Five longreads on artificial intelligence and a future filled with machine-written prose.
robots
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Dog’s Inner Life: What a Robot Pet Taught Me About Consciousness
“‘Clearly this is not a biological dog,’ my husband said. He asked whether I had realised that the red light beneath its nose was not just a vision system but a camera, or if I’d considered where its footage was being sent. While I was away, he told me, the dog had roamed around the […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘Machines Set Loose to Slaughter’: the Dangerous Rise of Military AI
“… it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the idea of ethical robotic killing machines is unrealistic, and all too likely to support dangerous fantasies of pushbutton wars and guiltless slaughters.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Extreme Heat Is Here, and It’s Deadly
“For many, the present is already feeling pretty dystopian.” Arizona and regions across the U.S. are seeing record-high temperatures — and the heat will only intensify. At High Country News, Jessica Kutz reports that climate fiction, Indigenous architecture, and a robot named MaRTy are a few key things that can prepare us for a hotter […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Business & Tech, Nonfiction, Quotes
Is Estonia Leading the Way to the Future Digital World?
Estonia’s ultimate goal in digitizing its society has less to do with automation than it does with embracing the transient nature of labor in the European marketplace.
Posted inQuotes, Science & Nature
The Dream of a Perfect Android
Hiroshi Ishiguro has spent his career creating robots. But does he know enough about humans to make them lifelike?
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes
Themed for Success
At Eater, journalist Emily Yoshida hits some of Tokyo’s absurd, popular tourist attractions trying to understand specifically what themed-destinations offer and why they’re so popular.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Who Cares about Your Jetpack?’ On the Lack of Women Futurists
When we think about futurism, more often than not it’s robots and hoverboards that spring into our minds.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Happens When We Run Out of Jobs?
After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse. For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable—like plows […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Nightmare Dream of a Thinking Machine
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.