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... )

Elf Sternberg has written a smart essay about emotion, and what we are actually saying when we claim that we are unemotional, that we are beyond this and are purely rational.

When we say someone is "unemotional," what we're really saying is that they're engaged in the privileged feelings of masculinity: pride, reserve, contentment. Act like it, ( Read more... )

• Antipope Charlie Stross wonders about the interactions between parasite loads and the intelligence of the inhabitants of off-world colonies.
• Bad Astronomy shares a stunning mosaic of the Milky Way Galaxy.
• blogTO notes the construction of a viewing platform for Toronto plane spotters.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog examines why we call other people stupid ( Read more... )

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross describes how Brexit has forced him to rewrite his latest novel.
• D-Brief suggests early Venus was once habitable, and notes the rumour of an Earth-like planet found around Proxima Centauri.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes the detection of storms of brown dwarfs.
• The Dragon's Tales reports on more signs of water on Mars.
• False Steps ( Read more... )

• Atlas Obscura looks at the 18th century British tradition of installing hermits in gardens.
• Bloomberg looks at Brexit proponents who say the United Kingdom can arrange a better deal with the European Union than Switzerland, notes continued anger after the housing collapse, and studies prospects for light rail in Los Angeles.
• CBC notes the death of K- ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes how Ryerson University has launched an incubator for the local music scene.
• Crooked Timber notes the high minimum wage in Australia.
• Dangerous Minds shares a video of Keith Haring getting arrested from 1982.
• The Dragon's Gaze reports on a study of hot Neptunes.
• The Dragon's Tales notes that a search of WISE data did not produce Planet Nine ( 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... )

Bloomberg View's Faye Flam looks at the evidence for empathy elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

For all its apparent simplicity, a new experimental study showing that mouse-like rodents can be nice to each other now stands at the vanguard of a scientific revolution. The paper, published in the journal Science and promoted under the headline, “ ( Read more... )

The Dragon's Tales linked to a remarkable paper that claims to have found stone tools 2.6 million years old in India.

This paper presents the first Indo-French Prehistorical Mission in the Himalayan foothills, northwestern India, and introduces the results of the multidisciplinary research program “Siwaliks” under the patronage of Professor Yves ( Read more... )