Vladimir Putin faces token opposition in the polls this weekend after his regime has viciously cracked down on opposition figures. He’s likely to be even more repressive in his next term.
Of the risks posed by AI, overtaking human intelligence isn’t an immediate concern.
The South Korean go player Lee Sedol after a 2016 match against Google’s artificial-intelligence program AlphaGo. Sedol, ranked 9th in the world, lost 4-1.
Lee Jin-man/Flickr
The history of human-machine collaboration suggests that AI will evolve into a “cognitive partner” to humankind rather than as all-powerful, all-knowing, labour replacing robots.
Twenty years after Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess, artificial intelligence can make games more fun, and perhaps even endlessly enjoyable, if it learns to adapt.