The human race has long designed and used tools to help us solve problems, from flint axes to space shuttles. They affect our lives and shape society in expected and sometimes unexpected ways. We may understand…
Your autonomous vacuum cleaner cleans your floors and there is no great harm if it occasionally bounces into things or picks up a button or a scrap of paper with a phone number. But then again this latter…
The famous theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, has revived the debate on whether our search for improved artificial intelligence will one day lead to thinking machines that will take over from us…
If cars with drivers still suffer under gridlock conditions on roads, how will driverless cars fare any better? With greater computerisation and network awareness, driverless cars may be the answer to…
Earlier this year, start-up Eterni.me emerged from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Entrepreneurship Development program. The company’s tagline – “simply become immortal” – quickly attracted media…
Last week, Elon Musk warned an audience at MIT that: we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. Musk is the…
Biological brains are unlikely to be the final stage of intelligence. Machines already have superhuman strength, speed and stamina – and one day they will have superhuman intelligence. The only reasons…
One of the issues of self-driving vehicles is legal liability for death or injury in the event of an accident. If the car maker programs the car so the driver has no choice, is it likely the company could…
The risks posed to human beings by artificial intelligence in no way resemble the popular image of the Terminator. That fictional mechanical monster is distinguished by many features – strength, armour…
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…