Gadget Lab: Weekly Tech News

Self-lacing sneakers have been the dream since Marty McFly first rocked Nike MAGs in 1989, but most attempts at turning shoe leather into smart sneakers have been expensive, produced in small batches, and frankly, a little gimmicky. Until now: Earlier this week, Nike revealed Adapt BB, the company’s latest self-lacing basketball shoe. And these actually seem … smart. WIRED’s Peter Rubin joins the Gadget Lab podcast this week to talk about what it’s like to wear the new kicks, and describes all of the tech that goes into them. At $350, the Adapt BB’s are a little more accessible than previous iterations, though as Peter points out, they’re likely to be worn by professional athletes and Nike-backed college teams to start. Also on this week’s podcast: WIRED’s Nitasha Tiku talks about a group of Googlers who have launched a public awareness campaign about mandatory arbitration agreements, arguing that employers use them to suppress workers facing harassment and discrimination. Show notes: Peter’s story on Nike’

We came. We saw. We touched a lot of gadgets. This week was the annual CES, one of the world’s largest consumer electronics show, and WIRED’s team was on the ground covering all of the top tech trends to emerge from the show. In this week’s episode of the Gadget Lab podcast, Mike, Arielle, and Lauren talk about CES’s big security #fail, what all of these connected gadgets mean for the future of healthcare, and robots. Lots of robots. Later in the episode, Arielle talks to Jen Wong, the chief operating officer of Reddit, about the company’s “growing up” moment and how it plans to monetize its users. Show notes: Check out our best of CES list when you’ve finished listening to the pod. Our CES reporting goes beyond gadgets, as well: We have stories on how insidious logging your child’s data has become, why you should ignore the 5G hype (for now), and how women’s sexuality is apparently still taboo at CES. Recommendations this week: Arielle recommends getting a Yubikey for all your 2FA needs; Mike recommends t

If you had to sum up the year in tech in one word, what word would you choose? That’s what we at the Gadget Lab asked ourselves as we looked to somehow recap a year’s worth of tech-related drama in approximately 45 minutes. 2018 was the year that we learned about Cambridge Analytica; that social media’s role in the 2016 U.S. election came into sharper focus; that top tech executives were put in the Congressional hot seat; and that tech workers spoke out about everything from brutal work environments to how their firms’ technologies were being used by government agencies. At the same time, 2018 was also a year of remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the future of transport. And at the very least, our increasing awareness of some of the tech industry’s practices could lead us to a place in the new year where we’re making better decisions about what’s good and what’s not-so-good for us tech-consuming mortals. That’s what we’re telling ourselves, anyway. Also on this w

Most people, at this point, believe that climate change is a real thing that will harm future generations of humans. And yet, a cognitive dissonance exists around that knowledge and our sense of responsibility: A much smaller percentage of people believe that climate change is impacting them personally, according to Yale’s climate survey program. It is indeed impacting humans right now, with clear and compelling evidence that the global average temperature is much higher than anything modern society has experienced. And that has lead us to a whole host of issues, some of which WIRED writer Adam Rogers discusses with the Gadget Lab team on this week’s podcast. So what can we humans do to fix things – and how much of it can actually be fixed by personal actions, versus widespread policy? How much does our own consumption of tech add to the problem? We ask Adam these questions and more. Show notes: You can find some of Adam’s recent work here and here. Issie Lapowsky covered Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s trip to