Daniel Rourke /stream

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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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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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Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. In the mid-’90s, a computer program called Chinook beat the world’s top player at the game of checkers. Three years later, to much…

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Algorithms – step-by-step sequences of operations that solve specific computational tasks – are transforming the world around us. They support sophisticated search engines, voice recognition software, online transactions, data compression, targeted…

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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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On the cultural ideology of Big Data.

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The day that science fiction writers have feared for so long has finally come—the machines have risen up. There is nowhere you can run and nowhere you can hide.

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Erik Davis’s TechGnosis is considered the classic text on the relation between technology and the occult. This “Afterword 2.0” was written for a new edition, just out from North Atlantic Books.

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Photo: Faulkner at Virginia, © 2010 Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia; Author Stephen Railton.

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Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information.

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In a welcome sign of the coming singularity, Buzzfeed just announced that it has built a sentence generator that mimics the turgid writing style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

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Vincent van Gogh's Old Vineyard With Present Woman (1890) and Joan Miro's The Farm (1922) Could a computer program influence how we understand art history and the canon? Or, could an…

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In central London this spring, eight of the world’s greatest minds performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience of hundreds watched in hushed reverence.

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It used to be simpler. You woke up, and there was one newspaper you could read. It printed on pulp and delivered to your driveway. You got in your car, and…

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Our Top 10 of 2013. No. 1: more and more of modern life is steered by algorithms. But what are they exactly, and who is behind them? Tom Whipple follows the…

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Here’s how Hollywood works today: Somebody writes a script. And especially if it’s an animated feature--a piece that will take hundreds of Pixar artists years to produce--there’s almost no chance it…

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Chess has problems. Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's…

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The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yieldedinnovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of theimage. These applications rely on algorithmically…

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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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This is the very lightly edited text of a lecture delivered as part of Through Post-Atomic Eyes in Toronto, 23-25 October 2015. Huge thanks to Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian for…

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Skip Article Header. Skip to: Start of Article. In the mid-’90s, a computer program called Chinook beat the world’s top player at the game of checkers. Three years later, to much…

Bookmark

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.

Bookmark

Creativity is one of humanity’s uniquely defining qualities. Numerous thinkers have explored the qualities that creativity must have, and most pick out two important factors: whatever the process of creativity produces,…

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On the cultural ideology of Big Data.

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The day that science fiction writers have feared for so long has finally come—the machines have risen up. There is nowhere you can run and nowhere you can hide.

Bookmark

Erik Davis’s TechGnosis is considered the classic text on the relation between technology and the occult. This “Afterword 2.0” was written for a new edition, just out from North Atlantic Books.

Bookmark

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is having a moment, albeit one marked by crucial ambiguities. Cognoscenti including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates, among others, have recently weighed in on its potential…

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One day artificial intelligence might well identify any object that passes in front of its sensors, and with far greater depth and accuracy than humans. For now, we have smartphone apps…

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In a welcome sign of the coming singularity, Buzzfeed just announced that it has built a sentence generator that mimics the turgid writing style of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Bookmark

Vincent van Gogh's Old Vineyard With Present Woman (1890) and Joan Miro's The Farm (1922) Could a computer program influence how we understand art history and the canon? Or, could an…

Bookmark

In central London this spring, eight of the world’s greatest minds performed on a dimly lit stage in a wood-panelled theatre. An audience of hundreds watched in hushed reverence.

Bookmark

It used to be simpler. You woke up, and there was one newspaper you could read. It printed on pulp and delivered to your driveway. You got in your car, and…

Bookmark

Here’s how Hollywood works today: Somebody writes a script. And especially if it’s an animated feature--a piece that will take hundreds of Pixar artists years to produce--there’s almost no chance it…

Bookmark

The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yieldedinnovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of theimage. These applications rely on algorithmically…