robots
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FUNNY WOMEN: The Future Is Female and Customizable
Announcing the She-bot 3000, a female companion who’s the perfect combination of girlfriend, mother, and therapist. For a low daily rate (and with no minimum commitment or background check required), the She-bot can be your bot, and yours only.
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The Last Book I Loved: Re-reading Dana Levin’s Banana Palace in 2019
In such a context, Dana Levin’s particular apocalypses deserve another look.
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The Clockwork Job Thief
Ornamental yet functional, mobile yet fragile—do these aesthetic humanoids belong more to the realm of novelty or art?
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Weekly Geekery
Your new chatbot therapist recommends volunteering. Womp womp: those productivity hacks are making you less productive. A quick-and-dirty primer to the “Anthropocene.”
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Weekly Geekery
Why Finnish women matter to the history of science fiction. Holiday science books: let visions of squid and sarcophagi dance in their heads. Astronauts survive thanks to a black female mathematician. This robot could make your toddler Mark Zuckerberg. (Minus the…
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Weekly Geekery
Don’t dis slang—it’s older than you are. Regarding the pain of fish (and humanities-loving robots). Fake scientists are real. Sexism messes up men’s mental health, too. Aimee Bender and the Ladies of Contemporary Fairytale.
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Like Tears in Rain
In a universe slowly sinking into entropy, writing can take the disordered pieces of our experience and fit their edges together into something organized. If the work of a writer is to tease out meaning from the tangled mess of life, many of…
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Weekly Geekery
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…
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Carving the Uncanny Valley
Any 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…
