Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves.

Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will. Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016.

Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will. Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016.

In the eleventh century, St. Anselm of Canterbury proposed an argument for the existence of God that went roughly like this: God is, by definition, the greatest being that we can imagine; a God that doesn’t exist is clearly not as great as a God that does exist; ergo, God must exist.

While video game music has become more and more popular as the years have rolled by, there once was a time when it was seen as an afterthought; the tunes that accompanied the titles we played on our home computers and consoles were often there simply to avoid us having to listen to complete silence.

While video game music has become more and more popular as the years have rolled by, there once was a time when it was seen as an afterthought; the tunes that accompanied the titles we played on our home computers and consoles were often there simply to avoid us having to listen to complete silence.

You encounter so many people every day, online and off-, that it is almost impossible to be alone. Now, thanks to computers, those people might not even be real.

In 2007, Kenneth Stanley, a computer scientist at the University of Central Florida, was playing with Picbreeder, a website he and his students had created, when an alien became a race car and changed his life.

There are thousands of computers that could destroy human civilization as we know it, if not eradicate the human race altogether.

Of all the buzzy 21st-century tech phrases, “machine learning” threatens to be the most important. Programming computers is slow, but we’re nearing the point where humans give the bots parameters and let them teach themselves.

Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will. Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016.

Joi Ito's Resisting Reduction manifesto rejects the idea of reducing the world to a series of computable relationships that will eventually be overtaken by our ability to manipulate them with computers ("the Singularity") and instead to view the world as full of irreducible complexities and "to d

Computer algorithms have gotten much better at recognizing patterns, like specific animals or people's faces, allowing software to automatically categorize large image collections. But we've come to rely on some things that computers can't do well.

Joi Ito's Resisting Reduction manifesto rejects the idea of reducing the world to a series of computable relationships that will eventually be overtaken by our ability to manipulate them with computers ("the Singularity") and instead to view the world as full of irreducible complexities and "to d

Seduced & Abandoned was one of a series of ICA conferences (spanning 12-13 March, 1994) held under the umbrella title Towards the Aesthetics of the Future that explored the connections between culture, society, politics and the impact upon them of new digital processes and technologies.

In this selection, Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A but do not make individual presentations.

Digitisation supported by Virtual Futures http://virtualfutures.co.uk

Extra title music by Vapor Lanes https://vaporlanes.bandcamp.com/

Review of the proceedings http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/gadgets-tech/computers-more-theorists-than-you-could-shake-a-stick-at-rupert-goodwins-floats-in-organic-creme-de-1429850.html

The celebrated historian of science, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Social Thought and History at the University of Chicago speaks on "Algorithms Before Computers: Patterns, Recipes, and Rules." Presented at the UW as a Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities on April 19, 2017. More at https://simpsoncenter.org/news/2017/03/lorraine-daston-algorithms-computers-april-19.

One of the big trends we’ve seen over the last five years is automation. At the same time, we’re also seeing more intelligence built into tools we already have, like phones and computers. Where do you see this process in five years?

Go is an ancient Chinese board game, often viewed as the game computers could never play. Now researchers from Google-owned company DeepMind have proven the naysayers wrong, creating an artificial intelligence - called AlphaGo – which has beaten a professional Go player for the first time. In this Nature Video, we go behind the scenes to learn about the game, the programme and what this means for the future of AI.

When was the last time you awoke right at the first peak of day? Or put away your work simply because night was falling? We are less and less tied to rhythms of natural time, living instead in the glow of computers and smartphone screens.