Tag: AI

This week, our editors recommend longreads by Benjamin Wofford, Josh Dzieza, Evan Osnos, Alice Wong & Ed Yong, and Dan Kois.

Seven schools in China have installed facial recognition technology in classrooms to monitor — and score — their students. At The Disconnect, Yujie Xue reports on this “intelligent education” initiative.

The question “Can a machine think?” has shadowed computer science from its beginnings. Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that a machine could be taught like a child; John McCarthy, inventor of the programming language LISP, coined the term “artificial intelligence” in 1955. As AI researchers in the 1960s and 1970s began to use computers to recognize images, translate between languages, and understand instructions in normal language and not just code, the idea that computers would eventually develop the ability to speak and think—and thus to do evil—bubbled into mainstream culture.