When we first meet L3, Lando Calrissian’s droid co-pilot in the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story, she’s railing against a brutal droid-on-droid cage match in a cantina: “How…

You’ve been hoaxed.The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They’ve alleged that algorithms can…

It’s 2050 and you’re due for your monthly physical exam. Times have changed, so you no longer have to endure an orifices check, a needle in your vein, and a week of waiting for…

At a moment when vaccines promise to end the coronavirus pandemic, emerging new variants threaten to accelerate it. The astonishingly fast development of safe and effective vaccines…

The first artificial neural networks weren’t abstractions inside a computer, but actual physical systems made of whirring motors and big bundles of wire. Here I’ll describe how…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Computer scientists are trying to build an AI system that can win a gold medal at the world’s premier math competition.Photograph…

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” These are the opening words of the short book On Bullshit, written by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt.…

Any student of modern math must know what it feels like to drown in a well of telescoping terminology.For a high-profile example, let’s take the Calabi-Yau manifold, made famous…

In January, Robert Williams, an African-American man, was wrongfully arrested due to an inaccurate facial recognition algorithm, a computerized approach that analyzes human faces and…

 We need a global debate on the best way to respond to these demographic changes.Photo illustration by Arthimedes / ShutterstockIn their 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologists…