It’s Monday morning of some week in 2050 and you’re shuffling into your kitchen, drawn by the smell of fresh coffee C-3PO has brewed while he unloaded the dishwasher. “Here you…

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…

When we first meet L3, Lando Calrissian’s droid co-pilot in the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story, she’s railing against a brutal droid-on-droid cage match in a cantina: “How…

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” These are the opening words of the short book On Bullshit, written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt.…

Consider Data, the android from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Suppose he finds himself on a hostile planet, surrounded by aliens that are just about to dismantle him. In a last-ditch…

In the summer of 1956, a small group of mathematicians and computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to embark on the grand project of designing intelligent machines. The ultimate…

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…