[Image: Sunrise, via PublicDomainPictures.net ]. A short item in The Economist last month suggested that town planners could simply bypass their own aesthetic responses to a landscape and turn instead to an algorithm to design “scenic” locales. Researchers at the Warwick Business School, we read,…

One of the saving graces of the Trump era is the journalism it hasinspired. Maggie Haberman is a tireless, keen-eyed example. As part ofthe New York Times ’ White House team, she has repeatedly added to thesum total of what we know about this President and the chaotic WestWing. To hang around…

H alf a century ago, in the great hippie year of 1967, an acclaimed young American science fiction writer, Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more…

D uring World War II, a radar operator tracks an airplane over Hamburg, guiding searchlights and anti-aircraft guns in relation to a phosphor dot whose position is updated with each sweep of the antenna. Abruptly, dots that seem to represent airplanes begin to multiply, quickly swamping the display.…

Dear Journalists, I'd like to offer some advice on how to write better and more truthfully when you write articles about artificial intelligence. The reason I'm writing this is that there are a whole lot of very bad articles on AI (news articles and public interest articles) being published in…

We are living in the web’s goldfish bowl.Photograph: Alamy G oogle and Facebook have conveyed nearly all of us to this page, and just about every other idea or expression we’ll encounter today. Yet we don’t know how to talk about these companies, nor digest their sheer power. We call them platforms…

Kate Crawford, speaking at the AI Now conference at MIT this week. John Maeda (@johnmaeda) Opaque and potentially biased mathematical models are remaking our lives—and neither the companies responsible for developing them nor the government is interested in addressing the problem. This week a group…

It’s understandable that the great unwashed masses of the larger population might not appreciate contemporary art. But you’d think that photographers, who are creatives in their own right, would appreciate the art and creativity of others in all of its various forms. What I’ve seen instead is that,…

The irony of our vibrant and necessary police reform movement is that it’s happening simultaneously to everyone becoming a cop. I mean everyone — liberal, conservative, radical and reactionary. Blogger, activist, pundit, and writer, obviously, but also teacher, tailor, and candlestick maker. Cops,…

Alex Tizon passed away in March. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self . For more about Alex, please see this editor’s note . T he ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put…

I t was night, stormy, and the oil rig Transocean Winner was somewhere in the North Atlantic on 7 August 2016 when her tow-line broke. No crew members were on board. The rig was being dragged by a tugboat called Forward, the tethered vessels charting a course out of Norway that was meant to take…

Slavoj Žižek: ‘He can be a very witty writer indeed – but, as a good Freudian (or Lacanian), he knows well there really are no such things as jokes.’Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer L ife is, despite all the advances of medical science, still way too short to spend any time reading…

Do you remember 2012? When referendums were new and exciting and they came to us and asked us “Do you want a mayor?”, and we rose with one voice and said “No, we don’t want a mayor.” Well, the will of the people doesn’t mean quite the same thing when it doesn’t threaten to cause a rift in the…

Modern civilisation is a miraculous feat, one made possible by science. Every time I take a flight, I marvel at the technology that has allowed us to soar above the clouds as a matter of routine. We have mapped the genome, built supercomputers and the internet, landed probes on comets, smashed atoms…

The Egyptian painters who decorated King Tut’s burial chamber had to work quickly—the pharaoh died unexpectedly, at about the age of nineteen, and proper preparations had not been made. Plaster was applied to lumpy limestone walls. On the chamber’s western wall, twelve baboons with an identical…

The question I’m asked most often requires some unpacking, so this first post will cover just this one topic: “What are the differences between artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning?” These are all real terms with distinct meanings but are often used…

The country’s largest Ikea opened in Burbank, California, last month . At 456,600 square feet, twice the size of, and one mile away from, the old Burbank Ikea, this new store offers a lot more of everything people have come to expect from the brand: More inspirational showrooms, more lingonberries,…

‘It must be a great feeling, this patriotism of which people speak; and yet, for myself, I’ve never experienced it.’Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images I t must be a great feeling – at once warm and calming, a sense of profound belonging, of inclusion into the greater group, and through that to the…

I’m presenting a new Virtual Reality work commissioned by STRP , called FIGHT . This is the transcript of my talk discussing the work and the motivations behind it. (re reading time, subtract 5 mins for references) Carter, O. L. et al. Meditation alters perceptual rivalry in Tibetan Buddhist monks .…

The referendum was the flame ; Article 50 is the fuse. Today, after months of recrimination and fear, the deed was finally done. Britain’s unelected Prime Minister triggered Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, setting the legal machine of international relations on an unstoppable course towards Brexit.…