The ominous eye of HAL in 2001: A Space OdysseyIf humans go on to create artificial intelligence, will it present a significant danger to us? Several technical luminaries have been…

Scott Aaronson, theoretical computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), runs a popular blog called “Shtetl-Optimized.” Which is a curious…

Many of us have been taught that pronouncing vowels indistinctly and dropping consonants are symptoms of slovenly speech, if not outright disregard for the English language. The Irish…

In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force Supply Depot in Ohio was looking for a faster way to store and fetch information from its sizable inventory. They had 50,000 items in their records…

The Earth may not be flat, but the web certainly is. “There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational document from the World Wide Web Consortium—meaning…

On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my computer to write music on its own. I wanted to…

I’ve never seen the computer you’re reading this story on, but I can tell you a lot about it. It runs on electricity. It uses binary logic to carry out programmed instructions.…

The 2008 animated movie Waltz With Bashir starts with 26 bloodthirsty dogs hurtling down a road, causing havoc and terrorizing nearby people. It turns out to be a dream: Boaz Rein-Buskila…

A statue of Alan Turing by sculptor Stephen Kettle made entirely of pieces of slate. The statue depicts Turing working on an Enigma machine, which the Nazis used to encode messages,…

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his…