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…

The mind in the machine: Demis Hassabis on artificial intelligence Purchase a Newspaper + Premium Digital subscription for All the benefits of Premium Digital, plus: Free delivery to your home or office, Monday to Saturday FT Weekend - a stimulating blend of news and lifestyle Purchase a Premium…

The Factum Arte warehouse, in Madrid, is filled with copies of treasured art works, including a facsimile of an Assyrian winged lion that once stood in Nimrud—a site, in Iraq, that has been largely destroyed by ISIS . Credit Photograph by Henrik Spohler for The New Yorker The Egyptian painters who…

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 – at once warm and calming, a sense of profound belonging, of inclusion into the greater group, and through that to the very land itself. At the same time, it must be a rousing feeling – stirring, even – especially when certain key cues are introduced: flapping flags,…

FIGHT! Virtual Reality Binocular Rivalry (VRBR). 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…

The United Kingdom is getting out of the European Union. / Tyler Merbler T he 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…