A month or so out from Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated biopic Oppenheimer, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community is having its own Oppenheimer moment. Like the director of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos Laboratory, who famously came to regret his part in the development of the atomic bomb, the Big Tech Titans are falling over each […]
Science
In Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2018), the British writer Aaron Bastani puts a leftist spin on the Promethean view of technological development. While noting the revolutionary potential of recent genetic innovations, he insists that the latter are no different in kind from the selective breeding practices of the past: they are simply another great leap […]
Paywalled, I’m afraid, but consider subscribing! The defence: Chess vs artificial intelligence Nostalgia on demand: Streaming memories in the experience machine
The best scene in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes towards the end of the movie. The titular physicist is talking to Einstein, recalling a previous conversation in which they’d discussed the possibility that an atomic bomb would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. ‘When I came to you with those calculations’, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) reflects, ‘we thought we […]
So about five hundred million years ago, give or take, there was this little creature called Plectronoceras. It was about 2 cm long — just under an inch — and it had a conical shell with a bunch of tentacles sticking out. It was a cephalopod, an early member of the group that includes octopuses […]
John Mitchinson explores why perception is as much about what we know as what we see
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has released a new report today warning that consumption of the ‘super-food’ kale over a period of time can lead consumers to have heightened levels of arrogance. The study was conducted in several cafes in... Read More ›
Okay so, we all know how the Earth ends, right? In six billion years or so, the Sun swells up into a red giant, and the Earth gets melted. Pretty straightforward. But it turns out that /life/ on Earth will end long before that. There are reasons to think that the biosphere will collapse about […]
Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System, Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die. Let’s start with the “billions of miles”. Voyager 1 was launched in early September 1977. Jimmy Carter was a hopeful new President. Yugoslavia and the USSR were going concerns, as were American Motors, Pan […]