It’s the year 2000, I’m just about eight years old, and it’s my first day on AOL Instant Messenger. My fingers move clumsily across the plastic keyboard as I try to type fast enough to keep up with two cousins who are already seasoned AIM pros, sending me rapid-fire missives of excitement in our little online chat room. I’m in Boston and they’re in New York, but “omg we can talk all the time!!!1!”

We weren’t alone in our excitement. First released in 1997, AIM was a popular way for millions of people to communicate throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, and it helped form Internet culture and communication as we know them today. It’s where so many of us became fluent in LOL-ing and emoticons, and caught the itch to stay in constant contact with others no matter where we are.

But in the two decades since its launch, AIM’s popularity has dwindled in favor of mobile-focused platforms for communicating, like Facebook, Instagram, and Slack. At its peak in 2001, AIM had 36 million active users; as of this summer, it had just 500,000 unique visitors a month. And so, in early October, Verizon-owned Oath (which comprises AIM’s creator, AOL, and Yahoo) announced that on December 15 it would take this giant of the early Internet offline.

The move makes sense, but it’s bittersweet to see such a pivotal part of my introduction to life on the Internet disappear. So I’m saying goodbye to AIM in the best way I know how: by looking back at how it came to be, and how it will, in many ways, always be with us.

Back in February 1997, Barry Appelman, an AOL engineer, was granted a patent for something opaquely called “User definable on-line co-user lists.” It promised to be “a real time notification system that tracks, for each user, the logon status of selected co-users of an on-line or network system and displays that information in real time.” In plain English, that’s what we came to know as the Buddy List—a then-revolutionary feature that showed you your online friends and indicated whether or not they were actively at their computers.

The Buddy List wasn’t an AIM feature from the start; at first, users had to request information about their contacts’ online status one at a time, and they even had to know the person’s username to do it. But these requests became so frequent that they were crashing AOL’s servers, so AIM engineers decided to just show users all their friends’ information up front instead. That simple solution set the stage for how we interact with folks online to this day.

In fact, with the addition of some other clever features, many of today’s messenger apps are incredibly similar to how AIM operated in the late ’90s. Even Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook’s original chat feature as a reaction to the way AIM was designed. Zuckerberg’s version, now known as Facebook Messenger, has a few improvements, but the basics are all there: a buddy list, online activity statuses, and the ability to chat one on one, or in a group. You see this same basic design in Apple’s now-dead iChat, and in Google Hangouts and Slack (the latter two even let you set status updates, like next-generation away messages).

Messaging apps are still so similar to the format AIM popularized because many of the people who ultimately built the tools we rely on today for keeping in touch with friends or communicating with coworkers came of age on all the features that AIM had to offer. Zuckerberg, 33, reminisced recently about the service in a personal Facebook post.

“AOL Instant Messenger was a defining part of my childhood,” he wrote. “It helped me understand internet communication intuitively and emotionally in a way that people just a few years older may have only considered intellectually.”

It’s hard to imagine that the success of messaging apps, ranging from the work-oriented Slack to the ephemeral Snapchat, would’ve been possible had AIM not been so popular. AIM wasn’t the first instant messaging tool to exist, but it was the most widely used and influential in broad strokes, making it possible for us to feel at home in lots of different online settings.

In many ways AIM was a proving ground. It’s where millions of us became comfortable with the ideas of tracking each other’s movements online and, most crucially, transferring emotional intimacy with other people from face-to-face interactions to computer-driven exchanges.

Even familiarity with chatbots began, for many of us, on AIM. Remember SmarterChild? It was a total jerk, but in the early 2000s millions of people used AIM to message this chatbot about everything from whether it liked them to what the weather would be the following day. These types of interactions primed us to feel normal asking Siri to tell a joke, or querying Alexa about today’s news.

There’s also a dark side to what AIM brought us, and even a nostalgic goodbye shouldn’t overlook that. The freedom to communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time also enabled early online bullying and trolling, which have only gotten worse with the spread of social media; that remains a challenge for today’s tech titans to solve.

But whether good or bad, AIM truly set the parameters for most of our virtual interactions, so when it goes dark on Friday, it will be gone but certainly not forgotten.

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Smartphones, especially newer, higher-end models, are getting really good at blending the real and the virtual (as in AR) and transporting you to altogether new places (as in VR). They can’t yet offer the more realistic sensations delivered by headsets like Microsoft’s HoloLens or HTC’s Vive (which themselves still need a lot of work), and it’s not yet clear how useful they will be, but they can show you amazing images without draining your bank account or wiring you to a computer.

Sensing the business potential of AR, companies like Apple and Google have rolled out tools to help iOS and Android developers add augmented reality to apps in ways that look more realistic than ever before. And Google has been pioneering work in mobile virtual reality, too—first with its Cardboard, which lets you view VR content with no electronics but a smartphone, and more recently with its Daydream View headset, which works with several Android smartphones for more all-encompassing VR.

These efforts alone are leading to a lot of mobile AR and VR apps, so it’s tricky to find the ones that do a great job of showing what we can do with these media, especially as smartphones and software get better and better. The following list collects some mobile AR and VR apps that are worth checking out, no matter whether you’re an early adopter with the latest headsets at home or just curious to learn more about these technologies.

These apps weren’t chosen because they’re currently the most useful applications of AR and VR. The products are all focused on having fun. But they are worth trying because they can help you think about the potential for new AR and VR technologies and get a sense for what’s already possible.

1. Euclidian Lands

$4, iOS

An AR puzzle game for the iPhone or iPad, Euclidian Lands has a design reminiscent of the popular Monument Valley. The game consists of increasingly complicated cube-like castles that you can twist and turn in segments, helping the red-caped male protagonist vanquish his enemies. The ways you interact with the app are intuitive and smooth: you swipe your finger across your display in the direction you want a segment of the castle to turn. And the crispness of the architecture, not to mention the hero’s flowing cape, is impressive. Less clear is how easily you’ll adjust to playing a game that takes advantage of the way Apple’s ARKit software can stick a 3-D object in one spot and keep it there while you interact with it from many different angles. To get a good look at the puzzle and figure out my strategy, for example, I often had to walk around it. I found myself peeking underneath it, too, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. You’ll probably want to play this game in an open space.

2. Parker

$60, iOS, Android, Kindle Fire

At a glance, Parker looks like a normal teddy bear with some cute wooden accessories, but when used with the Parker app on a smartphone or tablet, it comes alive. It’s essentially an augmented-reality Tamagotchi. The app includes a number of activities that revolve around taking care of Parker. Kids can place a virtual bandage on a small cut on its tummy, give Parker an x-ray with an included bib, or, in the iOS app, craft a woodland or underwater scene with (or without) the bear and take pictures of it. What’s smart about Parker is that augmented reality is a big feature but not the whole focus of the app. There are also lots of simple on-screen activities that encourage kids to engage in imaginative play with the bear, like taking its temperature with a toy thermometer or listening to its chest with a stethoscope.

3. Figment AR

Free, iOS

The first time I tried Figment, I found myself wandering in circles in my office, inspecting a giant, mustachioed ice cream cone and laughing as it danced around in a style best described as the Macarena meets Thriller-era Michael Jackson. With the app, you can do things like add different 3-D creatures and objects to the room you’re actually sitting in—a purple dog or two, a big turkey, a bouncing rainbow—and make videos and photos to share with friends. You can place a digital picture frame with a 360° photo on your real wall, move close to the frame, and peer through your gadget’s screen to see more of the photo (the app has stock photos, or you can take your own with a 360° photo app and then add them within Figment). Figment is a fanciful showcase for virtual objects that look as if they are actually there in the room with you. And that’s great, because it gives a sense of how impressive AR can be, even on a pocket-size display.

4. Coloring VR

Free, Google Daydream View

Coloring VR, which works with Google’s Daydream View headset ($99) and a compatible phone, lets you color on a giant virtual canvas rather than a small piece of paper—a simple change that makes the activity surprisingly meditative. There are free pictures that you can color in by picking a hue from an on-screen palette and then tapping on different parts of the picture with Daydream’s handheld controller. If you want more picture options, themed packs with subjects such as underwater and outer space scenes cost $1.99 apiece. True, with Coloring VR you don’t get the freedom that comes with a higher-end 3-D VR painting app like Google’s Tilt Brush (which is so far available only for the pricey, computer-tethered Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets). Instead, you get a huge white virtual canvas with a black-outlined image of, say, a quaint little town that you can ink perfectly.

5. Untethered

$5 per episode, Google Daydream View

VR is a great medium for presenting mysteries that unfold slowly as users explore the world around them, and Untethered, an episodic app that starts on a stormy night in an Oregon radio station, shows this off cleverly with comic-style animation and voice interaction. In the first episode, you play a DJ who’s dealing with weird weather and an uninvited guest. As with other Daydream apps, you control Untethered with the small remote that comes with the headset—great for playing records and pressing buttons on aging station electronics. But the app also takes advantage of Google’s voice recognition technology to move the plot along via characters like a producer, who is constantly yapping at you from a speaker and asking you to do things like record on-air announcements, invite listeners to call in, and talk to callers who divulge strange stories.Untethered is slow-moving, but it illustrates neat methods of storytelling and game interaction that are still in their infancy in VR.

6. Poly

Free, Google Cardboard, Daydream View

This new website from Google is not an app, but it is a cool place to explore all kinds of 3-D objects and intricately crafted scenes made by a variety of VR and AR artists. There are thousands of things to look at, many of which were made with Google’s Tilt Brush 3-D VR drawing tool, and they range from robots to sea creatures to a lucid-dream-like ’90s bedroom. And while Poly is aimed at creators of AR and VR apps, offering them a convenient spot to share 3-D assets that others can download and use in their projects (or to snag some for their own), anyone can contribute to or download from the site. You can view Poly objects in a regular Web browser, or use a smartphone and Google Cardboard ($15) or Google’s Daydream View headset and a compatible phone to see the same things in VR. 

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Rather than lay eggs in rotting berries, as domestic flies do, the invasive species punches holes in fruit that’s still ripening, spoiling it. The costs to U.S. agriculture: about $700 million a year.

California’s cherry growers think they may have a way to get rid of the flies cheaply. To do it, they are counting on a technology developed by geneticists: a “gene drive” that can spread DNA alterations among wild flies, potentially killing them off.

Gene-drive technology is among the most widely debated—and feared—inventions of modern biology. Opponents call it a genetic “atom bomb” and want it banned. Others see the possibility of unprecedented public health interventions, like eradicating the mosquitoes that spread malaria.

Now, for the first time, commercial uses are on the table. With funding from the California Cherry Board, scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have installed a gene drive in the invasive pest, the first time the technology has been established in a commercially important species.

In addition to that effort, which remains confined to the laboratory, two spinout companies from the University of California, San Diego, are also pursuing commercial use of gene drives. One, Agragene, also intends to alter plants and insects. Its sister company, Synbal, wants to harness the technology as a speedy way of engineering lab mice and possibly pet dogs.

“It’s about having genes under precise control in whatever organism you are modifying,” says David Webb, acting CEO of both UCSD spinout companies, neither of which has raised capital.

A gene drive works via a so-called selfish gene that is able to replicate itself and get inherited by most of an animal’s offspring rather than just half, as is usual. The effect is called “super-Mendelian” inheritance.

The problem is that modifying wild animals raises complex ethical and regulatory issues. Some scientists worry that gene drives could run amok—say, if laboratory animals escape and spread changes in the wild. The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has even added gene drives to a list of uses of gene-editing technology it doesn’t think companies should pursue.

What’s more, any use of such a powerful technology is going to be highly regulated. Such obstacles explain why most gene-drive funding has come from either philanthropies or the military. The Gates Foundation has committed more than $75 million to engineer self-destructing malaria mosquitoes, which it thinks may be needed to wipe out that disease in Africa. This year the U.S. military research agency DARPA began spending a similar amount to develop antidotes to gene drives, should they be used as a weapon.

The California Cherry Board, which represents growers, just wants to get rid of the flies. When the pests arrived a decade ago, the orchards started spraying insecticides called pyrethroids, with trade names like Mustang Maxx and Warrior.

“This is basically the strongest chemical that there is,” says Nick Matteis, an executive with the growers’ organization. The sprays kills the flies and pretty much every other insect, too, including bees. “If you didn’t have to spray, that is a huge deal,” he says.

To the cherry growers, a gene drive looks like a precision tool that could eliminate one species among thousands. In 2013, the organization started funding development of the technology, spending about $100,000 a year, or about a third of its research budget, to have Riverside professor Omar Akbari install a gene drive in that fly’s genome.

“It’s a lot of money from their perspective, but from our end, it’s only enough to pay a salary and a few experiments,” says Akbari, an expert on insect genetics and one of the participants in the DARPA program.

Even so, by July Akbari had success with the gene drive. His technology, called Medea after the Greek sorceress who murdered her children, spread to 100 percent of flies in experiments in laboratory cages, he says.

The next step it to determine what genetic cargo to attach to the selfish gene. Female flies survive the winter because their bodies make cryoprotectants. Adding a gene to block those chemicals could cause the flies to freeze. Another possibility is genetically altering the bugs’ ovipositor so that they change their behavior.

“If you got rid of that knife or dull it, instead of stabbing ripening cherries, they would lay their egg in rotting fruit, like regular flies,” says Akbari. “The flies would still exist, but they would no longer be crop pests.”

People fear that gene drives will be unstoppable once released. In fact, scientists have a wide variety of tricks to keep them under control. In Akbari’s case, his Medea system requires a large number of insects for the chain reaction to begin—at least thousands. That means a few flies hitching a ride somewhere else in a box of cherries would be unlikely to spread the drive accidentally.

The California Cherry Board says it’s now ready to finance larger-scale laboratory studies. To pay for them, and eventually seek approval to deploy a gene drive, the farmers’ group is planning to raise funds from other fruit growers to finance a “public-benefit corporation.” The company would have, as part of its charter, a requirement to keep its technical plans and finances out in the open. 

“We’ll create an entity that is basically in the trust business,” says Tom Turpen, a consultant who is advising the farmers in their formation of the new company. Otherwise, he says, opponents of GMOs would likely instigate a paralyzing public debate. 

Matteis, the Cherry Board executive, estimates it could be five years before a gene drive is approved and ready to deploy. He’s hopeful that by then the public will support the plan. “Any insect considered remotely beneficial to the environment, you would have a much harder time,” he says. “But this insect is a recent arrival. There would be less concern about disrupting the circle of life.”

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In January 2017, BTCC was investigated by China’s Central Bank. In September, China announced that it was banning initial coin offerings (ICOs), a popular fund-raising method for startups that use digital coins or tokens. Even then, Lee thought exchanges like his were safe. Later that month, Chinese regulators made it clear that BTCC and other domestic virtual-currency exchanges had to close, an attempt to make it harder for the general public to enter the market and buy bitcoins.

Lee says that he was neither shocked nor panicked, just dismayed. “Ah, finally, the party’s over,” he thought. “The party has to end sometime.”

Bitcoin, introduced by a mysterious and since vanished character named Satoshi Nakamoto, came into the world around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. The fact that it was not backed by any central authority appealed to those who distrusted governments and big banks. Since then, the currency’s rise—especially its popularity among speculators, who helped push the value of one bitcoin from under $1,000 to more than $10,000 during 2017—has presented governments with a challenge. Should they allow this new kind of money, even though it makes it easy for people to send funds relatively anonymously—a feature that is attractive to money launderers and other criminals? Should they try to suppress it, in hopes of maintaining full control over monetary policy? Or should they embrace it, as the Japanese government has done, even passing a law to recognize Bitcoin as a legal payment method?

Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a blockchain, which is a public, censor-proof ledger that is continually being updated by a network of computers throughout the world. The decentralized nature of virtual money should make it impossible for any one country to shut it down. China’s crackdown put that foundational belief to the test. The news of BTCC’s shutdown briefly caused the price of a bitcoin to plunge. China, after all, is known for trying to control seemingly uncontrollable things. Beijing has been surprisingly effective at fencing off the Internet with an army of censors and a Great Firewall that blocks sites like Facebook and Twitter, and yet its online communities and commerce flourish. China is now developing its own digital fiat currency, an apparent attempt to make financial transactions cheaper and more traceable, as well as to combat counterfeiting.

None of this would seem to bode well for Bitcoin. Yet weeks after the crackdown, nearly everyone I spoke to in China’s cryptocurrency community was in strikingly good spirits. They were optimistic about the future of Bitcoin and other virtual currencies in China, whose crackdown wasn’t as all-encompassing as it might have seemed.

Speed limits

China’s cryptocurrency world resembles a Silicon Valley of the East. People dress casually, work in shared maker spaces, and scribble on whiteboards. They are global, ready to jump on a flight to New York or Tokyo to seek out a business opportunity. “It reminds me of the Internet community in 1995. Everyone knows each other,” says Gao Dongliang, a blockchain investor. Similar to early devotees of the Internet, Gao explains, people in China’s blockchain community share a belief in a world-changing technology.

One member of this community is Lu Bin, the CEO of a Shanghai-based blockchain startup called Andui. The energetic Lu, who got a PhD from Louisiana State University, says he helped come up with the term yitaifang, the Chinese name for Ethereum, a Bitcoin-inspired virtual-currency network built for more complicated financial transactions.

In late August Lu did an ICO to raise money for Bihu.com, a communications platform that uses blockchain technology. In ICOs, startups issue a new virtual token to the public, sometimes on the premise that the token will be necessary for use of the startup’s product. High demand for that product should, in theory, make these virtual tokens gain value. Bihu.com aimed to be like Twitter or Reddit, except that users could reward good content with “keys,” the platform’s own token.

Lu was thrilled by Bihu’s ICO. He says he raised over $20 million in a matter of hours. He believed there was no way that venture capital would deliver that kind of result. Then the following month China’s ICO ban came down, and Lu had to give all the money back.

He took it in stride. Lu acknowledged there was “frustration within the team” and a general “waste of energy.” But nonetheless, he felt that the ICO ban protected average investors against fraud.

In fact, everyone I spoke to in China’s cryptocurrency  community supported, or was at least sympathetic to, the ICO ban. I repeatedly heard that 90 percent of Chinese ICOs were scams. The whole model, in which you buy tokens to use on a platform that does not yet exist, might never exist, or could be a total flop, can be a magnet for fraudsters.

Fraudulent ICOs are not limited to China, of course. In 2017 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged two ICOs that were supposedly backed by investments in diamonds and real estate. Neither had “any real operations,” the government alleged. In China, the fraud problem appears to have been exacerbated by the participation of relatively new and inexperienced investors.

Da Hongfei, founder of an alternative cryptocurrency called NEO, says the ICO crackdown was necessary for China. NEO had its first ICO in 2014 and has since risen to become one of the top cryptocurrencies in the world by market value, at over $2.5 billion in December. The company says it offered to refund investors after the ICO ban, but they preferred to keep their NEO tokens.

To illustrate why he supports the ban, Da describes a recent trip he took to Germany. He was struck by the experience of driving on the autobahn, which has no speed limit. Germany is able to do this, he says, because “they have good-quality roads, they have a very strict test for a driver’s license … Everybody is obeying the traffic rules, and they have very good-quality cars.” He adds, “If we don’t do a speed limit in China, or even maybe the United States, that would be a disaster.”

China didn’t just impose a speed limit on virtual currency, however. It shut down the entire highway. Perhaps Chinese officials banned ICOs until they figure out how to regulate them. Lu, the entrepreneur who had to return $20 million to investors, hopes that this is the case. He says ICOs present a new business model in which users are stakeholders in the company, which gives them an incentive to invite their friends to join the platform. Lu believes that the virtual-currency exchanges will reopen but be run by the government. He says China will take regulation cues from the outside world, particularly the United States. The SEC recently signaled that it would take a more aggressive stance toward ICOs, perhaps by requiring ventures to register with the commission and disclose extensive information to investors.

For now, Lu will continue to work on Bihu.com from Shanghai, raising capital with private investment. “We are believers,” he says. “We believe the Chinese market is eventually going to open.” If cryptocurrency is going to be a real thing, he says, “China does not want to miss the train.”

Miner threat

Before Bitcoin got too hot in the country, Chinese authorities were cautiously accepting of the technology. In May 2013, state-run CCTV even aired a short documentary about it. That same month, Zennon Kapron notes in his 2014 book, Chomping at the Bitcoin: The Past, Present and Future of Bitcoin in China, more Bitcoin wallets—the software that holds and manages people’s private cryptographic keys—were downloaded by computers in China than in the rest of the world put together.

It’s easy to understand why many Chinese people would be attracted to Bitcoin. In China’s heavily regulated financial environment, speculating on the currency represented one of the few investment options for the retail investor, Kapron observes. In 2013, the Shanghai stock exchange had been underperforming for years. Real estate prices were too high for many ordinary people, but you could buy a fraction of a bitcoin for as little as one dollar. By mid-2013, Chinese exchanges were moving more than $35 million in bitcoins each day.

The speculative fervor threatened to get out of hand. Beijing was also worried about yuan leaving the country. China caps yuan outflow at $50,000 per person per year. While it’s not clear that large numbers of people were using Bitcoin to evade Chinese capital controls, the potential was there. People in China could buy bitcoins in yuan, sell them on an American exchange, and then withdraw the sum in dollars. In late 2013 Chinese authorities struck back, banning financial services companies from dealing with Bitcoin exchanges. People could no longer withdraw yuan from their bank accounts to directly buy bitcoins on Chinese exchanges.

It wasn’t long before Chinese people figured out how to get around this obstacle. Instead of paying exchanges directly from their bank accounts, they used cash to buy vouchers that could then be traded on the exchanges. Alternatively, purchasers could send money to the personal bank account of someone who worked at an exchange.

The latest restrictions are more draconian, with cryptocurrency exchanges now shut down. But once again, workarounds have emerged. Some people have turned to online and offline peer-to-peer trading. People can also buy and sell digital currencies on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, which is blocked in China but can be accessed by virtual private networks (VPNs) that get around the Great Firewall. People who already own coins can just go online and trade them on an exchange that is based overseas. There was even some trading on WeChat, China’s massively popular but heavily monitored messaging app.

After all, China did not ban Bitcoin itself, nor did it explicitly prohibit peer-to-peer trading. And importantly, China hasn’t banned the mining of bitcoins, in which people have their computers race to solve difficult mathematical problems in exchange for coin rewards. As of September, more than two-thirds of bitcoins were made in China. Much of the computer hardware used for mining is manufactured there. Miners use a great deal of computing power, and some Chinese computer clusters used for the process enjoy access to relatively cheap electricity. The growth and dominance of Chinese mining has led to fears among some that the country has too much influence over the future development of blockchain technology.

A founder of a pool of miners, a person who goes by the name of Discus Fish, says that China’s local governments once encouraged mining, particularly in mountainous areas that produce hydroelectric power. The mines were using energy that would otherwise have gone to waste. Then in September the political environment changed, and he feared some local governments would no longer welcome mining. But others in the mining community were unconcerned. Zhao Qianjie, a vice president of BTCC, notes that the company’s mining pool was not influenced by the crackdown on its Bitcoin exchange. And in China, if something is not explicitly verboten, then it’s full speed ahead.

Getting around control

What is clear is that China has made it more inconvenient for newcomers to enter the Bitcoin market. But maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. At least so would argue James Gong, a Shanghai-based cryptocurrency expert who founded ICOage, an online platform through which ventures could promote and raise money for their ICOs. Launched last January, ICOage closed down in September. He says that most of the ventures on his platform were not Chinese, and that the overseas projects were generally higher in quality than the Chinese ones. “People who don’t understand blockchain or digital currency shouldn’t be participating in this market,” Gong says. “The risks are too great. Raising the threshold for ordinary people to trade digital currency is good for the industry as a whole. Some Chinese people were blindly investing. They would buy anything.”

Even now, Chinese people who want to trade cryptocurrency are likely to find a way. China is making trading difficult but not impossible. Beijing employs a similar strategy for censoring the Internet. It’s possible to use a VPN to jump over the firewall, but for many people it’s too much mafan, or trouble. Besides, they are happy with domestic platforms like WeChat. Yet even if China introduced its own digital currency, people might be willing to go the extra length to use Bitcoin.

“With Bitcoin, people will be more motivated to get around control,” explains Duan Xin-Xing, former vice president of the global Bitcoin exchange OKCoin and now executive president of the Hangzhou-based blockchain startup 8btc. “The Internet is a network of information; Bitcoin is a network of money. It has real value.”

The word “Bitcoin” may have become more nearly taboo in China, but “blockchain” has not. Han Feng is the Beijing-based cofounder of the Elastos Foundation, which ambitiously plans to build a whole new Internet powered by blockchain technology. This fall, Han planned to teach a Tsinghua University course that would be webcast all over the world. He prepared for months. The camera stands were already arranged. Then the university promoted the course on WeChat and called it “the first course on Bitcoin at Tsinghua University.”

Han was upset by Tsinghua’s lack of political instincts. Why would you use the word “Bitcoin” at such a sensitive time? Sure enough, the online course was canceled, but Han wasn’t deterred. He proceeded to teach the class on Tsinghua’s campus in Beijing under a more politically correct title, “The Smart Economy and Blockchain.”

Chinese authorities clearly see blockchain as a technology of the future. Blockchain development is even part of the Communist Party’s 13th five-year plan. The technology provides a tamper-proof, intermediary-free ledger for payments and various other kinds of transactions. Michael Casey of the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative has argued that China sees blockchain as a useful tool for advancing its regional interests, especially in trade.

China would prefer to take blockchain without Bitcoin. “The central government wants to use blockchain to ensure the trustworthiness of public and administrative data, but they don’t want people to print their own money,” says Ben Koo, an engineering professor at Tsinghua University.

China may also hope to replace Bitcoin with its own digital currency, but Bitcoin enthusiasts in the country, like Bobby Lee, say that China’s version would be a “completely different animal.” He explains, “It’s going to be a controlled, centralized currency that happens to be digital; it happens to have some encryption technologies in it.” If the new currency is subject to the same monetary policies, interest rates, restrictions, limits, and regulations as traditional currency, Lee says, “then it’s going to not compare to something, like Bitcoin, that’s truly free.”

When winter ends

China’s crackdown has demonstrated that no one country can stop Bitcoin. That’s the beauty of the decentralized network: if one nation bows out, others pick up the slack. After China clamped down, much of Bitcoin trading moved to Japan and South Korea. “Blockchain is a global technology,” says Han, cofounder of Elastos. “Different functions work in different countries. If you want to exchange, you go to countries with friendly laws, like Japan. If you want customers, you go to China. If you need a technology community, you go to the U.S.”

Not only has the Chinese ban failed to stop Bitcoin, but the price of a bitcoin rebounded and continued to hit record highs. Chinese regulations may even have contributed to the surging price. “When China started regulating Bitcoin, it sent a message that China takes this currency very seriously,” says Yan Chen, CEO of NBL, a service for storing cryptocurrency wallets. “The market sees that Bitcoin is something that governments are afraid of, so it must be really powerful.”

NEO’s Da thinks that China’s crypto community will shrink over the short term, and that there will be a “winter” for some time. But he sees the overall outlook as bright. He believes that Chinese capital controls will not be around forever, and their removal will give the Chinese government one less reason to be wary of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin presents China with the same challenge that the Internet once did. The Chinese government was initially suspicious of the Web, because letting it in would mean relinquishing some degree of control. But Beijing ultimately decided that keeping the Internet out would be worse, since that would cut China off from the global economy. The dilemma posed by Bitcoin has one key difference: it’s way too late to isolate China from the rest of the world. “Bitcoin cannot be forbidden in China,” says BTCC’s Zhao. “As long as there is one cable available from China to the outside, then Bitcoin will survive.”

That means for now, Bitcoin has passed the China test. “Bitcoin itself did not break after China banned it,” Lee says. The virtual currency has delivered on its promise that it could not be defeated by any government, even one as powerful as China’s. Or, as Lee puts it, “Every time you try to whack Bitcoin and it doesn’t die, it becomes stronger.”

Emily Parker has covered China for the Wall Street Journal and served as an advisor in the U.S. State Department. She is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground.

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Why did you leave a high-profile job in Silicon Valley to take a post at the DNC?
After the presidential election, I just felt that the world was broken and I needed to find a place where I could apply what I’d learned in my previous roles to see if I could make a difference.

During the election, the DNC suffered a damaging e-mail hack. What steps have you taken to improve security?
Security’s an arms race. We have a target on us in the same way that most multinational corporations do, but we don’t have the budget of a big company. All our services such as e-mail have now been moved to cloud infrastructure run by companies like Microsoft and Google. We’re also focusing on culture change. We actively phish our own people and publicize internally which teams have the worst compliance. We’re also in the final stages of hiring a chief security officer.

What keeps you awake at night beyond security?
In electoral politics, unlike other jobs I’ve had, you can’t move the ship dates. I’m always worried whether we’ll have enough time to make the kinds of technological and cultural changes we need to make across the party. We’re not just trying to catch up to where we think the Republicans are; we’re attempting to do a massive leapfrog.

What progress have you made?
Campaigns are incredibly intense from the outset, and campaign managers tend to stick with what they’ve done before or to make a few incremental changes. We’re encouraging them to experiment with more revolutionary technologies. We’re creating the infrastructure to do real-time analytics and to make data science tools widely available and easy to use. And we’re working on a platform strategy that allows us to easily plug in and vet new technologies for things such as canvassing and voter mobilization.

Do you see AI being used more extensively in future campaigns?
We need to be starting long-term, authentic conversations today with every American in order to get to the next presidential election in 2020. That means developing a deeper appreciation of the different issues that interest people. I think that artificial intelligence and machine learning will help us to better understand and segment audiences on a scale that’s not been done before, even by some of the biggest companies in the world.

Are companies like Twitter and Facebook doing enough to tackle fake news and its influence on political campaigns?
No, I don’t think my former employer or Facebook are doing enough here. It’s certainly a very difficult problem. At the heart of it are things like fake accounts, hijacked accounts, and trolling accounts. We’re now seeing outside researchers doing some really interesting work to try and identify the bots spreading fake news.

How can we get more transparency in online political advertising?
Part of the answer is greater clarity from social platforms. They need to make it obvious who is paying for political ads online and how much they’re spending. This would fix a lot of the problem, but there needs to be some formal regulation of online political advertising too.

Digital voting systems are vulnerable to hacking. What can be done to make them more secure?
From a technology standpoint, I think it’s going to be a combination of open-source software with verifiable code and paper trails. If we had a lot of academics willing to help us with verifiable code, and paper trails to show what the electronic machines actually recorded, we’d be in a much better place. I would love to see national standards that every state would need to follow when purchasing voting machines.

Given your experience at Uber, when do you think we’ll all be heading to the polls in driverless cars?
Hopefully, a whole bunch of people will be using them to vote in the 2024 presidential election.

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I hear footsteps behind me. I turn around and watch two figures enter the room and take up stations in front of the portraits. They’re the men from the pictures.

An unseen narrator explains that the shorter one, Jean de Dieu, was a child soldier recruited by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). It’s a Hutu group waging war against Rwanda from its base in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The other, Patient, is a sergeant in the Congolese army, which is allied with Rwanda’s ruling Tutsi ethnic group.

I know they’re both virtual characters, re-created through 3-D scanning and computer graphics. But they’re startlingly realistic—far more lifelike than anything I’ve seen in a game or movie.

As I approach Jean de Dieu, who looks sad and tired, a conversation begins. The narrator asks: Who is your enemy? What is violence for you? What makes your enemy inhuman? Jean answers in halting, vulnerable tones. I listen to his story of being forced into a refugee camp at age 11 and seeing Congolese militia kill his parents, their brains splattering onto him. Of course he’d hate the Tutsi, and everyone aligned with them.

Now the narrator quizzes Patient. He says the army pursues the FDLR because its soldiers rob, rape, and murder Congolese citizens. “He has no human values and can no longer change his mind,” Patient says of his despised FDLR enemy. “He wants to stay in the forest as part of the rebellion like a savage. Only beasts live in the forest.”

But Patient and Jean de Dieu also tell the narrator something else: they just want to live in peace with their neighbors and families. And as I walk through three more rooms and meet more combatants—gang members in El Salvador, a reservist in Israel and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza—I hear that shared hope flicker through in answer after answer. These men all have different stories, different traumas, and different allegiances. But their dreams are the same. Abu Khaled, in Gaza, says 23 of his family members have died during the Israeli occupation, but he still hopes for “peace and brotherhood” in the region.

After 40 minutes, I’m guided to a spot on the floor that resembles a Star Trek transporter pad. An assistant helps me remove my Oculus Rift VR headset and backpack, and I’m back on the ground floor of the MIT Museum, where this ambitious virtual-reality exhibit, “The Enemy,” made its North American premiere in the fall of 2017.

The exhibit—or maybe “experience” is a better word—is the creation of the Belgian-Tunisian photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa. He interviewed and filmed the fighters and then worked with Fox Harrell, a professor of digital media and artificial intelligence at MIT, and French partners Camera Lucida, France Télévisions Nouvelles Ecritures, and Emissive to bring them to life inside the virtual gallery.

Part of what’s groundbreaking about “The Enemy” is the sheer size of the simulation: the museum cleared out a 3,000-square-foot space so that up to 15 Oculus-wearing visitors at a time could roam freely in the virtual world. The fidelity of the characters and their movements is also striking. You can see the stubble on their chins and the tattoos on their arms and torsos. Thanks to eye-tracking sensors, each figure’s gaze is locked onto yours, cementing the illusion that the fighters are speaking directly to you. The technology works well enough to disappear, allowing you to form direct, empathetic connections with Jean, Patient, Abu, and their fellow combatants.

Which is exactly what Ben Khelifa wanted. “My interest was, can you look at these people in the eyes?” he told me. “Can they look you in the eyes? And what is happening when two people look at one another in the eyes? There is a connection, whether we want it or not.”

Right now, the “The Enemy” is accessible only to museum visitors, but Ben Khelifa says he wants those trapped in conflict zones, especially young people, to experience it too. If the installation can help people see that every conflict is grounded, to some extent, in stereotypes and misunderstandings, they might come to understand one another better and stop fighting, he believes. It’s a noble goal—but will all future VR producers have such benevolent aims?

Blown away

The idea that VR might be a medium for a new kind of journalism took hold around 2015, when the New York Times released its first VR documentary, “The Displaced,” about three young war refugees. Technically, the pieces produced by the Times’ VR studio are 360° films. Viewers can look in different directions, but otherwise, they watch passively. Sticklers reserve the term “virtual reality” for simulated 3-D environments in which users can move around at will and control objects, as gamers can on platforms such as HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and Oculus Rift. That’s the type of virtual reality that Ben Khelifa, a freelancer who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Israel, Yemen, Somalia, and many other countries, wanted to employ for “The Enemy.”

Ben Khelifa says he was worried that traditional war images have lost their power. Take the famous photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old refugee boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. “Every single parent in the world should react to this and say, ‘That could be my kid,’” Ben Khelifa says. But though the image saddened millions, it didn’t move nations to intervene in Syria. “We don’t have the same emotional relation with photos that we used to have,” he says.

A virtual-reality re-creation of a fighter, speaking in his own words, might help viewers feel the impact of war more deeply, Ben Khelifa believed. So he went to Israel and Gaza, where he found soldiers willing to be videotaped. While they talked, he scanned them with a Microsoft Kinect and photographed them from multiple angles. He says his experience as a photojournalist helped him get the subjects to open up. “These fighters understand that I’ve been through a lot of fighting too—without holding a gun, but holding my camera,” Ben Khelifa says. “And I think there is—I wouldn’t call it a brotherhood, but an understanding that we both know what war is.”

In April 2015, at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, Ben Khelifa showed a prototype of “The Enemy,” featuring only Abu Khaled and an Israeli soldier named Gilad. “People were just blown away by the realism of the fighters,” he says. But these early figures didn’t walk, turn their heads, or react to users. “From there, what I’ve been realizing is, the more the fighters are modified to recognize your presence, the more you recognize the presence of the fighter,” he says. “You spend less time wondering if he’s real or not. And you get to listen.”

A few years earlier Ben Khelifa had met MIT’s Fox Harrell, whose book Phantasmal Media explores how creators of VR and other computational media can build experiences that mutate depending on the user’s actions. Harrell says he’s fascinated by the narrative techniques of the 1950 Kurosawa film Rashomon, which retells the story of a brutal rape and murder from multiple perspectives. “I’ve been interested in how you can use algorithmic processes in AI to trigger these kinds of effects,” he says.

For “The Enemy,” Harrell helped Ben Khelifa and his team of developers in France build a system that surveys visitors before the experience and then monitors them on camera and via the Oculus headset as they interact with each fighter. Visitors’ responses determine the order in which they experience the three conflicts, the message they receive in the final gallery, and even the weather visible through the skylights.

John Durant, the director of the MIT Museum, says “The Enemy” took the museum into untested territory, both technologically and politically. “It was very appealing, because a lot of us talk about the ways in which technology may or may not contribute to addressing certain kinds of social and political issues, and sometimes people talk about it more than actually experiencing it and trying it,” he says.

The poignant stories told by Amilcar and Jorge, members of two rival gangs in San Salvador, give that section of the exhibit a sticking power that a photo essay just wouldn’t have, Durant says. “Most of the people who are likely to visit this museum don’t have the experience of growing up as members of a gang where a kind of tribal loyalty is perhaps the most fundamental thing you know,” he says. “So it takes some effort, honestly, to try and think about what the world might be like from that point of view. I think ‘The Enemy,’ to me, made it much easier.”

Visitors to the museum report similar revelations. “I’m from Colombia … I’ve lived close to war,” one visitor wrote in the guest book. “Forgiveness is gonna be always the hardest part. For forgiveness to appear, there’s gotta be compassion, and that is what ‘The Enemy’ brought me. Thank you.”

Brainwashing

VR has, in fact, begun to compete with old-fashioned photojournalism and TV news. VR producers have been flocking to Southeast Asia lately to document the plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim-majority ethnic group under assault in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. A refugee featured in a searing Al Jazeera VR film recounted how security forces in Myanmar had killed her husband and raped her. An Emmy-nominated VR film shot inside a Rohingya confinement camp by the anti-atrocity group the Nexus Fund showed prisoners languishing with little food or medical care. “I can’t put everybody on a plane and take them to Myanmar, but I know that if I could and they could see this in person, there’s nothing they wouldn’t do to help,” Nexus Fund executive director Sally Smith told CNN.

But if VR is an empathy machine, where will all that empathy be directed in the future? Here in the United States, meddlers have hijacked Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to generate outrage and spread falsehoods, with political consequences we are only beginning to understand. VR’s immersiveness and realism pull even more directly on our heartstrings. There’s nothing to stop Buddhist extremists in Myanmar, for instance, from making VR films designed to further inflame passions against the Rohingya. “Am I scared by it? Yeah,” Ben Khelifa says. “If you can create empathy, you can brainwash people too.”

In “The Enemy,” the VR storytelling is even-handed to a fault. In fact, if the piece has a limitation, it’s that it refuses to judge the merits of each fighter’s cause. But that limitation is also a strength. The parallel questions put to each combatant allow the visitor to construct “this kind of model of what’s the same and what’s different” for each fighter, Harrell explains. “And that can be some impetus to thinking beyond the preconceptions you had of the conflict.”

Without this kind of commitment to fairness and factuality, VR could easily devolve into a propaganda tool. But that’s true of all journalism. We’re fortunate that a creator with Ben Khelifa’s vision and conscience is showing the way. 

Wade Roush is a technology journalist and the producer and host of Soonish, a podcast about technology and the future.

“The Enemy” was produced by Camera Lucida, France Télévisions, the National Film Board of Canada, Emissive, and Dpt, and was staged at the MIT Museum in late 2017. It will continue its North American tour in Montreal and other Canadian cities. For tour dates visit theenemyishere.org.

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The FCC’s net neutrality rules prevent Internet service providers such as Comcast and Verizon from blocking or slowing down (legal) content. They also prohibit them from engaging in “paid prioritization,” or letting some companies pay to have their content delivered faster than others. After much debate, the rules were enshrined by the agency’s Obama-era “Open Internet Order,” introduced in 2015.

Ajit Pai, a Republican and former Verizon executive appointed by President Trump to lead the FCC, wants to overturn the order. His intention to do so, which had been widely telegraphed (see “What Happens If Net Neutrality Goes Away?”), has sparked a heated debate. Pai and his supporters want to give ISPs greater freedom over how they organize and charge for their services; opponents fear his plan will give ISPs too much power to determine what people see online.

The Open Internet Order switched the classification of broadband from a lightly regulated “information service” to a “telecommunications service,” which empowered the FCC to impose tougher, utility-style regulation on ISPs. Pai and his allies blame this approach for depressing broadband investment. In a speech earlier this year, Pai claimed that domestic investment by the nation’s 12 biggest ISPs fell by 5.6 percent, or $3.6 billion, between the start of 2014 and the end of 2015.

But other studies show that overall broadband investment in America has been pretty much flat for a number of years. One paper by Free Press, a consumer advocacy group, even found that investment by publicly traded ISPs rose by 5 percent in the two-year period after the Open Internet Order took effect compared with the two years prior.

Advocates of net neutrality argue that the agency’s rules are more important than ever now that ISPs are getting deeper into content themselves—a shift that could tempt them to give their own services an unfair advantage over rival ones. AT&T, for instance, doesn’t charge its mobile customers for the data they use watching shows from DirecTV, which it owns. Under net neutrality, the FCC can scrutinize these so-called “zero rating” deals on a case-by-case basis.

If the rules are rolled back, more of these arrangements are likely to appear. ISPs will also start offering paid prioritization. Some of these “fast lane” deals might not lead to higher prices for consumers. But entrepreneurs are rightly concerned that large companies will spend heavily to dominate fast-lane access, making it harder for some startups, such as bandwidth-hungry mobile video companies, to challenge them. “Milliseconds of difference can leave you at a disadvantage when potential customers are evaluating your product,” explains Tom Lee, the head of policy at Mapbox, a location data platform for mobile and Web applications.

Even the very biggest startups could suffer. In an IPO filing published earlier this year, Snap warned that weakening or ending net neutrality would hurt its business if ISPs limited access to it or favored its rivals (see “Why Snap Is Worried About Net Neutrality”). Young companies that pay up for higher speeds would have to pass those costs on to consumers, making it harder to compete with bigger players.

Big ISPs say they’re committed to keeping a level playing field, but history and economic realism suggest they won’t. AT&T, for instance, blocked Skype and other Internet calling services on iPhones on its network until 2009. In many markets in America, there are still only one or two high-speed broadband providers. The lack of competition means there’s little to deter them from discriminating against services that pose a threat to their own offerings.

Pai’s plan would switch responsibility for policing ISPs to the Federal Trade Commission, which focuses on consumer protection and anti-trust issues. But the FTC can’t impose rules like net neutrality across the board; it can tackle complaints only on a case-by-case basis. And few innovators will have the time or the money to launch legal battles. “Most startups don’t have enough cash to deal with a complaint in a contractual dispute, let alone fund years of an anti-trust case,” notes Evan Engstrom of Engine, a startup advocacy group.

Attempts to stall the FCC vote have picked up since it emerged that nearly eight million online messages sent in during the agency’s formal comment period on Pai’s proposed plan appear to have been sent from temporary or disposable e-mail addresses, suggesting they may well be fakes. Most of these comments were in favor of scrapping net neutrality. A group of 28 senators and New York’s attorney general are among those who have called on the FCC to postpone the vote so the alleged fraud can be investigated.

Whenever the vote takes place, though, the Republicans’ 3-2 majority among the agency’s five commissioners means Pai’s plan is likely to pass. What happens then? There will almost certainly be legal challenges mounted to delay a dismantling of the rules. Some states may even try to introduce their own regimes, though the FCC’s plan specifically preempts such moves.

Engstrom and others are hoping Congress will take a stand. Politicians from both parties generally agree that consumers and young companies need to be protected from unfair practices by ISPs. Susan Collins, a Republican senator, and several colleagues from Maine have even publicly opposed the FCC’s plan. Other Republicans may take more persuading, but getting bipartisan agreement on a law that enshrines net neutrality would be the best way to protect consumers, and the startups that are the lifeblood of innovation.

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But while the booming digital-currency market is delighting local entrepreneurs, it’s worrying the South Korean government. Authorities are particularly concerned about a new method of fund-raising called an initial coin offering, in which companies create blockchain-based digital tokens, which can be used to purchase a specific product or service in the future, and sell them publicly (See “What the Hell Is an Initial Coin Offering?”). In September, the country’s Financial Services Commission (FSC) ordered a ban on ICOs. “Cryptocurrencies are neither money nor currency nor financial products,” said the agency in a written statement at the time. “The South Korean government has reaffirmed an earlier stance that the state doesn’t guarantee the proper value of virtual currencies.”

The move could hinder local startups that deal in digital currencies and work with blockchain technologies. In South Korea, as in other countries, such startups have been using ICOs to raise funds because the campaigns require little paperwork, let entrepreneurs solicit money directly from investors rather than rely on banks or venture-capital firms, and enable founders to maintain total ownership of their companies. In September alone, South Korean startups raised about $89 million in digital token sales, according to government data. When the FSC announced its ban in late September, 20 South Korean startups said they had planned to raise seed money through ICOs but would fund-raise in foreign countries instead.

South Korea’s restriction came several weeks after China issued its own ban on ICOs, characterizing them as an unauthorized form of fund-raising and “disruptive to economic and financial stability,” and ordered companies to issue refunds to investors. Chinese regulators also instructed digital-currency exchanges to shut down their mainland trading platforms, compelling them to relocate overseas.

Many people have likened the two countries’ decisions, but South Korea’s stance on cryptocurrencies is unique. Unlike China, South Korea has yet to implement its ICO rule and did not make companies return ICO funds. It also continues to let Korea-based investors put money into foreign ICOs and digital-currency exchanges to operate within its borders. In November, Choe Heung-sik, who heads South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service, said that the agency is monitoring cryptocurrency trading inside the country but has no immediate plan to “directly supervise” exchanges.

However, South Korea has signaled it may start levying taxes on cryptocurrency transactions. Currently, trading virtual currencies in the country incurs only commission fees. But on October 13, the chief of the country’s National Tax Agency, Han Seung-hee, told lawmakers that the group is mulling imposing a value-added tax, a capital gains tax, or both on trades, with the help of financial authorities.

An official decision is expected within the first quarter of 2018. If the plan gets implemented, South Korea will become one of the few countries to tax cryptocurrency-cash exchanges. Germany and Singapore levy taxes on virtual-currency trading depending on factors such as the amount of gain and the length of the holding period, but other countries—among them Australia and Japan—recently eliminated their fees.

Retail investors aren’t the only South Koreans excited about cryptocurrencies; some of the country’s biggest corporations are pouring money into virtual-currency businesses and related technologies. Nexon, one of South Korea’s biggest video-game developers, is the leading shareholder in Korbit, the country’s No. 3 cryptocurrency exchange. Dunamu, an affiliate of Kakao, a leading South Korean Internet services company, recently launched a cryptocurrency exchange called Upbit. And the DB Group, another South Korean conglomerate, partnered with the local firm Sentbe in August to offer remittance payments in Bitcoin.

Even Samsung, South Korea’s largest conglomerate, is getting involved in the blockchain technology that makes cryptocurrency possible. In May, the company’s IT solutions unit, Samsung SDS, announced a pilot project that will use this system of widely distributed, frequently updated cryptographic ledgers to track shipping imports, exports, and the location of cargo shipments in real time. That month, the Samsung affiliate also joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, an industry group that is developing business-grade software based on blockchain. “Samsung SDS doesn’t have plans to start up a digital coin business, but the company does intend to develop [new] business models using blockchain technologies,” said spokesman Jo Joo-hong to MIT Technology Review.

South Korea’s fervor for cryptocurrency is notable given that the country has an urgent reason to be skeptical: cyberattacks from North Korea. Hackers probably hailing from North Korea targeted officials at four South Korean Bitcoin exchanges in July and August, according to South Korea’s National Police Agency. The “spear-phishing” plots involved sending messages from stolen e-mail addresses and attaching malicious code that was identical to viruses previously proved to be of North Korean origin. Experts such as the American cybersecurity firm FireEye have theorized that the hackers were responding to increased economic sanctions on North Korea and were interested in Bitcoin because of its relative anonymity, since people can buy and use the currency without revealing their true identities.

“The rampant use of digital currency offers both opportunities and risks,” says Kim Kyung-soo, head of the Ethereum research center in South Korea. “Risk takers are attempting to make profits by delving into these high-volatility assets. But digital currencies could also be used as seed money to lift the next wave of technology developments.”

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I hear footsteps behind me. I turn around and watch two figures enter the room and take up stations in front of the portraits. They’re the men from the pictures.

An unseen narrator explains that the shorter one, Jean de Dieu, was a child soldier recruited by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). It’s a Hutu group waging war against Rwanda from its base in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The other, Patient, is a sergeant in the Congolese army, which is allied with Rwanda’s ruling Tutsi ethnic group.

I know they’re both virtual characters, re-created through 3-D scanning and computer graphics. But they’re startlingly realistic—far more lifelike than anything I’ve seen in a game or movie.

As I approach Jean de Dieu, who looks sad and tired, a conversation begins. The narrator asks: Who is your enemy? What is violence for you? What makes your enemy inhuman? Jean answers in halting, vulnerable tones. I listen to his story of being forced into a refugee camp at age 11 and seeing Congolese militia kill his parents, their brains splattering onto him. Of course he’d hate the Tutsi, and everyone aligned with them.

Now the narrator quizzes Patient. He says the army pursues the FDLR because its soldiers rob, rape, and murder Congolese citizens. “He has no human values and can no longer change his mind,” Patient says of his despised FDLR enemy. “He wants to stay in the forest as part of the rebellion like a savage. Only beasts live in the forest.”

But Patient and Jean de Dieu also tell the narrator something else: they just want to live in peace with their neighbors and families. And as I walk through three more rooms and meet more combatants—gang members in El Salvador, a reservist in Israel and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza—I hear that shared hope flicker through in answer after answer. These men all have different stories, different traumas, and different allegiances. But their dreams are the same. Abu Khaled, in Gaza, says 23 of his family members have died during the Israeli occupation, but he still hopes for “peace and brotherhood” in the region.

After 40 minutes, I’m guided to a spot on the floor that resembles a Star Trek transporter pad. An assistant helps me remove my Oculus Rift VR headset and backpack, and I’m back on the ground floor of the MIT Museum, where this ambitious virtual-reality exhibit, “The Enemy,” made its North American premiere in the fall of 2017.

The exhibit—or maybe “experience” is a better word—is the creation of the Belgian-Tunisian photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa. He interviewed and filmed the fighters and then worked with Fox Harrell, a professor of digital media and artificial intelligence at MIT, and French partners Camera Lucida, France Télévisions Nouvelles Ecritures, and Emissive to bring them to life inside the virtual gallery.

Part of what’s groundbreaking about “The Enemy” is the sheer size of the simulation: the museum cleared out a 3,000-square-foot space so that up to 15 Oculus-wearing visitors at a time could roam freely in the virtual world. The fidelity of the characters and their movements is also striking. You can see the stubble on their chins and the tattoos on their arms and torsos. Thanks to eye-tracking sensors, each figure’s gaze is locked onto yours, cementing the illusion that the fighters are speaking directly to you. The technology works well enough to disappear, allowing you to form direct, empathetic connections with Jean, Patient, Abu, and their fellow combatants.

Which is exactly what Ben Khelifa wanted. “My interest was, can you look at these people in the eyes?” he told me. “Can they look you in the eyes? And what is happening when two people look at one another in the eyes? There is a connection, whether we want it or not.”

Right now, the “The Enemy” is accessible only to museum visitors, but Ben Khelifa says he wants those trapped in conflict zones, especially young people, to experience it too. If the installation can help people see that every conflict is grounded, to some extent, in stereotypes and misunderstandings, they might come to understand one another better and stop fighting, he believes. It’s a noble goal—but will all future VR producers have such benevolent aims?

Blown away

The idea that VR might be a medium for a new kind of journalism took hold around 2015, when the New York Times released its first VR documentary, “The Displaced,” about three young war refugees. Technically, the pieces produced by the Times’ VR studio are 360° films. Viewers can look in different directions, but otherwise, they watch passively. Sticklers reserve the term “virtual reality” for simulated 3-D environments in which users can move around at will and control objects, as gamers can on platforms such as HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and Oculus Rift. That’s the type of virtual reality that Ben Khelifa, a freelancer who has covered conflicts in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Israel, Yemen, Somalia, and many other countries, wanted to employ for “The Enemy.”

Ben Khelifa says he was worried that traditional war images have lost their power. Take the famous photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old refugee boy whose body washed ashore in Turkey in 2015. “Every single parent in the world should react to this and say, ‘That could be my kid,’” Ben Khelifa says. But though the image saddened millions, it didn’t move nations to intervene in Syria. “We don’t have the same emotional relation with photos that we used to have,” he says.

A virtual-reality re-creation of a fighter, speaking in his own words, might help viewers feel the impact of war more deeply, Ben Khelifa believed. So he went to Israel and Gaza, where he found soldiers willing to be videotaped. While they talked, he scanned them with a Microsoft Kinect and photographed them from multiple angles. He says his experience as a photojournalist helped him get the subjects to open up. “These fighters understand that I’ve been through a lot of fighting too—without holding a gun, but holding my camera,” Ben Khelifa says. “And I think there is—I wouldn’t call it a brotherhood, but an understanding that we both know what war is.”

In April 2015, at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival, Ben Khelifa showed a prototype of “The Enemy,” featuring only Abu Khaled and an Israeli soldier named Gilad. “People were just blown away by the realism of the fighters,” he says. But these early figures didn’t walk, turn their heads, or react to users. “From there, what I’ve been realizing is, the more the fighters are modified to recognize your presence, the more you recognize the presence of the fighter,” he says. “You spend less time wondering if he’s real or not. And you get to listen.”

A few years earlier Ben Khelifa had met MIT’s Fox Harrell, whose book Phantasmal Media explores how creators of VR and other computational media can build experiences that mutate depending on the user’s actions. Harrell says he’s fascinated by the narrative techniques of the 1950 Kurosawa film Rashomon, which retells the story of a brutal rape and murder from multiple perspectives. “I’ve been interested in how you can use algorithmic processes in AI to trigger these kinds of effects,” he says.

For “The Enemy,” Harrell helped Ben Khelifa and his team of developers in France build a system that surveys visitors before the experience and then monitors them on camera and via the Oculus headset as they interact with each fighter. Visitors’ responses determine the order in which they experience the three conflicts, the message they receive in the final gallery, and even the weather visible through the skylights.

John Durant, the director of the MIT Museum, says “The Enemy” took the museum into untested territory, both technologically and politically. “It was very appealing, because a lot of us talk about the ways in which technology may or may not contribute to addressing certain kinds of social and political issues, and sometimes people talk about it more than actually experiencing it and trying it,” he says.

The poignant stories told by Amilcar and Jorge, members of two rival gangs in San Salvador, give that section of the exhibit a sticking power that a photo essay just wouldn’t have, Durant says. “Most of the people who are likely to visit this museum don’t have the experience of growing up as members of a gang where a kind of tribal loyalty is perhaps the most fundamental thing you know,” he says. “So it takes some effort, honestly, to try and think about what the world might be like from that point of view. I think ‘The Enemy,’ to me, made it much easier.”

Visitors to the museum report similar revelations. “I’m from Colombia … I’ve lived close to war,” one visitor wrote in the guest book. “Forgiveness is gonna be always the hardest part. For forgiveness to appear, there’s gotta be compassion, and that is what ‘The Enemy’ brought me. Thank you.”

Brainwashing

VR has, in fact, begun to compete with old-fashioned photojournalism and TV news. VR producers have been flocking to Southeast Asia lately to document the plight of the Rohingya, a Muslim-majority ethnic group under assault in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. A refugee featured in a searing Al Jazeera VR film recounted how security forces in Myanmar had killed her husband and raped her. An Emmy-nominated VR film shot inside a Rohingya confinement camp by the anti-atrocity group the Nexus Fund showed prisoners languishing with little food or medical care. “I can’t put everybody on a plane and take them to Myanmar, but I know that if I could and they could see this in person, there’s nothing they wouldn’t do to help,” Nexus Fund executive director Sally Smith told CNN.

But if VR is an empathy machine, where will all that empathy be directed in the future? Here in the United States, meddlers have hijacked Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to generate outrage and spread falsehoods, with political consequences we are only beginning to understand. VR’s immersiveness and realism pull even more directly on our heartstrings. There’s nothing to stop Buddhist extremists in Myanmar, for instance, from making VR films designed to further inflame passions against the Rohingya. “Am I scared by it? Yeah,” Ben Khelifa says. “If you can create empathy, you can brainwash people too.”

In “The Enemy,” the VR storytelling is even-handed to a fault. In fact, if the piece has a limitation, it’s that it refuses to judge the merits of each fighter’s cause. But that limitation is also a strength. The parallel questions put to each combatant allow the visitor to construct “this kind of model of what’s the same and what’s different” for each fighter, Harrell explains. “And that can be some impetus to thinking beyond the preconceptions you had of the conflict.”

Without this kind of commitment to fairness and factuality, VR could easily devolve into a propaganda tool. But that’s true of all journalism. We’re fortunate that a creator with Ben Khelifa’s vision and conscience is showing the way. 

Wade Roush is a technology journalist and the producer and host of Soonish, a podcast about technology and the future.

“The Enemy” was staged at the MIT Museum in late 2017, and will continue its North American tour in Montreal and other Canadian cities. For tour dates visit theenemyishere.org.

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On Monday, Google released a tool called DeepVariant that uses the latest AI techniques to build a more accurate picture of a person’s genome from sequencing data.

DeepVariant helps turn high-throughput sequencing readouts into a picture of a full genome. It automatically identifies small insertion and deletion mutations and single-base-pair mutations in sequencing data.

High-throughput sequencing became widely available in the 2000s and has made genome sequencing more accessible. But the data produced using such systems has offered only a limited, error-prone snapshot of a full genome. It is typically challenging for scientists to distinguish small mutations from random errors generated during the sequencing process, especially in repetitive portions of a genome. These mutations may be directly relevant to diseases such as cancer.

A number of tools exist for interpreting these readouts, including GATK, VarDict, and FreeBayes. However, these software programs typically use simpler statistical and machine-learning approaches to identifying mutations by attempting to rule out read errors.

“One of the challenges is in difficult parts of the genome, where each of the [tools] has strengths and weaknesses,” says Brad Chapman, a research scientist at Harvard’s School of Public Health who tested an early version of DeepVariant. “These difficult regions are increasingly important for clinical sequencing, and it’s important to have multiple methods.”

DeepVariant was developed by researchers from the Google Brain team, a group that focuses on developing and applying AI techniques, and Verily, another Alphabet subsidiary that is focused on the life sciences.

The team collected millions of high-throughput reads and fully sequenced genomes from the Genome in a Bottle (GIAB)  project, a public-private effort to promote genomic sequencing tools and techniques. They fed the data to a deep-learning system and painstakingly tweaked the parameters of the model until it learned to interpret sequenced data with a high level of accuracy.

Last year, DeepVariant won first place in the PrecisionFDA Truth Challenge, a contest run by the FDA to promote more accurate genetic sequencing.

“The success of DeepVariant is important because it demonstrates that in genomics, deep learning can be used to automatically train systems that perform better than complicated hand-engineered systems,” says Brendan Frey, CEO of Deep Genomics.

The release of DeepVariant is the latest sign that machine learning may be poised to boost progress in genomics.

Deep Genomics is one of several companies trying to use AI approaches such as deep learning to tease out genetic causes of diseases and to identify potential drug therapies (see “An AI-Driven Genomics Company Is Turning to Drugs”).

Frey says AI will eventually go well beyond helping to sequence genomic data. “The gap that is currently blocking medicine right now is in our inability to accurately map genetic variants to disease mechanisms and to use that knowledge to rapidly identify life-saving therapies,” he says.

Another prominent company in this area is Wuxi Nextcode, which has offices in Shanghai, Reykjavik, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Wuxi Nextcode has amassed the world’s largest collection of fully sequenced human genomes, and the company is investing heavily in machine-learning methods.

DeepVariant will also be available on the Google Cloud Platform. Google and its competitors are furiously adding machine-learning features to their cloud platforms in an effort to lure anyone who might want to tap into the latest AI techniques (see “Ambient AI Is About to Devour the Software Industry”).

In general, AI figures to help many aspects of medicine take big leaps forward in the coming years. There are opportunities to mine many different kinds of medical data—from images or medical records, for example— to predict ailments that a human doctor might miss (see “The Machines Are Getting Ready to Play Doctor” and “A New Algorithm for Palliative Care”).

But genomic medicine represents an especially big  opportunity, because the scale and complexity of the data is unprecedented. “For the first time in history, our ability to measure our biology, and even to act on it, has far surpassed our ability to understand it,” says Frey. “The only technology we have for interpreting and acting on these vast amounts of data is AI. That’s going to completely change the future of medicine.”

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