Black Friday lasts a month this year at The Home Depot, including half off select tools and tool sets. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Or at least, The Home Depot Black Friday deals have slipped all customary bounds of the calendar: Online deals have already started as of Wednesday, November 5, and will go all the way to December 3. This includes some very steep discounts on flagship tool brands like Milwaukee, Ryobi, and Dewalt tools--by which I mean half-off and buy-one-get-one steep.

This story is part of Future Tense Fiction, a monthly series of short stories from Future Tense and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination about how technology and science will change our lives. By the time Tara returned from the protest, SafeT gauged her Wellness at 60% and Chase felt sick. For the last two hours he'd watched the number on his phone's app tick down, from safe green to warning yellow: 87%, 74%, 60%. On his newsfeed, masked chanters waved signs before the wire cage shielding the five megapipes that breached the marshy shore of Lake Michigan. Each pipe was owned by a consortium of Lakes United companies. Their great steel veins wormed the city, bearing water from LU to the drought-scarred West and South, whose nations paid more per acre-foot than Milwaukee's citizens ever could. On the feed Chase hadn't been able to see Tara or the sign she'd painted that morning: Our Lake, Our Water. What he had seen were the security corps of at least three consortia, clumped beneath their ever-circling camera-drones, bull-horning the chanters that they were risking corporate slander. If arrested, they'd be hauled off to one of the consortia's private prisons. There they could be coerced into confessing they were linebreakers, guerillas who spliced pipes to siphon off clean water to Milwaukee neighborhoods that couldn't afford consortia prices. Protestors sometimes returned from these prisons. Fingers numb, Chase had tapped SafeT to view the breakdown of Tara's Wellness aggregate into its individual components: risk of arrest (15%), risk of indictment (20%), risk of job loss (27%), risk of injury (31%). Even when she had texted home in 30 and he'd cleared her route in the SafeT map--low smoke risk, low contagion risk, 93% chance of safe arrival--his jaw only eased when she stepped through the door. Tara's thin face was ferocious, cheeks red against her yellow hair. Black grease spotted her strong hands. Over the decade they'd shared, he'd watched age sharpen her into herself. Now, impassioned, she was fiercely beautiful. He almost forgot her yellow number, until she saw him, and her smile sagged.

This story appeared in the November 2020 issue as "Cracking the 414s." In the 1983 techno-thriller WarGames, David Lightman, played by a fresh-faced Matthew Broderick, sits in his bedroom, plunking away on a boxy computer using an 8-bit Intel processor. As text flashes across the screen, David's face lights up; he believes he's hacking into a video game company, but the unwitting teenager is actually facing off against a military supercomputer. "Shall we play a game?" the computer asks ominously. In the film, the subsequent showdown triggers a countdown to World War III.

It goes by many names, this thing that we yearn for and that rules us: opium, money, power. William S. Burroughs, the American cult author, likened them all – in his 1959 novel "Naked Lunch" – to the flesh of a gargantuan centipede that lurks in the depths and has an irresistible taste, and whose addicts gorge on it until they lose consciousness. To get a piece of it one must undergo endless ordeals, wandering about in kitchens, sleeping cubicles, wobbly balconies and basements. That's also the sort of route one must follow in order to experience the products of an algorithm that was unveiled in May in Silicon Valley. Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, aka GPT-3, is a "language model": a machine learning system that's capable of automatically and dynamically generating texts in human-like language. Since its emergence, thousands have wished to touch it, use it, breathe in something of the words it spews out. But only a few have been vouchsafed that privilege.

Earlier today, you might have seen this tweet (or some variation of it) make its way across your screen. "Travis Scott's takeover of Fortnite… if we could do that with Joe Biden [for the convention], Joe Biden projected over the Grand Canyon" -- Lis Smith, democratic strategist, on politico live There's a good chance you'll recognize some subset of these words. You'll almost certainly be familiar with Joe Biden and the Grand Canyon, for instance. Maybe you also play Fortnite and listen to Travis Scott. Or perhaps your soul has withered away to the point that you already had Lis Smith's Politico Live appearance circled on your calendar.

Lawyers, be forewarned: In what could be a foreshadowing of things to come, a judge has penalized two lawyers for failing to use artificial intelligence. The case comes to us by way of Ontario. It arose after a woman named Kristen Cass slipped and fell in a tavern in Port Dalhousie, a waterfront community on Lake Ontario, 30 minutes by car from Niagara Falls. The tavern owner defaulted, so her lawsuit proceeded solely against the building's owner, the Port Dalhousie Vitalization Corporation (PDVC). PDVC won summary judgment dismissing the action against it.

MADISON, WISCONSIN – Foxconn Technology Group will partner with three major Midwestern companies to create a $100 million fund to help launch technology startups around the world, the companies announced Tuesday. The Taiwanese electronics giant, Advocate Aurora Health, Johnson Controls and Northwestern Mutual will each contribute $25 million to create the Wisconn Valley Venture Fund. The fund will be controlled by a manager based in Milwaukee as well as a committee comprised of representatives from each of the four companies. Officials from the four companies said they expect the fund will produce excellent returns and lead to advances in robotics, artificial intelligence and health care. "We look forward to enabling entrepreneurs and startups to find success for transformative solutions through the fund," Foxconn CEO Terry Gau said in a statement.

See how self-driving cars prepare for the real world inside a private testing facility owned by Google's autonomous car company, Waymo. The Navya passenger shuttle is among myriad autonomous vehicles worldwide in various stages of development. And at an event Nov. 17 and 18 on the University of Wisconsin Madison College of Engineering campus, visitors will have the opportunity to check it out. The Taiwan-based electronic manufacturer's plans to use driverless vehicles to move thousands of workers a day at its 22 million-square-foot campus about 30 miles south of Milwaukee could pave new ground for the technology, which promises to reshape transportation in this country. More than a dozen states are scrambling to get ready for self-driving cars, and while major companies from Google to General Motors are testing such cars, few are in use yet.

In the fall of 2016, Oliver Buechse, a Green Bay-based strategy consultant, attended a conference in Silicon Valley with a focus on disruption in the financial industry. Interacting with the artificial intelligence and fintech community, Buechse noticed something different about the discussions there. AI, clearly, had already arrived on the West Coast. "All of California was abuzz about AI," Buechse said. "I thought, why aren't we talking about this in Wisconsin?" Wisconsin's apparent tardiness to the conversation concerned Buechse and he left compelled to spread the word. "Then I thought, 'Well, what am I going to do about it now that I know?'" he said. Eliciting fear or optimism, hype or indifference, artificial intelligence can be an elusive concept to pin down. Leading thinkers in the tech industry diverge on the subject. Entrepreneur Elon Musk has made headlines with near-apocalyptic predictions that the race for artificial intelligence will ignite World War III and that AI poses an existential threat to humans. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, meanwhile, has dismissed such concerns.

Galloping Ghost, one of the largest video-game arcades in the world, sits in an unassuming, single story brick building in Brookfield, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, that seems to go on forever, each corner bursting with beeping, blinking and flashing arcade cabinets. Owner Doc Mack says they have more than 600 games. He says he didn't set out have quite that many. "I have a huge collecting problem that I've had since childhood so I should have seen it coming, but who knew?" Mack asks rhetorically. Galloping Ghost is part of a resurgence of old-fashioned, button mashing arcade games.