Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero,…
The company responsible for AlphaGo—the first AI program to defeat a grandmaster at Go—has launched an ethics group to oversee the responsible development of artificial intelligence. It’s a smooth PR move given recent concerns about super-smart technology, but Google, who owns DeepMind, will need to support and listen…
As robots and AI start to play an increasing role in our lives, the question of how we want them to behave gets more pressing with each passing breakthrough. In the new book, Robot Ethics 2.0: From Autonomous Cars to Artificial Intelligence, robo-ethicists Will Bridewell and Alistair M. C. Isaac make the surprising…
Every 100 years or so, our Sun gives off a great big belch that sends an intense wave of charged particles towards Earth. This wasn’t a problem in the past, but our high-tech civilization is now disturbingly vulnerable to these solar storms. A new study quantifies the economic risks posed by these extreme solar…
In the classic 1966 American science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine crew was miniaturized and injected into a body to fix a blood clot in the brain. That’s obviously not how future medical science is going to work, but the notion of creating microscopic machines to perform complex tasks is certainly on…
Last year, two data scientists from security firm ZeroFOX conducted an experiment to see who was better at getting Twitter users to click on malicious links, humans or an artificial intelligence. The researchers taught an AI to study the behavior of social network users, and then design and implement its own phishing…
As we head deeper into the 21st century, the prospect of getting robots to do the dirty business of killing gets closer with each passing day. In Max Tegmark’s new book, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the MIT physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute contemplates this…
Last year, Malka Older released Infomocracy, a scifi thriller about a world without nations where global elections are controlled by a powerful search engine called Information. In the aftermath of that election, the story continues with sequel Null States—and we’ve got an exclusive excerpt to share.
The new guy at work invites you over to his house. You feel uneasy. Sure, he’s a hard worker, a fast typer, and his intense focus quickly made him an indispensable coworker. But his scarred face seems to betray some violent past. His measured speech seems manufactured. Still, you can’t remember the last new friend you…
Homo sapiens have been around for at least a hundred thousand years, and civilization for maybe a few thousand. These timescales are far longer than your minuscule lifespan, but given our 13 billion-year-old galaxy, they’re shorter than a cosmic heartbeat. And unlike galaxies that require a major wallop to tear apart,…
The Planet of the Apes prequels did much to explain how humans lost their status as the dominant species on the planet—a cataclysmic set of events fueled by a global pandemic known as the “Simian Flu.” This virus, the product of a medical experiment gone horribly wrong, wiped out the vast majority of humans, but it…
Inspired by the traditional Japanese art of origami, self-folding robots can go places and do things traditional robots cannot. A major drawback to these devices, however, has been the need to equip them with batteries or wires. Researchers from Harvard have found a new way to overcome this problem, by designing…
Earlier this week, David Kenny, IBM Senior Vice President for Watson and Cloud, told the US Congress that Americans have nothing to fear from artificial intelligence, and that the prospects of technological unemployment and the rise of an “AI overlord” are pernicious myths. The remarks were as self-serving as they…
Rapid developments in brain-machine interfacing and neuroprosthetics are revolutionizing the way we treat paralyzed people, but the same technologies could eventually be put to more generalized use—a development that’ll turn many of us into veritable cyborgs. Before we get to that point, however, we’ll need to make…
Last fall, John Zhang made headlines after his fertility clinic announced that for the first time a baby had been born using a new technique requiring three genetic parents. The baby’s mother carried the genes for a fatal nervous system disorder called Leigh syndrome, but Zhang had been able to keep the disease from…
Shimon—a four-armed marimba playing robot—has been around for years, but its developers at Georgia Tech have recently taken this futuristic musical machine to the next level. Using deep learning, the robot can now study large datasets from well-known musicians, and then produce and perform its own original…
According to Twin Galaxies, the official high score for the arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man belongs to Abdner Ashman, with 933,580 points. Or at least it did, before an artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft achieved the maximum possible score for the game, 999,990.
Emulating spiders and bugs, and using drinking straws as basic building blocks, a research team from Harvard University has developed a type of semi-soft robot capable of standing, walking, and even striding across a liquid surface. Say hello to the “arthrobots.”
With each passing breakthrough in artificial intelligence, we’re asking our machines to make increasingly complex and weighty decisions. Trouble is, AIs are starting to act beyond our levels of comprehension. In high frequency stock trading, for example, this had led to so-called flash crashes, in which algorithms…
Films and TV shows like Blade Runner, Humans, and Westworld, where highly advanced robots have no rights, trouble our conscience. They show us that our behaviors are not just harmful to robots—they also demean and diminish us as a species. We like to think we’re better than the characters on the screen, and that when…
