Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of WIRED, talks about CES from Las Vegas!
What is the controversy with the Ivanka Trump speaking at CES?
Well, there were a lot of people who didn't want her here because she doesn't work a lot on tech policy and a lot of people who are in the tech industry don't like the Trump administration. My view, hey, she wants to speak about tech. She's a pretty senior official. Fine for her to be here. Second controversy: She talked a lot about retraining the workforce. A lot of people who feel like the Trump administration has been anti worker and that's not an appropriate position for her to push. More sympathetic to that argument.
Any surprises coming out of CES this year?
Yeah. There is no 5G. No one's talking about it. I haven't seen anything with 5G. I've seen one big T-Mobile billboard across the street. Maybe 5G is now an infrastructure story, not a consumer story. We'll have to wait till next year to see more 5G. We're in kind of a lull. There was a lot last year. Maybe next year. Not this year.
How concerned should the public be about deepfakes this election year?
Very! But less now that Facebook has preemptively announced that they're going to ban them. I feel better about deepfakes today than I did yesterday.