William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) entering a Holodeck simulation.
Star Trek/Screenshot/Memory Alpha
The technology needed to create a real Star Trek-like Holodeck is not that far out of reach.
Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters
Artificial intelligence is surrounded by fear and mystery because very few understand its inner workings. But it’s actually rather intuitive and far simpler than it seems.
Machines don’t make the same errors as humans when it comes to decisions based on visual analysis.
from www.shutterstock.com
The value of machine learning is not only that it is more accurate than humans. It is also cheaper and more consistent in its diagnoses.
Scans are still largely studied by humans.
Shutterstock/bikeriderlondon
Artificial intelligence is already transforming a range of industries but it has still to make an impact on healthcare. So what’s the hold up?
Robots will need to teach themselves.
Robot reading via shutterstock.com
We need to do more than teach machines to learn. We need to overcome the barriers that separate machines from us – and us from them.
Machines are set to take over all of our jobs in the near future, author Tim Dunlop predicts.
Franck Robichon/EPA
Business Briefing: why the future is workless
The Conversation 18.1 MB (download)
We need to embrace a future where machines do our jobs for us and the government gives us a basic income as a safety net, author Tim Dunlop says.
HBO
New HBO series reimagines a group of life-like robots programmed with hope but marred in violence. They might be more human than we think.
Will our digital phrasebook finally be able to handle more than just simple snippets?
cybrain/Shutterstock.com
Auto-translation software has been pretty frustrating to use. But news of vast improvements to Google’s translation software raises the prospect that websites will soon be browsable in any language.
Can machine learning help us find – and reduce – gender bias?
Doctor/nurse via shutterstock.com
Algorithms that learn from large data sets can pick up inherent social biases. That could perpetuate the biases, or even worsen them.
angellodeco/shutterstock.com
Computer-aided decision-making has been shown to help in clinical contexts. But winning over doctors and patients is a different matter.
Who’ll be the next president of the United States – Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?
Flickr/torbakhopper
The Australian census is just one way to gather data on people. We also freely give out information in other ways that can be used to study many things, and maybe even predict an election result.
What if these two smartphones could share their learning of their user’s behaviour?
Flickr/Markus Spiering
Artificial intelligence gives technology the ability to learn and adapt. But they can learn a lot more if they can share their learning with other smart devices.
Predicting whether a child will commit a crime before their 18th birthday is fraught with problems.
Shutterstock/Tomsickova Tatyana
Machine learning is being used to see if it’s possible to predict whether someone will commit a crime some time in the future. But does this risk condemning people for a crime they haven’t committed?
He’s certainly thinking big….
Norsk Telegrambyra AS/Reuters
The technological goals are lofty. But fitting the new tech into the social and political landscape might pose the bigger challenge.
Shutterstock
The rise of online ‘chatbots’ shows how artificial intelligence is becoming a part of daily life. But how do you stop them talking like a really bad PA?
The beautiful, if clunky, game.
Jens Wolf/EPA
Computers must master football if they are to demonstrate that they can be our equal.
Machine learning is driving the next revolution in computing.
Image sourced from shutterstock.com
We’re just at the beginning of working out the tasks machines will make us better at.
The computer does more of the work than you might think.
CT computer and scan room image via shutterstock.com
Pairing more powerful computers with increasingly sensitive scanners can yield many benefits in medicine and other fields.
Genomes don’t translate easily into an understanding of disease.
www.shutterstock.com
Big data is all well and good, but if we want medical breakthroughs, we’ll need big theory too.
A robot for an MP – who’d vote for that?
Shutterstock/Mombo
If a machine can write a speech for a politician, why not go the next step and replace the elected human with a programmed robot?