People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you want it to be conscious? I think it is largely up to us whether…

Dmitry Malioutov can’t say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems…

When Google’s AlphaGo computer program triumphed over a Go expert earlier this year, a human member of the Google team had to physically move the pieces. Manuela Veloso, the head…

One night in late July 2014, a journalist from the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly interviewed a 17-year-old Chinese girl named Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice). The journalist, Liu…

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples…

Nineteen stories up in a Brooklyn office tower, the view from Manuela Veloso’s office—azure skies, New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty—is exhilarating. But right now we only…

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his…

Ken Goldberg is nothing if not creative. A distinguished roboticist and researcher at the Automation Sciences Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, he’s also an internationally…

Can a robot be creative? Advances in cloud robotics—machines connected to supercomputers in the cloud—have given self-driving cars, surgical robots, and other “smart” devices…

When IBM’s Deep Blue beat chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997 in a six-game chess match, Kasparov came to believe he was facing a machine that could experience human intuition.…