Science
essay
Evolution
What on earth is a xenobot?
The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks
Philip Ball
video
Art
What does an AI make of what it sees in a contemporary art museum?
15 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
The people of the cloud
Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
video
Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
6 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
How machine learning can help historians decode ancient inscriptions
7 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
AI’s first philosopher
Alan Turing was a pioneer of machine learning, whose work continues to shape the crucial question: can machines think?
Sebastian Sunday Grève
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
From ‘chandeliers’ to entangled qubits, here’s what happens inside a quantum computer
9 minutes
essay
Cognition and intelligence
Modular cognition
Powerful tricks from computer science and cybernetics show how evolution ‘hacked’ its way to intelligence from the bottom up
Michael Levin & Rafael Yuste
video
Technology and the self
When an AI rejects him for life insurance, Mitch wonders if he can escape his fate
7 minutes
video
Physics
Models capture the world-warping physics of what happens when stars meet black holes
2 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Who, exactly, authored this AI-generated spin on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo?
5 minutes
essay
Future of technology
Learn from machine learning
The world is a black box full of extreme specificity: it might be predictable but that doesn’t mean it is understandable
David Weinberger
essay
Stories and literature
The cliché writes back
Machine-written literature might offend your tastes but until the dawn of Romanticism most writers were just as formulaic
Yohei Igarashi
essay
History of technology
Pixel: a biography
An exact mathematical concept, pixels are the elementary particles of pictures, based on a subtle unpacking of infinity
Alvy Ray Smith
video
War and peace
What happens when pacifist soldiers search for peace in a war video game
21 minutes
essay
Neuroscience
The warped self
Social media makes us feel terrible about who we really are. Neuroscience explains why – and empowers us to fight back
Mark Miller & Ben White
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Algorithms are sensitive. People are specific. We should exploit their respective strengths
36 minutes
essay
Consciousness and altered states
Brain wifi
Instead of a code encrypted in the wiring of our neurons, could consciousness reside in the brain’s electromagnetic field?
Johnjoe McFadden
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
Machine in the ghost
Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world
Ed Simon
idea
Computing and artificial intelligence
Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past
Catherine Stinson
essay
The future
At the limits of thought
Science today stands at a crossroads: will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created?
David C Krakauer
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
What’s it like to chat with an AI that mimics you? Uncanny conversations with Replika
13 minutes
idea
Computing and artificial intelligence
Ancient animistic beliefs live on in our intimacy with tech
Stephen T Asma
video
Physics
‘The secrets of exotic matter’ revealed by the winners of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics
13 minutes