By Neel V. Patel
On the outside, Mars is a cold, barren hellscape. But beneath the surface, it is teeming with quakes and other geological activity.
That’s the story we’re learning from the first results from NASA’s InSight mission, published across several papers in Nature Geoscience (and one in Nature…
By Oren Etzioni
Could we wake up one morning dumbstruck that a super-powerful AI has emerged, with disastrous consequences? Books like Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom and Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, as well as more recent articles, argue that malevolent superintelligence is an existential risk for humanity.
But one can…
By Gideon Lichfield
Google’s most advanced computer isn’t at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, nor anywhere in the febrile sprawl of Silicon Valley. It’s a few hours’ drive south in Santa Barbara, in a flat, soulless office park inhabited mostly by technology firms you’ve never heard of.
An…
By David Rotman
Gordon Moore’s 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. …
By Tim Maughan
Bruce Sterling wasn’t originally meant to be part of the discussion. It was March 13, 2010, in Austin, Texas, and a small group of designers were on stage at the South by Southwest interactive festival, talking about an emerging discipline they called “design fiction.”
“They asked me…
By Tanya Basu
For six hours, a circular robot flits up and down a wall, sketching out a lotus with myriad intricate designs embedded in each petal. Four marker pens color in the designs. It looks beautiful. …
By Antonio Regalado
The world is watching with alarm as China struggles to contain a dangerous new virus, now being called SARS-CoV-2. It has quarantined entire cities, and the US has put a blanket ban on travellers who’ve been there. …
By Brian Bergstein
In less than a decade, computers have become extremely good at diagnosing diseases, translating languages, and transcribing speech. They can outplay humans at complicated strategy games, create photorealistic images, and suggest useful replies to your emails.
Yet despite these impressive achievements, artificial intelligence has glaring weaknesses.
Machine-learning…
By Karen Hao
Every year, OpenAI’s employees vote on when they believe artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will finally arrive. It’s mostly seen as a fun way to bond, and their estimates differ widely. …
By Angela Chen and Karen Hao
Perhaps you’ve heard of AI conducting interviews. Or maybe you’ve been interviewed by one yourself. Companies like HireVue claim their software can analyze video interviews to figure out a candidate’s “employability score.” The algorithms don’t just evaluate face and body posture for appearance; they…
