Daniel Rourke /stream

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ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about “the singularity” —…

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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…

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The movement was young, energetic, educated, and art school-heavy. Above all it was “positive”: both cyber-positive and sex-positive. Sometime in the late 1990s, I met someone else called Joanna Walsh. The fact that…

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According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed…

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By the time she started saying “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” people had started to realize that there was something wrong with Tay.

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Later this year, a nuclear power reactor will open in the US for the first time in two decades. But this reactor, called Watts Bar Unit 2—one of two near Spring…

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Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks,…

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In the 21st century, we are inundated with news about human-induced climate change. But perhaps human-produced media are not the only source of information.

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The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis…

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The New York Times’ March 1, 2016 story “Swiping a Priceless Antiquity … With a Scanner and a 3-D Printer” by Charly Wilder tells how two German artists made a surreptitious, unauthorized…

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“The black female’s body needs less to be rescued from the masculine “gaze” than to be sprung from a historic script surrounding her with signification while at the same time, and…

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According to a new study, humankind is now entering the “Age of Plastic”. The research investigates the evidence that we are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which humanity is the…

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For a long time, archaeologists have suggested that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals because we had greater technological and cultural development, which allowed us to find and exploit resources more readily than Neanderthals…

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In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky. But have you ever wondered why…

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President Obama has warned that ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are contributing to high unemployment. Sen. Marco Rubio said that the central challenge of our times is "to ensure that the…

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ACCORDING to some prominent voices in the tech world, artificial intelligence presents a looming existential threat to humanity: Warnings by luminaries like Elon Musk and Nick Bostrom about “the singularity” —…

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There are all sorts of food scams perpetrated every day here in America. The whole farm-to-table trend, for example — a lot of that is probably just marketing bullshit, according to…

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The movement was young, energetic, educated, and art school-heavy. Above all it was “positive”: both cyber-positive and sex-positive. Sometime in the late 1990s, I met someone else called Joanna Walsh. The fact that…

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By the time she started saying “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” people had started to realize that there was something wrong with Tay.

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Later this year, a nuclear power reactor will open in the US for the first time in two decades. But this reactor, called Watts Bar Unit 2—one of two near Spring…

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Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks,…

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Click to view The problem with bio-art is that it's often made of living tissue — and sometimes living tissue gets out of control.

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The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis…

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“The black female’s body needs less to be rescued from the masculine “gaze” than to be sprung from a historic script surrounding her with signification while at the same time, and…

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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.

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For a long time, archaeologists have suggested that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals because we had greater technological and cultural development, which allowed us to find and exploit resources more readily than Neanderthals…

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Imagine constructing a building with no blueprints or architects, and no inkling of what the finished edifice should look like. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, and yet that’s what…

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In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky. But have you ever wondered why…

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President Obama has warned that ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are contributing to high unemployment. Sen. Marco Rubio said that the central challenge of our times is "to ensure that the…

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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…