Exploring bleeding edge experiments, oddities, new and bizarre dicoveries, and fact-checking conspiracy theories since 2008. No question is out of bounds and no topic is too strange for a deep dive.
# tech
Law enforcement agencies can’t wait to deploy facial recognition AI in daily policing, and pressuring lawmakers to get out of their way. But their zeal for face-seeking AI can easily backfire.
# tech
Every computer system can be compromised, even artificial intelligence. But despite some recent warnings, it’s not about to become a prime new target for hackers.
# tech
Interaction with robots on a regular basis has the potential to blur some important lines when it comes to dealing with the world around us. But the good news is that our machines can still enforce them.
# tech
We need a blockchain for ethical, friendly artificial intelligence about as much as a fish needs an umbrella. But in true Singularitarian fashion, one is being proposed.
# tech
Experts are worried we’re ceding too many decisions to recommendation algorithms and are on a slippery slope to exploitation and learned helplessness. In reality, we’d be lost and very frustrated without them.
# tech
The American military may be the best in the world, but too often, it’s fighting 21st-century wars with 20th-century ideas. Its foreign counterparts have an opportunity to master the wars of the future.
# podcast
The Singularity is the event in which humanity changes from sacks of meat to immortal AIs. It's also about as realistic as getting an admission letter to Hogwarts.
# podcast
Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, but what do they actually mean by that? Turns out nailing down the meaning of the term is a lot harder that it seems at first glance.
# tech
Kissinger’s concerns about machines displacing human curiosity and turning our brains into useless, gray jelly unsuccessfully mine the same territory as many other technophobes with roughly the same results.
# health
IBM was going to use Watson to find new treatments for cancer and help oncologists provide better care for their patients. They ended up doing neither and revealing the machine’s Achilles heel.