It’s the final frontier in artificial intelligence. It’s the star of countless films and novels, both the greatest villain and hero of modern-day fantasies. I’m talking about true “intelligent” machines, sometimes called “hard” AI, or “general intelligence”. …

I am not, I will admit, a terribly good artist. Not with a brush and paint at least. I can make a credible effort with a pen or pencil, provided you’re not after something tricky like human hands or horses. But break out the oil paints and it’s all over…

It seems there’s nothing a human can do that some clever jerk with a computer won’t come along and do better. First it was simple calculations, then it was factories. The computers beat us at Chess in ’96, they mastered Go in ’15, and now they’re coming for our video…

Death, they say, is the great equaliser. It comes for all of us eventually, and none of us escape its icy grasp. This was as true throughout history as it is today, but on a medieval battlefield I imagine there was particular poignancy to the aphorism. …

New Zealand — where I live — has historically not had a “dating” culture so much as a “binge drinking” culture. The commonly accepted mating ritual of my youth was to get blind drunk, wake up in the company of a complete stranger and then — if you liked the…

How Computers Think: Part Four — It is comforting to believe, despite all the advances in artificial intelligence, despite the relentless march of machines into jobs that were once the sole preserve of human beings, that there will always be some fundamental aspect of human experience that cannot be replicated. We like to think that, while…