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Forget yoga—hallucinogenic ayahuasca is the new health cure du jour. H.G. Wells’s BFF was editor of Nature. Also from Nature: Wave goodbye to the 10,000-hours rule. Neurofiction, or stories that read your brain. Accurate AI models of existence? Not until robots dance.
...moreAny Luddite with half a brain has already begun stockpiling nonperishables for the inevitable moment the robots rise up against us. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Joelle Renstrom recounts how writers were awakened to the threat of artificial intelligence: A certain likeness to humans inspires kinship, but when the line blurs, that kinship turns to […]
...moreFor JSTOR Daily, Matt Langione reviews the current state of artificial intelligence, and the strides AI technology must make to fully complement human thought and experience. The latest step, Langione notes, is the news that Google began improving its “natural language algorithms” with the text of romance novels, which opens the question of what kind […]
...moreThe Atlantic explains how Kurt Vonnegut’s lectures about story arcs influenced a group of researches to classify works of fiction based on six “core narratives” in order to find the “emotional trajectory of a story.” The research group hopes the data helps scientists to “train machines” to write original works.
...moreFacial recognition technology is a little racist. Two writers talk about the end of the world and more importantly, the end of social media. Robots are just babies—tiny, terrifying babies. Nabokov and butterfly sex.
...moreLast year physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that advanced artificial intelligence, or AI, could lead to the end of humanity. How are scientists working on this issue? Teaching robots empathy with books! Newsweek reports on the Quixote system, which teaches AI a human sense of right and wrong.
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Author Louisa Hall discusses her latest novel, Speak, the future of artificial intelligence, and how playing squash taught her a love of literary technique.
...more(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Who is burning black churches? The weird history of weird news. What animal is going to infect us all and lead to our doom? Robots know. The office snake. Politics of the potty.
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Ex Machina is pretty adept at tricking viewers into thinking we’re smarter than the film.
...moreA new computer program can write fables, reports the Guardian. The Moral Storytelling System, devised by Margaret Sarlej at the University of New South Wales, chooses a moral and determines a sequence of events. But the resulting stories so far remain fairly basic and Sarlej doubts the software will ever replace novelists. She instead sees […]
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