The Life Scientific: Michael Wooldridge

“I shall largely speak of mice,” the paper begins “but my thoughts are on man.”So begins a truly extraordinary scientific paper, and an equally extraordinary story.“Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population.” was published in 1973 by John Calhoun, and i ...  Afficher plus

In July 2024 a startling scientific paper was published.Headlined ‘Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor’, scientists told how they had discovered oxygen being made two and a half miles down, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.Their claim centred on small pol ...  Afficher plus

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 in ...  Afficher plus

In the headlines this week eminent tech experts and public figures signed an open letter that read “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”One of the signatories was Geoffrey Hi ...  Afficher plus

Synthetic voice technologies are increasingly passing as human. But today’s voice assistants are still a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines we’ve been musing about for decades. In this episode, we explore how machines learn to communicate—and what it means for t ...  Afficher plus

If even AI companies are fretting about the existential threat that human-level AI poses, why are they building these machines in the first place? And as they press ahead, a debate is raging about how we regulate this emergent sector to keep it under control. In the second epi ...