Skeptophilia

In the episode of Star Trek  called "The Return of the Archons," Captain Kirk and the team from the Enterprise  visit a planet whe...

AI scares the hell out of me. Not, perhaps, for the reason you might be thinking.  Lately there have been scores of articles warning about t...

I've written here before about the two basic camps when it comes to the possibility of a sentient artificial intelligence. The first is ...

One of the difficulties I have with the argument that consciousness and intelligence couldn't  come out of a machine is that it's aw...

There's one incorrect claim that came up in my biology classes more than any other, and that's the old idea that "humans only u...

Earlier this week, I dealt with the rather unsettling idea that when AI software capabilities improve just a little more, we may be able to ...

I'm notoriously un-tech-savvy.  Or, to put it more accurately, my techspertise is very narrow and focused.  I've learned a few thing...

New from the "Haven't These People Ever Watched  Horror Movies?" department, we have: some scientists in Austria who have uplo...

When I was a young and cocky junior in college, a couple of friends and I wrote a (very simple) computer program to generate free-verse poet...

I find the human mind baffling, not least because the way it is built virtually guarantees that the most logical, rational, and dispassionat...

There's one incorrect claim I find coming up in my classes more than any other, and that's the old idea that "humans only use 1...