• Beyond the Beyond shares Yves Behar's thoughts on design in an age of artificial intelligence.
• blogTO makes the case for the east end of Toronto.
• The Big Picture shares photos of a family of Congolese refugees resettled in New England.
• Centauri Dreams hosts an essay looking at the prospects for off-world agriculture.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos of ( Read more... )

• Centauri Dreams shares a proposal for the relatively rapid industrialization of space in a few short years using smart robots with 3d printign technology.
• To what extent, as Crooked Timber speculates, the Arthurian myth complex science fictional?
• Dangerous Minds shares a lovely middle-finger-raised candle.
• The Dragon's Gaze looks at the interactions ( Read more... )

Inverse features Joe Carmichael's interview with artificial intelligence pioneer Jürgen Schmidhuber, who claims that we've been making artificially intelligent programs since 1991. His argument actually does make a weird kind of sense, but I'm far from being an expert in the field. What do experts say?

You claim that some A.I.s are already ( Read more... )

• Antipope shares a guest essay by an author pointing out how duelling was a social plague.
• 'Nathan Smith's Apostrophen shares an essay noting that being a Donald Trump supporter who reads gay romance is a contradiction.
• Beyond the Beyond notes new European Union interest in defense integration.
• blogTO reports that a Torontonian designed the new ( Read more... )

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling notes the early Soviet science fiction genre of the "Red Pinkerton".
• blogTO notes higher passenger densities on Toronto ferries.
• Centauri Dreams considers gravitational wave astronomy.
• Crooked Timber argues that personality emulations will not take over.
• The Crux looks at the perchlorate salts covering the Martian ( Read more... )

Cade Metz' Wired article reports from Seoul, where a Google-designed AI defeated a veteran player of Seoul in a beautiful if unorthodox manner. There are new ways of knowing the world about.

At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty ( Read more... )

The Globe and Mail's Shane Dingman describes an unexpected for the Wattpad corpus.

If you are one of the 40 million people who enjoy reading or writing the mostly romantic werewolf, superhero or historical fiction stories found on Canadian startup Wattpad, you may also be contributing to the development of the next generation of artificial ( Read more... )

I have been sitting on Jenny Morber's Ars Technica article about the treatment of artificial intelligence since last February. Myself, I'm inclined to favour treating artificial intelligences well, and not only because I believe in their potential. What kind of a society is it where the abuse of apparently sentient beings is normalized? (This is ( Read more... )

Wikipedia's development of AI editors, noted by Wired's Cade Metz, worries me. If AIs will work there, what role will humans have?

Aaron Halfaker just built an artificial intelligence engine designed to automatically analyze changes to Wikipedia ( Read more... )

The "all" in the title of Davey Alba's Wired article is italicized, for emphasis.

The first picture flashes on the screen. “A man is standing next to an elephant,” a robotic voice intones. Another picture appears. “A person sitting at a table with a cake ( Read more... )