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...
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...
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...
