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.

This is a guest post by Daisy Dixon, Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University Content warning: This post includes discussion of abusive language, misogyny, body-shaming, and rape threats.

THE nature of consciousness is truly one of the great mysteries of the universe because, for each of us, consciousness is all there is. Without it, there is no world, no self, no interior and no exterior. There is nothing at all.

‘One of their philosophers has lately discovered that “as the liver secretes bile, so does the brain secrete thought”; which astonishing discovery Dr Cabanis, more lately still, in his ‘Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l’Homme’, has pushed into its minutest developments.

Following our one-hour promo chat from the other day, I’m very excited to announce that The Philosophy and Politics of Accelerationism, a collaborative course written by James ‘@meta_nomad‘ Ellis and myself is now live at teachable.com.

I've read fantastic, dark - often very political analyses - of TV shows like Thomas the Tank Engine, Teletubbies, Mr.Blobby, and Sesame Street's Oscar the Grouch.... but I'd like to find some more. What other dystopian, playful, surreal, philosophical, deconstructive readings of kid's television shows/characters are out there? I am more interested in kid's TV shows, rather than movies, because there is more material to go with, but certain classic films, like Willy Wonka perhaps, would be appreciated too

Author Adrienne Mayor discusses the myths that contained the first blueprints for artificial intelligence

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/audio/2018/nov/02/the-ancient-greeks-warned-us-about-ai-chips-with-everything-podcast

I read a quote recently, and cannot find it again. It was in an article or interview about better worlds, about the possibility of utopia. And the person writing/being interviewed quoted another thinker's doctrine, something like: "A possible world is only worth considering if it is better regardless of who you are in that world." i.e. imagine that you don't know who you would be born as in a possible world, and build your utopia from there.

In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life.

People think that they sell oil, but in fact they are becoming oil. —Victor Pelevin

A poet, somewhere in Siberia, or the Balkans, or West Africa, some time in the past 60,000 years, recites thousands of memorised lines in the course of an evening. The lines are packed with fixed epithets and clichés.

Outraged headlines erupted when students launched a campaign to challenge the great western philosophers. We went to the source of dissent – London’s School of Oriental and African Studies – to investigate

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological hardware – you’re using it now. Science and technology seem to be converging, from several directions, on the possibility of similar intelligence in non-biological systems.

Billions of years in the future, the Time Traveller stands before a dark ocean, beneath a bloated red sun. The beach is dappled with lichen and ice. The huge crabs and insects which menaced him on his visit millions of years in its past are gone.

Leaving planet Earth isn’t easy. This year, NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program received a record 18,000-plus applications from highly qualified scientists bent on discovering space’s deep abyss. It will choose a handful, if that.

The things we create define us, as a culture and as a species. Yet, so often, as we hurtle into the future, our creations seem to take on a life of their own.

More than Human: From the Politics of Plastics to Shifting our Species Into the UnknownWilla Köerner edited an issue of ART21 Magazine on the subject of Renewal. She interviewed us about #Additivism, asking the right kind of questions about what comes next:The things we create define us, as a culture and as a species. Yet, so often, as we hurtle into the future, our creations seem to take on a life of their own. For just over a year, the artist Morehshin Allahyari has partnered with the writer Daniel Rourke on a project that grapples with this conundrum in such a mind-expanding way that, after speaking with the pair about their work, my brain was reeling. This is a story of two people who, while working to explore the nuances and politics of a new creative medium, have found themselves entangled with a philosophical conundrum: What does it mean to be more than human?↪ Read the entire article here

Sometimes this failure of prediction is even science fiction's explicit subject. In Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series, for instance, a brilliant mathematician devises a method of calculating historical probabilities.

Sarah Perry is a contributing editor of Ribbonfarm. Nouns for human beings – “people” or “person” – conjure in the mind a snapshot of the surface appearance of humans. Using nouns like “people” subtly encourages thinking about people as frozen in time, doing nothing in particular.

Postmodernists oppose “grand narratives,” and perhaps the “grandest” of all “narratives” was authored by Karl Marx, that of the proletariat taking power and creating a society in which all individuals can develop their talents to their fullest.