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Meet This Year’s WIRED25: People Who Are Making Things Better

The scientists, technologists, artists, and chefs who are standing between us and species collapse.
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Illustration: Murugiah

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When Sartre said hell is other people, he wasn’t living through 2020. Right now, other people are the only thing between us and species collapse. Not just the people we occasionally encounter behind fugly masks—but the experts and innovators out in the world, leading the way. The 17-year-old hacker building his own coronavirus tracker. The Google AI wonk un-coding machine bias. A former IT guy helping his community thwart surveillance. There are people everywhere, in and out of the spotlight—in tech, science, food, culture, politics­—who aren’t deterred by disaster. Their wish: to make things better for all of us. Sounds like heaven. —The Editors

This feature appears in the October 2020 issue. Subscribe to WIRED.

Lisa Piccirillo

Assistant professor, MIT; solver of the Conway Knot

Piccirillo untangled the 50-year-old Conway knot in a single week, working on the mathematical challenge in the evening as self-assigned homework. She’s now been published in the prestigious Annals of Mathematics and has landed a tenure-track position at MIT.

Her hobbies:

  • Woodworking
  • ’70s-era Japanese motorcycles

Her favorite podcast: 99% Invisible

Tsai Ing-Wen, Chen Chien-Jen, and Audrey Tang

President, Taiwan; VP (until May 2020), epidemiologist; digital minister

A country’s first female president, an epidemiologist as her veep, and a transgender digital minister with anarchist beliefs—together, this Taiwanese trio all but eradicated the coronavirus from their homeland. They did so through decisive actions, like early travel bans, strict social distancing measures, and real-time mask-availability apps. The country’s true key to success, though, may be the hard lessons learned from the 2003 SARS outbreak (and the ensuing trust their people now have in their country’s institutions).

Their fellow Covid conquerors:

  • Anne Hidalgo, mayor, Paris
  • Kathy Lofy, state health officer, Washington
  • Jacinda Ardern, prime minister, New Zealand
  • Sara Cody, public health director, Santa Clara County, California
  • London Breed, mayor, San Francisco
Anthony Fauci

Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Fauci fell for public service through the work of his father, a neighborhood pharmacist who often doubled as doctor for low-income residents. As director of NIAID since 1984, he’s advised six presidents on HIV, Ebola, Zika, and more. His integrity in the face of Covid-19 has made him an icon. In a divided nation, he’s also a lightning rod.

No breaks: Fauci has been working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, since the beginning of February.

Public health’s next generation: Kizzmekia Corbett, viral immunologist, NIAIAD Vaccine Research Center. “Corbett represents what’s really good about America, in the sense that we have Black young people, who are in the very early stages of their career, who have been able to team up with experienced investigators and have made major contributions. She’s going to be a real role model, as both a woman and as an African American.” —Anthony Fauci

Al Gore

Founder and chair, the Climate Reality Project

The truth is increasingly inconvenient: The globe is getting hotter, and we’re to blame. In 2020, though, Gore is still working to fix it, by funding sustainable companies through the equity firm Generation Investment Management and educating the masses through his nonprofit Climate Reality Project. Among its campaigns: boosting voter registration to elect eco-friendly politicians.

Patrice Peck

Creator, Coronavirus News for Black Folks

In April, Peck launched a weekly newsletter to give the Black community the coronavirus coverage white journalists weren’t delivering—quickly accruing nearly 1,000 subscribers in the first month.

Her recommended TV shows:

  • I May Destroy You
  • Little America
  • Ramy

Instagram follows:

  • Zeba Blay (@zebablay), senior culture writer, Huffington Post
  • Kimberly Drew (@museummammy), art curator and writer

More fabulous corona-communicators:

Ava DuVernay

Filmmaker

DuVernay may be the most relevant director of 2020. Her body of work includes Selma, When They See Us—about the Central Park Five—and 13th, her 2016 documentary about mass incarceration. (Viewership of the Netflix doc skyrocketed in the three weeks following George Floyd’s murder.) This year she launched the online social justice course Array 101, as well as LEAP, a fund for artists whose work explores police violence.

More cultural ­masterminds: Misha Green, Janet Mock, Michaela Coel, Nia DaCosta, Lena Waithe, Issa Rae, Beyoncé

Timnit Gebru

Technical co-lead, Google’s Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team; cofounder, Black in AI

In 2016, Gebru was shocked to count only “about five Black people” out of an estimated 5,500 attendees at an AI conference. The following year, she helped organize Black in AI’s first annual workshop to bring more diversity to the field. Her research has spotlighted racist algorithms and the ethical quandaries of data-mining projects and AI, arguing in a January 2020 paper that current methods of data collection and annotation for machine learning are rife with biases capable of causing real-world harm.

Gebru’s Hobbies:

  • Piano
  • Staring into space at cafés

Recommended TV shows:

  • Queen Sono
  • Ramy
  • The Wire
Avi Schiffmann

Founder, nCoV2019.live

Just 17 years old, Schiffmann thought the government’s coronavirus tracking sites “sucked.” So he made his own. He has now attracted some 1.7 billion unique visitors and rejected millions of dollars in ads to keep his site bias- and distraction-­free.

He’d like to meet: Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee

His other project: 2020protests, a tracking site for BLM protests

Recommended book: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola Rosling

Eric Yuan and Sarah Friar

CEO, Zoom; CEO, Nextdoor

By last April, well into the pandemic, Zoom’s user base had climbed to more than 300 million daily users, and Yuan shifted his platform from servicing boardroom meetings to hosting quarantined book clubs, birthday parties, happy hours, weddings, graduations, and more. Then the “Zoombombing” began, pushing Yuan to mandate meeting passcodes and offer free end-to-end encryption for all users.

Internet explorer: Yuan was inspired to pursue a career in tech after seeing Bill Gates give a speech in Japan in 1995.

Friar, meanwhile, saw Nextdoor’s daily users soar 80 percent from February to March, as the pandemic shrank people’s daily lives to a few neighborhood blocks. She has now fine-tuned the site to combat misinformation, amplify local Samaritans, and promote small businesses and nonprofits.

Friar’s recommended books:

Vijaya Gadde

Legal, policy, and trust and safety lead, Twitter

Joining Twitter in 2011, Gadde quickly ascended to the top lawyer spot, where she now overlooks the site’s 280-character id. Her latest challenge: counseling the Twitterverse through one of the most boundary-­pushing presidential races in US history. This year, the platform started placing misinformation labels on high-profile tweets that it deemed capable of jeopardizing public safety or capsizing the democratic process. One such label was slapped onto President Trump’s May 26 post that claimed mail-in voting would lead to widespread fraud.

Influencers: Gadde toyed with the idea of studying archaeology and anthropology in college, until her parents talked her out of it.

Recommended book: A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles

Her fellow guardian: Del Harvey, vice president of trust and safety, Twitter

Ben Adida

Executive director, VotingWorks

Adida started the nonpartisan, nonprofit VotingWorks in 2018 to ensure that US elections are trustworthy and accessible. It has done so by offering affordable paper-ballot-fed ­voting machines with ­voter-verifiable tracking codes and conducting risk-limiting audits. VotingWorks is developing print-at-home mail-in ballots. Plus, all of its software is written with open source code, making it more reliable and secure.

His hobbies:

  • Baking
  • Basketball
  • Listening to Taylor Swift with his kids

Adida’s election tech comrade: Josh Benaloh, senior cryptographer, Microsoft Research

Sarah Cooper

Comedian

Without penning a single joke, Cooper has lit up TikTok and Twitter with her lip-sync parodies of President Trump. She has won bigly, with a guest-host spot on Jimmy Kimmel Live and an upcoming Netflix special called Everything’s Fine.

James Murdoch

Founder, Lupa Systems; ex-CEO, 21st Century Fox

On July 31, Murdoch resigned from the board of News Corp “due to disagreements over certain editorial content” and “other strategic decisions,” severing his last tie to his family’s media empire. Long considered the black sheep, he previously used part of his $2 billion stake in the majority sale of Fox to Disney to launch his investment firm, Lupa Systems. Among its goals: finance a more balanced media landscape, purge the internet of disinformation, and support eco-­conscious businesses.

His hobby: Studying the history of Central Asia, “particularly the parts where great empires enter long periods of terminal decline.”

Arlan Hamilton and Katie Rae

Founder, Backstage Capital; CEO, The Engine

Hamilton started the venture firm Backstage Capital while homeless, intent on investing in female, POC, and LGBTQ company founders long ignored by the Silicon Valley boys’ club. Read about it in her new book, released in May, It’s About Damn Time.

In 2016, MIT approached veteran venture capitalist Katie Rae after faculty bemoaned a paucity of funds for startups tackling hard problems that require years of research and development. She has now helped VC firm the Engine raise a $205 million fund for people who are focused on long-term challenges like climate change and world hunger.

Rae’s hobby: Paddleboarding with her dog, Lulu

Hamilton’s guilty quarantine pleasure: The Titan Games with Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson

Showrunner: Hamilton was a tour manager for the likes of Toni Braxton, CeeLo Green, and Amanda Palmer before switching to VC.

More VCs on a mission:

  • Carmichael ­Roberts, cofounder, Material Impact
  • Swati Mylavarapu, cofounder, Incite
Gwynne Shotwell

COO, SpaceX

Shotwell joined SpaceX as its ­seventh employee in 2002. Today she oversees the 8,000-person aerospace company, which this year scheduled 38 launches, including the Crew Dragon on May 30 with two NASA astronauts on board heading for the ISS. That liftoff marked the first time a commercially built spacecraft carried humans into orbit, turning Elon Musk’s ­starry-eyed dreams into headlines. Up next: the moon and Mars.

Isla Myers-Smith

Founder, Team Shrub

Over the past dozen years, Team Shrub has used satellites, drones, and boots on the ground to study the Arctic ice retreat—and flora advance—in the ­carbon-rich tundra. The group recently started putting AI to work, analyzing the terabytes of data they collected and giving us a glimpse into our precarious future.

Tech support: Myers-Smith cofounded Coding Club to teach coding to ecology students.

Her hobby: Playing folk music in the pubs of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Her recommended books:

Deonie and Steve Allen

Microplastic researchers, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

The two discovered microplastic in ocean breezes and over the French Pyrenees—in other words, it’s everywhere. The Allens’ 2020 mission is to pinpoint the sources and try to halt the spread.

Adventure time: The Allens both paraglide and have lived on a boat for the past two decades, traveling halfway around the world.

Their recommended TV show: BrainDead

Maddie Stone

Security researcher, Google Project Zero

After ­considering­ careers in interior design and with the FBI as a teenager, Stone was coaxed into pursuing a degree in engineering by her father. Now, as part of Project Zero, she’s been hunting the bugs hiding in Silicon ­Valley’s code. In the wild, these pests are known as zero-day vulnerabilities, and they can wreak havoc when exploited by hackers.

High achiever: Stone climbed Mount Kilimanjaro and has read over 80 books this year.

Matt Mitchell

Founder, CryptoHarlem

Mitchell gained firsthand knowledge of surveillance after being lured into two consecutive employee-­monitoring jobs. He’s now using his skills to stymie the digital panopticon, throwing (currently virtual) parties to educate and organize the Black community, whose overpoliced neighborhoods are under 24/7 surveillance.

An early inspiration: Seeing the Black hacker John Threat on the cover of WIRED in 1994. “Once you see it, you can be it. So that was a big, big deal. A lot of Black hackers, they still have that magazine in their house somewhere.”

Recommended book: Dark Matters, Simone Browne

Ohad Zaidenberg, Nate Warfield, and Marc Rogers

Cofounders, CTI League

In March, CTI formed a now 1,500-deep “Justice League” of volunteer hackers to defend the health care sector, and hospitals in particular, from cyber­criminals exploiting the Covid crisis.

Warfield’s Recommended books:

Count Hackula: Zaidenberg often works from 10 am to 3 am and is referred to as the “CTI League vampire.”

Ryan and Brandon Tseng

Cofounders, Shield AI

After serving seven years as a Navy SEAL, Brandon Tseng approached his entrepreneurial brother Ryan about creating a company that would use AI to save the lives of service members and civilians. Their fully autonomous quadcopter drones are now scouting combat zones overseas—even inside buildings and tunnels—to identify threats for soldiers.

Flashback: Brandon considered becoming a director when he was young; Ryan often starred in his short films.

Quarantine pleasures:

  • Ryan: Growing tomatoes with his wife
  • Brandon: pickleball and Starcraft
Swizz Beatz and Timbaland

Co-creators, Verzuz

On March 24, megaproducers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz got a concert­-starved nation on its feet when they livestreamed Verzuz’s inaugural hip hop and R&B battle to 20,000-plus fans on Instagram. They’ve now migrated their free face-offs to Apple TV and staged flowdowns like DMX vs. Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross vs. 2 Chainz, and Erykah Badu vs. Jill Scott. But it’s about more than just lyrical sparring and beat-backed pugilism—the pair see the series as a sort of museum for Black musicians everywhere.

Arca

Artist and producer

Arca’s new avant-pop album KiCk i (released in June) intercuts bubblegum beats with machine-gun clatter, cyberpunk reggaeton, and Björk crooning Spanish poetry in a bilingual duet. The kinetic stream of sonic shape-shifting mirrors the transgender Venezuelan artist’s outspoken reinvention of the 21st-­century diva. Or, as she raps on “Nonbinary,” “What a treat / It is to be / Nonbinary / Ma chérie / Tee-hee-hee / Bitch.”

Recommended video game: Sky: Children of the Light

Recommended musician: Simón Díaz

Jon Gray, Lester Walker, and Pierre ­Serrao

Cofounders, Ghetto Gastro

In the midst of a pandemic and BLM protests, this Bronx-based collective partnered with La Morada, a local Oaxacan restaurant, and Rethink, a nonprofit that redirects excess food to NYC families. Together, they’ve served 1,000 meals a day to those in need. Their goal is to keep growing the program, to feed, they say, millions.

Body movin’: Serrao originally considered becoming a pro soccer player or a Chippendales dancer.

Walker’s recommended books:

Gray’s recommended TV shows:

  • The Chi
  • I May Destroy You
  • Sherlock

Walker’s hobby: “Being fly. The drip should be effortless, it shouldn’t look like it’s difficult to do. That’s my hobby—doing shit effortlessly.”

Other prophets of food:

  • Gabriela Cámara, Cala restaurant, San Francisco: “We’re always struggling as an industry. The margins have been getting smaller and smaller. The only way to get larger margins is to cut costs, and the way society has been cutting costs is by industrializing food, and we know that has greater costs in the long run."
  • Ron Finley (“The Gangsta Gardener”), Los Angeles
  • Massimo Bottura, Food for Soul, #kitchenquarantine on ­Instagram: “Food enables human connections. It’s a powerful vehicle to inspire a change of mindset.”
Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook

CEO, Google; CEO, Apple

In the wake of the most cataclysmic viral outbreak in over 100 years, tech titans Sundar Pichai and Tim Cook overlooked their rivalry to unite the powers of Google and Apple for the greater good. Their Covid-19 contact tracing API has since been integrated into health care sector apps around the world. The next step: persuade 3 billion smartphone users to opt into the program and share anonymized Bluetooth pings with nearby Androids and iPhones. (Rest easy. Those encrypted pings will self-destruct in 14 days.)

How Pichai achieves calm:

  • Reading
  • Walking his dog, Jeffree
  • Learning new skills through YouTube videos, like making Indian dishes and pizza from scratch
  • Watching old football and cricket highlights

Illustrations by Jay Ruben Dayrit

Illustrations based on photographs by Getty Images (Gore, Shotwell, Chen, Cook, Duvernay, Yuan, Ghetto Gastro, President Tsai, Cooper, Pichai, Swizz Beats, Timbaland), Alex Raduan (Arca), Trace Ward (Deonie and Steve Allen), Claire Bee (Myers-Smith), Tony Luong (Rae), Taylor Miller (Peck), WM Photo (Murdoch), Nick Lee (Mitchell)

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