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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Defecating ducks, talking busts, and mechanised Christs — Jessica Riskin on the wonderful history of automata, machines built to mimic the processes of intelligent life.

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Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in — and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for…

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Slime mold—a living network of tendrils found on rotting wood and other plant debris—is easily one of the strangest things alive. Neither plant, nor fungus, it’s a collection of individual cells…

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Chris Bishop fears concern over Terminator-style scenarios could deprive humanity of one of the most powerful technologies ever created The promise of artificial intelligence could be lost to humanity because people…

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The story of IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 has been told so many times that it’s practically shorthand for the philosophical debate over man…

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At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes…

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Really, really racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far…

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Midway through the first of five recent matches between Lee Sedol, a top-ranked professional Go player, and AlphaGo, a computer program conceived by Google DeepMind, an odd thing happened: Lee’s jaw…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The move didn’t make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play…

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In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine…

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In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern…

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But when Tech Insider asked 26 AI researchers whether AI has to mimic the human brain to be truly intelligent, many of them flat out said no.

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Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you from…

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While humanity continues to become more reliant on technology swipe by swipe, the computers at our fingertips are becoming smarter – so smart, that they might just get fed up of…

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Parents already put their children under intense pressure to compete in the world. Will gene editing make it worse?

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Many people think of Facebook as just the big blue app, or even as the website, but in recent years we’ve been building a family of apps and services that provide…

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Automated Insights has opened up beta access to Wordsmith, its platform for automating repetitive, time-consuming writing tasks using your data.

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Samim Winiger spends a lot of his time playing around with neural networks, primitive artificial brains trained to autonomously run through algorithms for some kind of output, whether image recognition or…

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When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all…

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Face it: Siri sucks. So often, she has no clue what you’re saying. And when she does, there’s a pretty good chance she’ll respond with nothing more than a page filled…

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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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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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Artificial Intelligence is starting to turn invisible from the outside in — and vice versa. The exact effects and workings of AI technologies are becoming more challenging to perceive and comprehend for…

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Chris Bishop fears concern over Terminator-style scenarios could deprive humanity of one of the most powerful technologies ever created The promise of artificial intelligence could be lost to humanity because people…

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You hear a lot these days about the potential for impending doom as AI becomes ever smarter. Indeed, big names are calling for caution: the futurist optimism of protagonists like Ray…

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At Facebook’s F8 conference in Silicon Valley, David Marcus, the company’s head of messaging, proudly demonstrated its new suite of chatbots. Users can now get in a conversation with the likes…

Bookmark

Really, really racist. The thing is, this was all very much preventable. I talked to some creators of Twitter bots about @TayandYou, and the consensus was that Microsoft had fallen far…

Bookmark

Midway through the first of five recent matches between Lee Sedol, a top-ranked professional Go player, and AlphaGo, a computer program conceived by Google DeepMind, an odd thing happened: Lee’s jaw…

Bookmark

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The move didn’t make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — Lee Sedol is rather surprised that Google has fashioned an artificially intelligent system that so skillfully plays the ancient game of Go.

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In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine…

Bookmark

But when Tech Insider asked 26 AI researchers whether AI has to mimic the human brain to be truly intelligent, many of them flat out said no.

Bookmark

While humanity continues to become more reliant on technology swipe by swipe, the computers at our fingertips are becoming smarter – so smart, that they might just get fed up of…

Bookmark

Parents already put their children under intense pressure to compete in the world. Will gene editing make it worse?

Bookmark

Many people think of Facebook as just the big blue app, or even as the website, but in recent years we’ve been building a family of apps and services that provide…

Bookmark

Automated Insights has opened up beta access to Wordsmith, its platform for automating repetitive, time-consuming writing tasks using your data.

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A recent ProPublica analysis of The Princeton Review’s prices for online SAT tutoring shows that customers in areas with a high density of Asian residents are often charged more.

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When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all…

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A person sees this soon-to-be pornographic gif as an attractive blonde addressing the camera as she’s about to pull a man’s shorts down. A computer sees it as a portrait of…