Michael Wooldridge on AI and sentient robots

Imagine looking at a map of a city you thought you knew inside-out, only to discover a collection of tightly knit neighbourhoods that nobody had ever realised existed... Edith Heard has achieved something rather similar with DNA.Edith is a leading expert in epigenetics: put simpl ...  Show more

What do you do when your childhood dream of becoming an astronaut is grounded at the final hurdle?If you’re physicist Ginger Kerrick, you go on to help run the missions instead. After failing the medical of her astronaut application process, Ginger went on to become Nasa’s first ...  Show more

Humans have a long-held fascination with the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a dystopian threat - from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through to the Terminator movies. But somehow, we still often think of this technology as 'futuristic', whereas in fact, it's already woven ...  Show more

The idea that machine intelligence will one day take over the world has long been a staple of science fiction. But given the rapid advances in consumer-level artificial intelligence tools, the fear has felt closer to reality these past few months than it ever has before. The gene ...  Show more

The dream of AI — artificial intelligence — has been around for centuries: the idea of an intelligent machine without free will popped up in ancient Taoist scrolls, Buddhist fables, and the tales of medieval European courts. But it wasn't until the 20th century that science caugh ...  Show more

There's a lot of talk these days about the existential risk that artificial intelligence poses to humanity -- that somehow the AIs will rise up and destroy us or become our overlords. In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP), Shannon ...  Show more