Our reign as sole understanders of the cosmos is rapidly coming to an end. We should not be afraid of this. The revolution that has just begun may be understood as a continuation of…

Humans are probably not the greatest intelligences in the universe. Earth is a relatively young planet and the oldest civilizations could be billions of years older than us. But even…

Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech writer for President Obama, writing presidential…

Thanks to advances in machine learning over the last two decades, it’s no longer in question whether humans can beat computers at games like chess; we’d have about as much chance…

The idea that humans should merge with AI is very much in the air these days. It is offered both as a way for humans to avoid being outmoded by AI in the workplace, and as a path to…

What is it exactly that makes humans so smart? In his seminal 1950 paper, “Computer Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing argued human intelligence was the result of complex…

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who lived in the first half of the 19th century. (She was also the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who invited Mary Shelley to his house…

Nowadays, the words “artificial intelligence” seem to be on practically everyone’s lips, from Elon Musk to Henry Kissinger. At least a dozen countries have mounted major AI initiatives,…

In the introduction to her new book, Hannah Fry points out something interesting about the phrase “Hello World.” It’s never been quite clear, she says, whether the phrase—which…

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared Communist-era secret police service. To…