All the warnings about the poisonous side of artificial intelligence are no longer warnings. They’re here. “A fake image purporting to show an explosion near the Pentagon was shared by multiple verified Twitter accounts on Monday,” CNN reports. “This image shows typical signs of being AI-synthesized: there are structural mistakes on the building and fence that you would not see...

There is a little-known science fiction film where an American scientist and his team design and build a supercomputer—a colossus of such computational scale and skill that it can assess, calculate, and respond to situations in seconds. Colossus: The Forbin Project tells the story of a massive artificial intelligence-equipped computer the size of a mountain designed as the perfect system...

On any given day, I can drive around the small town where I live and easily see two-dozen or more individuals on cell phones. Some are on a call, some texting, tweeting, Facebooking, or just plain surfing. All of us appear to be spliced to our phones. I’ll come back to this later. Elon Musk is the man who gave...

Easier said than done. However, Frances Haugen, the former Facebook data scientist who came forward with thousands of internal documents to back up her claims that the engagement-based algorithms created by the tech giant are used to deepen “divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies,” has been in talks with the House Judiciary...

Jeffrey Wigand and Frances Haugen have two things in common. Both blew the whistle on impropriety within their respective companies, and both appeared on the news show, 60 Minutes to tell their stories. At the social media company, Facebook, Haugen—with a degree in computer engineering, and a master’s degree in business from Harvard—has 15 years experience in the computer world...

Amid the political and coronavirus turmoil, it’s time we turn to a story that demonstrates the best we can be. After a launch delay due to Tropical Storm Eta, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule successfully launched last night carrying four astronauts to the International Space Station. “SpaceX,” Space.com reports, “uses automated drone ships as floating landing pads...

Tomorrow marks the 50th anniversary that two men landed on the surface of the moon. It’s impossible to overemphasize the extraordinary achievement that took place 50 years ago this week. Technical skills aside, the courage that three men took was beyond anything that had ever been attempted. And yet, the men, inside their Columbia space craft, found the time to...

In my mind, only a handful of moments in the last 50 years are iconic. The launch of Apollo 11 and subsequent landing of the first men on an extraterrestrial surface certainly remains one of the few for several reasons: excellence in planning, mathematics, physics, physical training, creativity, engineering and the courage it took for the three explorer-astronauts. On an...

Global warming, according to a majority of climate scientists, is a global threat. And an 81-year-old man thinks knows he’s found an answer. This is the face of genius. In a story from the CBS program 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl interviewed a man with no science background or degrees. Walking around Thoreau’s idyllic Walden Pond, not far from his home,...

Julian Assange – founder and director of WikiLeaks, claiming he was only acting as a journalist revealing the truth about government secrets – was taken into custody by the Metropolitan Police Service in London after seven years of self-imposed confinement in the Ecuadorian Embassy. In 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks published classified American military and diplomatic documents delivered to him by...