Stories and literature

Culture

The cliché writes back

Computing and artificial intelligence

Future of technology

History of technology

Society

Pixel: a biography

Film and visual culture

War and peace

How to disappear

Neuroscience

Psychology

The warped self

Technology and the self

Science

Should computers run the world?

Ethics

Consciousness and altered states

Brain wifi

Machine in the ghost

Religion

Philosophy of religion

Algorithms associating appearance and criminality have a dark past

History of science

The future

At the limits of thought

Complexity

Soft awareness

Automation and robotics

Ancient animistic beliefs live on in our intimacy with tech

Physics

The hairy Nobel

Mathematics

Bayes’s theorem, and making probability intuitive

History of ideas

How Confucius loses face in China’s new surveillance regime

Music

Contrapuntal consciousness

But what is a neural network?

If machines want to make art, will humans understand it?

Cognition and intelligence

Information and communication

The information arms race can’t be won, but we have to keep fighting

Virtues and vices

Keeper of our collective consciousness: I need to understand myself

How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road?

Predicting the end of civilisation

Dan Tepfer’s player piano is his composing partner

A brief history of almost everything in five minutes

Philosophy

Existence precedes likes: how online behaviour defines us

Essays and videos exploring physics, evolution, cosmology and other frontiers in science

Science Essays from Aeon. World-leading scientists and science writers explore topics from theories of evolution to theories of consciousness, quantum physics to deep time, chemistry to cosmology. 