Humans are currently the most intelligent beings on the planet – the result of a long history of evolutionary pressure and adaptation. But could we some day design and build machines that surpass the human…
The Turing Test has been passed, the headlines report this week, after a computer program mimicked a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy called Eugene Goostman, fooling 33% of its interrogators into believing it…
After years of trying, it looks like a chatbot has finally passed the Turing Test. Eugene Goostman, a computer program posing as a 13-year old Ukrainian boy, managed to convince 33% of judges that he was…
The Conversation organised a public question-and-answer session on Reddit in which Anders Sandberg and Andrew Snyder-Beattie, researchers at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, explored…
James Dyson’s decision to fund a robotics laboratory at Imperial College London may not lead to the super advanced robot friends of our dreams, but what he has planned could make robotic domestic appliances…
I’ve just asked Siri about Her. Two screens of text appear in answer to my query. “Is that all you can find for Her?” I ask. “Let me check on that,” comes the response. More screens of text appear with…
All eyes turned to London this week, as Google announced its latest acquisition in the form of DeepMind, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence technologies. The £400m pricetag paid by Google…
January is a time when many of us seek to better ourselves. We want to learn a new skill or improve an existing one. A network designed especially for robots, RoboEarth, is being tested in the Netherlands…
Deep Blue gained world-wide attention in 1997 when it defeated the then chess world champion Garry Kasparov. But playing chess was all that Deep Blue could do. Ask it to play another game, even a simpler…
Intelligence is a very difficult concept and, until recently, no one has succeeded in giving it a satisfactory formal definition. Most researchers have given up grappling with the notion of intelligence…
We live in an exciting era where new technologies are allowing us to amass huge quantities of data about cancer. And vast databases containing the genetic profiles of tumours and other information have…
You might think social networks couldn’t possibly gather more information on you than they already do. That in a world where your every move is tagged, flagged and logged, there is nothing more that could…
Robots represent the cutting edge in science. For decades we have been promised a bright future in which these human-like machines will become so advanced that we won’t be able to tell the difference between…
When the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 it seemed to many we had crossed a threshold. By beating us at our (arguably) most complex intellectual task, man had…
Fear of machines becoming smarter than humans is a standard part of popular culture. In films like iRobot and Terminator, humans are usurped. Throughout history we can trace stories about humankind overreaching…
When you first stare down that tough opponent in a videogame (think Big Daddies in Bioshock or Striders in Half-Life 2), it can seem impossible to beat the computer-controlled character you’re facing…
We already know robots manufacture cars, work in factories, even vacuum our homes - but could they form a world-beating soccer team? The question seems like ripe pickings for a movie mogul, given Hollywood’s…
For much of his adult life, painter and scholar Harold Cohen has been working in collaboration with a computer to make visual art. Cohen has worked almost continuously on this creative artificial intelligence…
We know how to deal with suspicious packages – as carefully as possible! These days, we let robots take the risk. But what if the robots are the risk? Some commentators argue we should be treating AI (artificial…