Author: The Conversation

Have you ever had the experience of rereading a sentence multiple times only to realise you still don’t understand it? As taught to scores of incoming college freshmen, when you realise you’re spinning your wheels, it’s time to change your approach. This process, becoming aware of something not working and then changing what you’re doing, is the essence of metacognition, or thinking about thinking. It’s your brain monitoring its own thinking, recognising a problem, and controlling or adjusting your approach. In fact, metacognition is fundamental to human intelligence and, until recently, has been understudied in artificial intelligence systems. My colleagues Charles Courchaine, Hefei Qiu and Joshua Iacoboni and I are working…

Businesses are acting fast to adopt agentic AI – artificial intelligence systems that work without human guidance – but have been much slower to put governance in place to oversee them, a new survey shows. That mismatch is a major source of risk in AI adoption. In my view, it’s also a business opportunity. I’m a professor of management information systems at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, which recently surveyed more than 500 data professionals through its Center for Applied AI & Business Analytics. We found that 41% of organisations are using agentic AI in their daily operations. These aren’t just pilot projects or one-off tests. They’re part…

When a solar storm strikes Earth, it can disrupt technology that’s vital for our daily lives. Solar storms occur when magnetic fields and electrically charged particles collide with the Earth’s magnetic field. This type of event falls into the category known as “space weather”. The Earth is currently experiencing one of the most intense solar storms of the past two decades, reminding us of the need for ways to understand these events. An international team of researchers (including us) is working on a spacecraft mission that would enable researchers to study the conditions that create solar storms, leading to improved forecasts of…

The retirement of West Midlands police chief Craig Guildford is a wake-up call for those of us using artificial intelligence (AI) tools at work and in our personal lives. Guildford lost the confidence of the home secretary after it was revealed that the force used incorrect AI-generated evidence in their controversial decision to ban Israeli football fans from attending a match. This is a particularly egregious example, but many people may be falling victim to the same phenomenon – outsourcing the “struggle” of thinking to AI. As an expert on how new technology reshapes society and the human experience, I have observed a growing phenomenon which…

OpenAI has announced plans to introduce advertising in ChatGPT in the United States. Ads will appear on the free version and the low-cost Go tier, but not for Pro, Business, or Enterprise subscribers. The company says ads will be clearly separated from chatbot responses and will not influence outputs. It has also pledged not to sell user conversations, to let users turn off personalised ads, and to avoid ads for users under 18 or around sensitive topics such as health and politics. Still, the move has raised concerns among some users. The key question is whether OpenAI’s voluntary safeguards will hold once advertising…

People have become used to living with AI fairly quickly. ChatGPT is barely three years old, but it has changed the way many of us communicate or deal with large amounts of information. It has also led to serious concerns about jobs. For if machines become better than people at reading complex legal texts, or translating languages, or presenting arguments, won’t those old-fashioned human employees become irrelevant? Surely mass unemployment is on the horizon? Yet, when we look at the big numbers of the economy, this is not what’s happening. Unemployment in the EU is at a historical low of around 6%, half…

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets “to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI systems can process vast datasets and detect subtle correlations…

Autonomous vehicles have made remarkable progress over the past decade. Driverless cars and buses that once struggled to stay in lane can now navigate busy city streets, recognise pedestrians and cyclists, and respond smoothly to traffic signals. Yet one challenge remains stubbornly difficult. The hardest situations on the road are not the common ones but the rare and unpredictable events – what AI researchers call “long-tail scenarios” or “edge cases”, because they occur as outliers on any event distribution curve. Examples include unexpected roadworks, unusual behaviour from other road users, and other subtle situations where there is a very low probability…

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that makes a victim’s data, system or device inaccessible. It locks the target or encrypts it (converting text into an unreadable form) until the victim pays a ransom to the attacker. It’s one of the most widespread and damaging forms of cyberattacks affecting organisations around the world. An Interpol report identified ransomware as one of the most widespread cyber threats across Africa in 2024. South Africa reported 12,281 detections and Egypt reported 17,849. Despite global efforts to curb it, ransomware continues to thrive, driven by cybercriminals seeking quick financial gain. In its first-quarter 2025 report, global cybersecurity…

Around the turn of the century, the internet underwent a transformation dubbed “web 2.0”. The World Wide Web of the 1990s had largely been read-only: static pages, hand-built homepages, portal sites with content from a few publishers. Then came the dotcom crash of 2000 to 2001, when many heavily financed, lightly useful internet businesses collapsed. In the aftermath, surviving companies and new entrants leaned into a different logic that the author-publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms rather than pages, participation rather than passive consumption. And on January 15 2001, a website was born that seemed to encapsulate this new era.…