER & DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR INNOVATION AND PUBLIC PURPOSE / University College London
ECONOMICS – Lighting the Way to a Moon Shot to Fight Climate Change
Alex Stamos
DIRECTOR / Stanford Internet Observatory
DIGITAL ABUSE – Powering Real-Time Research Into Online Cesspools
Dana DeBeauvoir
COUNTY CLERK / Travis County, Texas
ELECTION SECURITY – Saying ‘Enough’ to Lousy, Vulnerable Voting Technology
Jack Conte
COFOUNDER & CEO / Patreon
CULTURE – Helping the Creative Class Survive—and Thrive—on the Internet
Dominic Williams
PRESIDENT & CHIEF SCIENTIST / Dfinity
BLOCKCHAIN – Breaking Big Tech’s Monopoly on Cloud Computing
Christopher Fabian & Sunita Grote
UNICEF Ventures
CONNECTIVITY – Bringing Broadband Internet to Underserved Parts of the Globe
Moriba Jah
DIRECTOR / Astria
TRAFFIC CONTROL – Tracking All the Debris Threatening Earth’s Orbital Highways
Hany Farid
RESEARCHER / UC Berkeley
DEEPFAKE DETECTING – Creating Tools to Suss Out Manipulated Digital Images
Anne Neuberger
DIRECTOR / NSA Cybersecurity Directorate
NATIONAL SECURITY – Collecting Signals to Defend the ‘Nation’s Most Sensitive Networks’
About the Author:
WIRED Editors: Megan Molteni, Tom Simonite, Andy Greenberg, Saraswati Rathod, J. Brian Charles, Brian Barrett, Benjamin Wofford, John Gravois, Gregory Barber, Anthony Lydgate, Daniel Oberhaus, and Lily Hay Newman.
