“The cloud” may be the most successful disappearing act in modern technology. Upload a photograph and it seems to float away. Stream a film and it arrives from nowhere. Ask an AI system a question and an answer materializes on a glass scree...
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You mention hiking boots over dinner. The next morning, an advertisement for hiking boots appears on your phone. You never remember searching for them. The coincidence feels too precise, and...
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Ask a child to draw the Sun and there is a good chance they will reach for a yellow crayon. Search for a Sun emoji and you will find the same convention. For centuries, artists have painted...
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The little hat-and-glasses icon has become shorthand for secrecy. Open an Incognito window in Chrome — or a Private Browsing window in another browser — and it feels as though you have stepp...
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A penguin standing on ice looks as though someone designed a bird with a torso, two feet and almost nothing in between. Its legs seem impossibly short, and when it starts walking, the famili...
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In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match. The achievement looked like a milestone on the road to machine intelligence: a computer had conquered a game...
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Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
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Few sights make the Moon seem more theatrical than an early-autumn moonrise. A huge amber disk appears behind trees, rooftops or distant hills, looking far larger than the Moon we see later...
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You check your phone and it is 4:44. Later, a receipt ends in $4.44. That evening, three fours appear in an address or a license plate. After the third encounter, coincidence can start to fe...
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Artificial intelligence has become one of those phrases that seems to describe everything at once. It can mean the system that recommends a song, the software that detects a suspicious bank...
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