They see facial recognition, smart diapers, and surveillance devices as inevitable evolutions. They’re not. Imagine you’re taking an online business class — the kind where you watch video lectures and then answer questions at the end.

On December 15, 1811, the London Statesman issued a warning about the state of the stocking industry in Nottingham. Twenty thousand textile workers had lost their jobs because of the incursion of automated machinery.

In an interview, best-selling author and machine-learning expert Pedro Domingos discusses the global competition to take the lead in artificial intelligence, the advance of autocrats and the threats modern technology presents to Western democracies.

Undiagnosed by the mainstream media and much of the academic community, a major intellectual renewal is underway across the left. It is energetic and tech-savvy, building platforms such as Novara Media.

The bartender pouring free drinks glances around with nothing to do as the raucous room full of startup founders and software developers gravitates toward its preferred drug: networking.

Big Tech’s warnings about an AI apocalypse are distracting us from years of actual harms their products have caused. On Tuesday morning, the merchants of artificial intelligence warned once again about the existential might of their products.

On May 30, a research organization called the Center for AI Safety released a 22-word statement signed by a number of prominent "AI scientists," including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind; and Geoffrey Hinton, who has been described as the "godfather" of AI.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray.

Among the more sombre gifts brought by the Enlightenment was the realisation that humans might one day become extinct.

A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World is a curated collection of over 160 thematic works that serve as pathways to explore the presence of artificial intelligence and technology in the geographic regions that are home to the majority of the human population.

A Primer on AI in/from the Majority World is a curated collection of over 160 thematic works that serve as pathways to explore the presence of artificial intelligence and technology in the geographic regions that are home to the majority of the human population.

In a few minutes, electronic music will start pulsing, stuffed animals will be flung through the air, women will emerge spinning Technicolor hula hoops, and a mechanical bull will rev into action, bucking off one delighted rider after another.

Barrett Moore had ordered 2 million N95 masks, held enough freeze-dried food to feed families hiding from global Armageddon for decades, owned a small arsenal of guns, and fortified a pole barn in which to wait out the collapse of civilization.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

“When Kurzweil first started talking about the “singularity”, a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist.

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do.

Sometime in April, the Ingenuity helicopter will take to the Martian air, making it, in NASA’s words, “the first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet.” Or, to put it in more mundane terms, Mars will have become another airport.

In 1860, Fukuzawa Yukichi, a young Japanese student still learning English himself, accompanied the first ever Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States as its English interpreter.