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
Watson can easily win a trivia contest, but it needs to play anyway to learn how to talk to humans.
# tech
No, the internet isn't about to gain sentience and become a globe-spanning hivemind.
# tech
The best way to make robots move may be to just let them figure out how to do it.
# tech
Singularitarian arguments for the seeming inevitability of artificial super-intelligent are little more than wild extrapolations of pop sci cliches.
# tech
DARPA wants machines that can look at video and not just see what's in the frame, but understand it.
# tech
Some recent AI papers suggest training robots like you would train intelligent animals. The question is why you would need to do that.
# tech
A lot of popular science writers who don't know how AI is developed are hyping a Skynet scenario. Don't believe them.
# tech
On the surface, a basic AI handily beat humans in a classification task. But if you look at the details, its victory wasn't exactly a clean one.
# astrobiology
The odds of downloading an evil alien artificial intelligence and enabling it to take over our machinery are pretty much zero to none.
# tech
The last thing we need is to try and turn social media into an artificial intelligence.