“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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Ask the meaning of life in the right corner of the internet and there is a good chance someone will answer with a number: 42. It has become one of popular culture’s most durable private joke...
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Ask whether snakes have legs and the obvious answer seems to be no. A cobra, viper or grass snake has no arms, no feet and no visible limbs at all. Yet the evolutionary answer is more intere...
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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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Every email, video stream, security-camera frame, cloud backup, online purchase, AI response and sensor reading leaves a digital trail. Multiply those events across billions of people, phone...
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Look down at almost any laptop, desktop keyboard or smartphone in the English-speaking world and the first six letters are the same: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The arrangement feels so inevitable that it...
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Ask a modern AI whether it is frightened, lonely or aware of its own existence and it may produce an answer that sounds uncannily introspective. It can discuss its “thoughts,” describe imagi...
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Science-fiction space battles have trained us to expect a particular soundtrack: engines roar, lasers crack and exploding spacecraft detonate with a cinematic boom. Put the same battle in th...
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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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A black hole does something stranger than simply swallowing light. Before a photon crosses the point of no return, spacetime can bend its trajectory so violently that the light can travel ar...
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