When you think of Roman soldiers marching into war, you probably don’t picture them carrying chickens to predict the army’s fortunes. And you likely don’t throw spilled salt over your shoulder to ward off bad luck. If superstitions like these seem silly to us now,...
There’s a human, crouched at the entrance to a cave, staring in awe at flashes of lightning. The human doesn’t understand what the flashes are, can’t even begin to comprehend things like electrons or particles. He doesn’t have the logic, the knowledge, to make sense...
Try, just for a moment, to remember the last image you looked at. Maybe it was an ad on a website, or maybe it was a meme you scrolled by on your phone. Can you recall it? Neither can I. And that’s why I’ve started to actively aim for signal and slay the noise....
If it feels like the tech giants are trying extra hard lately to become Marvel villains, you’re not alone. One look at the behaviour of the Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world shows alarming parallels. A single-minded pursuit of immense personal wealth and...
Look into a chimp’s eyes and it’s almost like looking in a mirror. You can see the awareness, the almost-humanness, gazing right back at you. You might even get the uncanny feeling that, with a couple of evolutionary sidesteps, we’d be sitting in a very different spot...
When The Matrix hit theatres back in 1999, it seemed like pure science fiction. A world where human brains and computers could directly interact? Impossible. But fast forward to today and the idea is reality. In fact, you could soon be able to control your thermostat...
Watching someone juggle makes us apprehensive. Each time they add an orange or a bowling ball, the risk of failure goes up. We wait, wide-eyed, knowing that one small slip could make the whole thing fall apart. After all, they only have two hands, and there’s no way...
Everybody loves a rogue computer. From books to movies, we devour stories like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina. It’s exciting to imagine those sci-fi futures, especially when we know that a computer doesn’t actually stand much chance of destroying humanity. But...
Data breaches are a lot like worms in a rainstorm. If you don’t see one now, just wait five minutes and another is bound to pop up. It makes perfect sense, then, that we try to protect personal data like birthdates and credit cards. But what doesn’t make sense is that...
We’ve got it pretty easy compared to the cavemen. Those prehistoric souls waged a constant battle for basic survival, and I’ll take central heating and modern medicine any day. Yet for all the innovations that have made life easier, we deal with a new kind of stress...
Algorithms might not be sexy, but boy are they efficient. Search the web for new shoes, and an algorithm instantly shows you hundreds of similar ones. Look at some new furniture, and the same sofa suddenly appears in all your ads. From TikTok reels to fast-food, the...
There’s always a clear winner in the game rock paper scissors. Paper covers rock, rock breaks scissors, and so on. But what’s a winning strategy when it comes to preserving your precious files? Digital has lots of benefits, but a closer look reveals that,...
Making a good trade means giving up one thing to get something better. Life skills are no different, and for the most part we’ve made some solid trades. A lot of them have been thanks to new technology. Not as many of us can saddle a horse, do mental math, or hunt our...
Trigger thumb. Text claw. Tech neck. Those names might sound straight out of science fiction but the ailments are very real, and odds are good that you’ve experienced at least one of them. They’re repetitive stress injuries that come from overuse of things like...
Ask ten people to describe the cloud and you’ll get ten different answers. Some might say it’s a mysterious place where your files go to disappear. Others would say it’s a server. Many assume it’s a place to store your photos so you can delete them from your...
I’ll never forget the look on the young man’s face as he handed me his waterlogged phone. It was a brand new flagship device, barely six months old, and it had all the functionality of a brick. Even less, in fact, since he couldn’t build much with a broken phone. He’d...
Love it or hate it, there’s no debate that technology is a boon for accessibility. From Braille keyboards to apps you control with your voice, the tech industry is creating new and better accessibility features all the time. Which is why it surprises me how rarely...
Who owns your robot? Not an actual robot, but the kind in the picture up there. The kind of image I created after typing a few prompts into Stability AI. The answer might surprise you, especially if you plan to use any sort of AI content in your own life....
If you haven’t heard of passkeys yet, odds are good you’ll be hearing about them soon. They’re a new way to log in to apps and websites, and they hold the promise of a future without passwords. Passkeys are great for a lot of reasons. They’re more secure than...
I was recently debating the idea that artificial intelligence will replace humans, and heard what seemed like a solid point against it: AI won’t replace humans for the simple reason that it can’t come up with anything original. Everything AI creates is simply a...
