Daniel Rourke /stream

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A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike,…

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It is uncontroversial that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos.

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The ‘mimetic faculty’ is an elusive concept, foregrounding a human inclination to mimic or to imitate, to produce symbolic forms, representations and artefacts that mirror and also perhaps transform their objects.

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It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting…

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If you dread a robot revolt, stop worrying about killer computers, and start worrying about ... paper clips? Nick Bostrom is explaining to me how superintelligent AIs could destroy the human…

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One does not have to look far to find intellectuals trained in the humanities, even the social sciences, who feel the need to ‘critique’ the concept of the Anthropocene.

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La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of…

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We must consider the possibility that intelligence, creativity and even consciousness are purely functions of the material world, with human beings as a peculiar kind of computer.

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We must consider the possibility that intelligence, creativity and even consciousness are purely functions of the material world, with human beings as a peculiar kind of computer.

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What does data sound like? There are probably thousands of answers to this question, but whatever the case, most of us can think of a few sounds conventionally used to approximate…

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KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most profound advances in science in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to formulate the problem of consciousness…

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LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the…

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Late one night last August, on the chalk downlands of southern England, Paul Kingsnorth stood in a field beside an old-growth forest, two yurts and a composting toilet. Kingsnorth is 41,…

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Google has cracked the CAPTCHA. In a paper published this week, Google researchers say that they've developed an algorithm that can accurately solve Google's own CAPTCHA puzzles — those obfuscated jumbles…

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Synthetic biology grew from a very old human desire to engineer living systems and make them do useful things for us.

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Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

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A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike,…

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It is uncontroversial that the human brain has capabilities that are, in some respects, far superior to those of all other known objects in the cosmos.

Bookmark

It is not pleasant to contemplate the thoughts that must be passing through the mind of the Owl of Minerva as the dusk falls and she undertakes the task of interpreting…

Bookmark

If you dread a robot revolt, stop worrying about killer computers, and start worrying about ... paper clips? Nick Bostrom is explaining to me how superintelligent AIs could destroy the human…

Bookmark

One does not have to look far to find intellectuals trained in the humanities, even the social sciences, who feel the need to ‘critique’ the concept of the Anthropocene.

Bookmark

La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of…

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In Luc Besson’s sci-fi classic The Fifth Element (1997), the "veryperfect" future human is reverse engineered from a severed hand.

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We must consider the possibility that intelligence, creativity and even consciousness are purely functions of the material world, with human beings as a peculiar kind of computer.

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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What does data sound like? There are probably thousands of answers to this question, but whatever the case, most of us can think of a few sounds conventionally used to approximate…

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KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "One of the most profound advances in science in recent years is the way researchers from a variety of fields are beginning to formulate the problem of consciousness…

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LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the…

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Humans have beat the odds over 400,000 years surviving climate change, super volcanoes and the worst that Mother Nature could throw at us. Technology has always helped us along the way.…

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Google has cracked the CAPTCHA. In a paper published this week, Google researchers say that they've developed an algorithm that can accurately solve Google's own CAPTCHA puzzles — those obfuscated jumbles…

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Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes…

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Here’s a game: which of these poems was written by a human, and which by a computer? Answer: the first one is a computer, the second one is Gertrude Stein. You…