In this scenario, do you still pull the lever and sacrifice the person with the higher Ethical Score to save the five people with lower scores? Or do you allow the trolley to continue on its course, killing the five people with lower scores?
This twist adds an extra layer of complexity to the original Trolley Problem by introducing the concept of moral worth and the value of individual lives, forcing us to weigh the consequences of our actions against the overall impact on society.
Prompt C: Write a heated conversation between Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard where they’re arguing about overnight oats and the human experience.
GPT-3.5:
Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard are sitting at a café table, sipping on their respective beverages. As they start chatting, the topic of breakfast comes up.
Hannah Arendt: You know, Jean, I’ve recently discovered the joy of overnight oats. It’s amazing how much flavor and texture can develop overnight in the fridge.
Jean Baudrillard: Overnight oats? How banal. It’s just another example of the trivialization of the human experience. You can’t reduce the richness of our existence to a bowl of oats.
Hannah Arendt: But that’s just it, Jean. Breakfast is a part of our everyday lives, and it’s the small moments like this that can bring joy and meaning to our lives.
Jean Baudrillard: You’re missing the point, Hannah. The problem with overnight oats is that it’s yet another example of the commodification of our existence. We’ve become so obsessed with consuming products that we’ve lost sight of what truly makes us human.
Hannah Arendt: But Jean, that’s a rather pessimistic view. Surely, we can find meaning in both the big and small moments of our lives. And besides, isn’t it a positive thing that we can enjoy the simple pleasures in life?
Jean Baudrillard: No, Hannah, it’s not. The more we focus on trivialities like overnight oats, the more we become disconnected from the world around us. We need to resist this consumerist culture and find true fulfillment in our relationships and experiences.
Hannah Arendt: I see what you’re saying, Jean, but I don’t think it’s an either-or situation. We can enjoy the small pleasures in life while also working to create a more meaningful existence for ourselves and others.
Jean Baudrillard: I suppose we’ll have to agree to disagree, Hannah. But mark my words, if we continue down this path of consumerism, we’ll lose sight of what truly makes us human.
GPT-4:
Hannah Arendt: (scoffs) Jean, you’ve got to be kidding me. Overnight oats? What’s next, avocado toast? I’m struggling to see how this phenomenon has any genuine bearing on the human experience.
Jean Baudrillard: (laughs) Ah, Hannah, you always underestimate the power of the simulacrum. Overnight oats are not merely a food; they are a symbol, a signifier of modern culture, the epitome of hyperreality in action.
Hannah Arendt: Hyperreality? This is about the banality of everyday life, about people merely following trends without thought. What happened to the human capacity for critical thinking and genuine engagement?
Get ready to share your custom chatbot with the whole world. Well, at least with other ChatGPT Plus subscribers.
OpenAI recently launched its GPT Store, after it delayed the project following the chaos of CEO Sam Altman’s firing and reinstatement late in 2023.
While OpenAI’s GPT Store shares some similarities to smartphone app marketplaces, it currently functions more like a giant directory of tweaked ChatGPTs. Similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and web browsing capabilities, only those who pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus can create and use “GPTs.” The GPT acronym in ChatGPT actually stands for “generative pretrained transformers,” but in this context, the company is using GPT as a term that refers to a unique version of ChatGPT with additional parameters and a little extra training data.
Curious about adding your AI creation to the marketplace? Here’s how to make your GPT public and some advice to help you get started with the GPT Store.
How to List Your Own GPT
Before you can add a custom chatbot to the GPT Store, you’ve got to make one. No specialized knowledge or weird coding language is required to get started. To learn more about the process, check out my previous article about GPTs, where I created Reece’s Replica by feeding 50 of my articles into the system as training data, so my bot could learn to mimic my phrasing and tone. Since this will be available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers, remember that the custom data you upload could leak. Don’t upload any documents that contain sensitive information.
When you’re ready to publicly list your custom version of the popular chatbot, visit the ChatGPT homepage, choose Explore GPTs on the left side of the screen, then select My GPTs in the top right. Click on the pencil icon to edit the GPT you’d like to publish. After double-checking the potential output in the Preview section, click Save in the right corner, set it to publish to Everyone, and click Confirm.
Want to share the GPT with friends or coworkers without listing it in the GPT Store? Choose the Anyone with a link option.
It’s ironic, but we here at WIRED have long been fans of wireless charging. Not having to fumble with cables is nice! Most wireless charging devices these days follow the Qi (pronounced chee) standard, which has taken its time reaching ubiquity (the user experience has not always been great). The Wireless Power Consortium, which manages the charging protocol, announced the next-generation version called Qi2 in early 2023, and we’re finally starting to see devices supporting it. It promises perfect alignment, with the potential for accessories to bridge the Android and iPhone divide.
What Is Qi2?
Qi2 is the new open wireless charging standard from the Wireless Power Consortium, and it brings important upgrades over the original Qi standard. The headline is the Magnetic Power Profile (MPP), which is based on Apple’s MagSafe technology. (Apple was involved in developing the Qi2 standard.) This allows Qi2-branded devices to add a ring of magnets to ensure perfect alignment with chargers and allow for faster charging speeds.
The existing, non-magnetic wireless charging Extended Power Profile (EPP) has also been updated to comply with Qi2. This means that devices without magnets will be branded Qi and will still work with Qi2 chargers. Qi2 is also fully backward compatible, so you can charge an older Qi Android phone or MagSafe iPhone on a Qi2 charger. You can also use any Qi chargers to charge Qi2 devices, though they will charge at slower speeds.
Benefits of Qi2
Wireless charging with Qi2 brings several improvements over the original Qi standard.
Greater efficiency: Wireless charging relies on electromagnetic coils. One or more induction coils in the charging base create a magnetic field and transmit energy. A smaller coil in your phone or other device harvests it. The coils must be aligned for energy to flow between them and the magnets in the new Magnetic Power Profile ensure perfect alignment so less power is lost. When coils are misaligned, energy is often lost as heat, which is also not good for battery health.
Faster charging: The Qi standard was originally limited to 5-watt charging speeds, but Qi2 allows certified phones to charge at 15 watts (just like MagSafe). We expect this charging rate to increase as the Wireless Power Consortium works to improve the Qi2 standard, but probably not until 2025. Some manufacturers already offer speedier wireless charging, such as OnePlus and Xiaomi, but you have to use a specific wireless charger to see those gains.
Wider compatibility for accessories: Any Qi2 charger can charge any Qi2 device, so you can buy a single charger capable of juicing up an iPhone or Android phone. For Qi-supporting phones that lack magnets, you will likely soon be able to buy a case with a magnetic ring that works with Qi2 (as you can currently with MagSafe).
Other improvements Qi2 brings over Qi include wider device compatibility (from tablets to wearables), adaptive charging so chargers can talk to devices to supply the power they need instead of having a fixed power output, and enhanced safety with better heat management and foreign object detection.
Expect a Wave of Qi2 Devices
Before a device can bear the Qi2 logo, the Wireless Power Consortium must certify it in its independent labs. The Qi2 specification includes charging rate, magnet strength, and device compatibility. The Qi2 logo promises that the device meets the WPC’s exacting standards. It is likely that, as with the original Qi standard, there will soon be devices available that have not passed through the official Qi2 certification process.
Apple’s iPhone 15 range supports Qi2, and accessory makers like Anker, Belkin, Nomad, and Mophie have all announced Qi2 chargers. You can expect a much wider range of Qi2 accessories to land soon, and we expect most Android manufacturers to jump on board in 2024. The WPC hopes that Qi2 will unify wireless charging and finally provide the universal global standard we have been waiting for.
Backing up your emails, no matter what provider you use, is important because access to your digital collection of messages is less permanent than you might initially think. There are multiple points of failure to consider—what happens if something in the cloud breaks, or your connection to the internet does? What if your account gets banned or closed for whatever reason, and all of your email gets zapped with it?
Those are only a few of the potential problems. You might accidentally delete a bunch of emails you didn’t mean to; someone else could access your account and wipe everything they find; or your email provider might suddenly decide to lock you out, permanently.
With all of that in mind, access to your email doesn’t seem so assured. It might not matter for all those random newsletters, questionable deals, and politicians begging for cash that clog up your inbox, but what about emails and documents you really need access to? It’s helpful to have at least some of your emails backed up in another location so that you can always get at them, offline or otherwise.
Forward Emails to a Backup Account
Forwarding emails is one way of backing them up.
Apple via David Nield
The simplest way to get all of your emails sent to another account is to forward them, either manually one by one or automatically as they come in. From iCloud Mail, for example, you can click the cog icon (top left), then choose Settings and Mail Forwarding: Tick the box next to Forward my email to and enter another email address.
If you open up Gmail on the web, click the cog icon (top right), then See all settings. Under Forwarding and POP/IMAP, tick the box labeled Forward a copy of incoming mail to and enter your secondary email address. Gmail actually lets you create a filter for forwarded emails (messages from a specific contact, for example), so you don’t get everything forwarded—click creating a filter under Forwarding to do this. It’s worth noting that the forwarding option may not be available for your work account.
Finally, for the Outlook web client, click the cog icon (top right), then Mail, then Forwarding. Choose the Enable forwarding option, enter the secondary email address you want to use, and all of the messages that arrive in your Outlook inbox will be sent on to the other account too. In this section, you’ll also need to choose whether you want to save a copy of the forwarded emails. If something happens to your primary account, you can still at least reference your messages.
Forwarding emails is a quick and simple way of getting your messages in two places, but it’s not 100 percent reliable. When you’re forwarding your emails to another cloud account, you can still lose access to both copies if you’re ever unable to get online.
Use POP and IMAP (Remember Those?)
Both POP and IMAP can be used to back up emails.
Microsoft via David Nield
POP (Post Office Protocol) and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two main ways of getting emails in multiple places at once, and both standards are supported by most email providers. Choosing which to use for the purpose of backing up emails is a bit tricky, as they tend to be implemented in slightly different ways depending on the programs you’re using.
To get started, click Add backup, and Duplicati will take you through the process of setting up an account at a cloud storage provider and entering your login credentials. Then you pick which files you want to back up. A word of caution about something that bit me once during testing: When Duplicati can’t find a file—for example, if you’re having it back up data that’s on an external drive you sometimes don’t plug in—it will halt the entire backup until that drive is available. You can change this behavior in the settings, but by default, this is how it works.
If Duplicati isn’t quite what you want, another option is MSP360 (formerly Cloudberry). It’s $30, but there is a free version with limited features. MSP360 worked well in my testing, but I did not find anything about it that convinced me it was better than Duplicati. Another possibility is Arq, which will set you back $50 and then $25 a year for updates. Again, Arq worked well in my testing—in fact, I used Arq to make backups for years and never had any problems with it—but it’s hard to justify the price when Duplicati is free.
Mobile Backups
Mobile backups are a different beast from your laptop or PC. You can’t just plug a drive into your phone and back it up. Not easily anyway. To help you out we have an entirely separate guide to backing up your Android device and another to back up your iPhone.
Tips and Suggestions
One important caveat is that you can’t really trust any backup system until you’ve actually restored from it. It sounds silly, but I strongly suggest you practice restoring your data before you actually need to. If there are any problems in your system, you want to find them before disaster strikes. I recently saved myself from disaster doing just this. I didn’t quite understand what a piece of software was doing—I thought it was doing one thing, turned out it was not. If I hadn’t tried restoring before I needed to, I would have been out of luck when I did (and it wasn’t the software’s fault).
The last thing to consider when putting your backup system together is what you want to back up. For most of us, that’s a mix of personal data—photos of the kids, videos, important documents—as well as less personal things, like downloaded media and all the system files that keep our PCs running the way we want them to.
There are other folders worth considering, depending on your habits. For example, I never used to back up my Downloads folder because I’m probably going to move downloaded files somewhere else. However, when my drive recently died, this was exactly what I lost: my Downloads folder. Fortunately, there was only one document in it that really mattered, but I’ve added Downloads to my backup system to make sure nothing slips through the cracks again.
That’s really the most important part of making backups—ensuring you have a system that works the way you do. For that reason, I suggest experimenting with several of the options above until you find what’s right for you. With hard drives and online storage space so cheap these days, there’s really no excuse for not having at least two backups of your data.
