AI
Did the Democrats kill Roomba?
Allow me to add an additional downer note to this grimmest of news days: iRobot, the company that manufactures Roombas,…
Why has Peter Thiel dumped his AI stocks?
How, I wonder, did a shortlist of candidates to succeed Sir Mark Tucker as chairman of HSBC come into the…
I regret my intolerance over Brexit
Cannabis smoke lingering along the sidewalks of Washington D.C. was the most palpable fruit of liberty since my last visit…
Say hello to your AI granny
Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing advert I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it…
The disturbing allure of sex robots
Kathleen Richardson reveals how certain men now seem to prefer the idea of ‘socially interactive companions’, first pioneered at MIT, to human girlfriends
The AI apocalypse is the least of our worries
A host of other catastrophes are far more likely to destroy the planet, including solar storms, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, biowarfare and even asteroid strike
Does anyone really want AI civil servants?
Of course they’ve called it ‘Humphrey’. The cutesy name that has been given to the AI tool the government is…
AI killed the Easter Bunny
On the grounds of advancing age, I had decided to ignore all the chatter about artificial intelligence and devote my…
Absorbingly repellent: Ed Atkins, at Tate Britain, reviewed
In the old days, you’d have to go to a lot of trouble to inhabit another person’s skin. Today you…
The vagaries of laboratory experiments
With much research threatened by flawed methods and misconduct, will AI bring unprecedented scientific progress or merely increase the unreliability problem?
Real artists have nothing to fear from AI
Christie’s is making digital-art history again – or at least trying to. Between 20 February and 5 March, it is…
Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit
Games are politics you can touch, says Tim Clare, and a well-designed boardgame can provide a critical experience of society’s systems
Nick Cave’s right-hand man Warren Ellis on AI, Gorecki and staying young
In the next few days Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play Leeds, Glasgow, Manchester and London. There are still…
Could AI lead to a revival of decorative beauty?
In front of me is what appears to be an authentic Delft tile. The surface of the tile is mottled,…
The triumph of surrealism
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in…
The rollercoaster ride of the world’s most reckless investor
The Korean-born Masayoshi Son – who lost $58.6 billion in 2000 – has a fascination with Napoleon, compares himself to Genghis Khan and is now reinventing himself as a futurist
Beware the ‘sourdough effect’
As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then…
The craft renaissance
As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered…
In the grip of apocalypse angst
Dorian Lynskey lays out the many ways in which we have imagined the world ending – through pandemic, nuclear holocaust, climate change, asteroid impact or, most unnervingly, AI
AI just changed the world. Again
Argentine President Javier Milei’s recent speech, to the World Economic Forum in Davos, has caused a stir for several reasons.…
Mother’s always angry: Jungle House, by Julianne Pachino, reviewed
But who – or what – is Mother? And are her exasperated warnings about ever-present danger exaggerated?
The real problem with ChatGPT is that it can never make a joke
When Andy Stanton commands the AI program to tell him a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis, the result, as it unfolds, drives him a bit insane
The balance of power between humans and machines
Robert Skidelsky dismisses the possibility of our annihilation by a superintelligent computer system, since ‘science tells us that we cannot create such a being’. But does it?
The case against re-recording albums
In 2012, Jeff Lynne released Mr Blue Sky: The Very Best of Electric Light Orchestra. Except it wasn’t. It was…
