Daniel Rourke /stream

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To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing…

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Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.

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Knowing that an author who wrote unsparingly about humanity’s capacity for violence and oppression dwelled amid such picturesque Pacific Northwest ordinariness is comforting. This quiet, unremarkable place would suit a diligent…

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Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia. Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with…

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An AI-generated image. Illustration by MoiraM/Alamy How much would you be willing to pay an artist for a portrait? £500? £200? How about $7.99 for 50? Over the last few days…

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With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences.

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A shadow looms over the 2020 election: Deepfakes! The newish video-editing technology (or really, host of technologies) used to seamlessly paste one person’s face on another’s body, has activated a panic…

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Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish,…

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The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their east African…

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When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With…

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Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions. Harari’s…

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I first read about Lord Dunsany - I am happy to report his full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett - in a collection of Arthur C. Clarke's non-fiction.

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On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and…

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The question of whether a computer program, or a robot, might become sentient has been debated for decades. In science fiction, we see it all the time. The artificial intelligence establishment…

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The thing to know about the AI lan­guage mod­els, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fun­da­men­tally bull­shit­ters. The bull­shit has got­ten better and bet­ter, but at the core … well,…

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An artificial intelligence trained to mimic the logic circuits of an ordinary computer can run code within itself, potentially speeding up certain calculations An artificial intelligence that mimics the operation of…

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The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

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In a 2014 interview with reviews blog The Book Smugglers, the fantasy writer Katherine Addison observed that the main character of her acclaimed novel The Goblin Emperor – Maia Drazhar –…

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We’re just innocent men.

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Constructing humanlike artificial intelligence often starts with deconstructing humans. Take fingerprints: When holding soapy dishes, we intuitively adjust our grip based on our fingerprint structure.

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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold…

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Fly to the stars? Conquer the climate crisis? Mankind can solve all problems, argues British physicist David Deutsch. Unbridled progress, he says, is the key: technical, moral, political and scientific.

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Cryptographers want to know which of five possible worlds we inhabit, which will reveal whether truly secure cryptography is even possible. Many computer scientists focus on overcoming hard computational problems.

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This story is the introduction to MIT Technology Review’s series on AI colonialism, which was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full…

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To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing…

Bookmark

Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.

Bookmark

As recently as just a few decades ago, the interconnected web of experiences, thoughts and emotions known as a ‘stream of consciousness’ was widely believed to belong to humans alone. A…

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Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia. Suppose you are a professor of pedagogy, and you assign an essay on learning styles. A student hands in an essay with…

Bookmark

With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences.

Bookmark

Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will. Sunspring debuted at the SCI-FI LONDON film festival in 2016.

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Several facilities in the U.S. and abroad maintain morbid warehouse morgues full of frozen human heads and bodies, waiting for the future. They are part of a story that is ghoulish,…

Bookmark

The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their east African…

Bookmark

When I was studying for my doctorate, in the late 1960s, we budding anthropologists read a book called Ideas on Human Evolution, a collection of then-recent papers in the field. With…

Bookmark

Watch videos of Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the wildly successful book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and you will hear him being asked the most astonishing questions. Harari’s…

Bookmark

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds…

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On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and…

Bookmark

The thing to know about the AI lan­guage mod­els, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fun­da­men­tally bull­shit­ters. The bull­shit has got­ten better and bet­ter, but at the core … well,…

Bookmark

Recently I began realizing that my perception of the world is beginning to change in a peculiar way. There are no longer distinctions between more and less important themes or work;…

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The first social media — blogs — were built on the idea of “user-pull” (users would decide which creators to follow) and “reverse chrono” (users received the most recent posts first).

Bookmark

In a 2014 interview with reviews blog The Book Smugglers, the fantasy writer Katherine Addison observed that the main character of her acclaimed novel The Goblin Emperor – Maia Drazhar –…

Bookmark

We’re just innocent men.

Bookmark

Constructing humanlike artificial intelligence often starts with deconstructing humans. Take fingerprints: When holding soapy dishes, we intuitively adjust our grip based on our fingerprint structure.

Bookmark

You are a member of a very peculiar species. Of all our quirks, the human religious impulse may be our most distinctive one. We build skyscrapers? Big deal, bowerbirds construct ornate…

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Fly to the stars? Conquer the climate crisis? Mankind can solve all problems, argues British physicist David Deutsch. Unbridled progress, he says, is the key: technical, moral, political and scientific.

Bookmark

This story is the introduction to MIT Technology Review’s series on AI colonialism, which was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full…

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This write-up re-introduces the concept of entropy from different perspectives with a focus on its importance in machine learning, probabilistic programming, and information theory.