Author: The Conversation

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.…

In the past five years, higher education has been in a seemingly endless state of disruption. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a mass rapid pivot to emergency remote teaching. In shifting to unfamiliar digital learning environments, instructors scrambled to replicate classroom learning online. When restrictions lifted, many institutions pushed for a “return to normal,” as though the pre-pandemic educational standard was ideal. Now, with generative AI disruptions, we are seeing a similar desire to cling to an idealised vision of the modern university. AI has unsettled long-established forms of assessment, simultaneously instigating a return to older assessment models in the interest of…

In 2026, astronauts will travel around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era, powerful new space telescopes will prepare to survey billions of galaxies, and multiple nations will launch missions aimed at finding habitable worlds, water on the Moon and clues to how our solar system formed. Together, these launches will mark a turning point in how humanity studies the universe – and how nations cooperate and compete beyond Earth. Coming from one of the world’s largest astrophysical research institutes, I can tell you, the anticipation across the global space science community is electric. Mapping the cosmos at…

Eighteen months ago, it was plausible that artificial intelligence (AI) might take a different path than social media. Back then, AI’s development hadn’t consolidated under a small number of big tech firms. Nor had it capitalised on consumer attention, surveilling users and delivering ads. Unfortunately, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetising consumer attention. When OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Search feature in late 2024 and its browser, ChatGPT Atlas, in October 2025, it kicked off a race to capture online behavioural data to power advertising. It’s part of a yearslong turnabout by…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly woven into everyday life, from chatbots that offer companionship to algorithms that shape what we see online. But as generative AI (genAI) becomes more conversational, immersive and emotionally responsive, clinicians are beginning to ask a difficult question: can genAI exacerbate or even trigger psychosis in vulnerable people? Large language models and chatbots are widely accessible, and often framed as supportive, empathic or even therapeutic. For most users, these systems are helpful or, at worst, benign. But as of late, a number of media reports have described people experiencing psychotic symptoms in which ChatGPT features prominently. For a small but…

Cut the words “please” and “thank you” from your next ChatGPT query, and if you believe some of the talk online, you might think you are helping save the planet. The idea sounds plausible because AI systems process text incrementally: longer prompts require slightly more computation and therefore use more energy. OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has acknowledged it all adds to operating costs at the scale of billions of prompts. At the same time, it is a stretch to suggest that treating ChatGPT politely comes at significant environmental cost. The effect of a few extra words is negligible compared with the…

The global outcry over the sexualisation and nudification of photographs – including of children – by Grok, the chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI, has led to urgent discussions about how such technology should be more strictly regulated. But to what extent can technology also be used to prevent this explosion in the generation and sharing of deepfake content of real people, without their knowledge or consent? On January 10, Indonesia became the first country to announce it was temporarily blocking access to Grok, followed soon after by Malaysia. Other governments, including the UK’s, have promised to take action against the chatbot…

Imagine you’re shopping for a dinner party this weekend and you spot some nice, but expensive, bottles of wine. You’re not sure if you can afford them, but before you can even open your banking app to check, a lightweight head-worn wearable has already registered the neural activity involved in your mental calculation. It transmits the data to your phone, which confirms that they’re within your budget. In this scenario, you’d be using neurotechnology. We’re increasingly accustomed to relying on consumer wearables like smartwatches and fitness apps that measure and assess our physical parameters, but for most of us, that’s…

When Elon Musk talks about robotics, he rarely hides the ambition behind the dream. Tesla’s Optimus is pitched as an all-purpose humanoid robot that can do the heavy lifting on factory floors and free us from drudgery at home. Tesla is targeting a million of these robots in the next decade. But is Musk likely to succeed? A few years ago, the thought of a friendly, capable household robot belonged in science fiction. We could imagine machines that danced, shifted boxes or played chess, but not ones that understood us well enough to be genuinely helpful. Then came generative artificial intelligence, or gen AI.…

After a string of dramatic failures, the huge Starship rocket from SpaceX had a fully successful test on Oct. 13, 2025. A couple more test flights, and SpaceX plans to launch it into orbit. A month later, a rival rocket company, Blue Origin, flew its almost-as-large New Glenn rocket all the way to orbit and sent spacecraft on their way to Mars. While these successful flights are exciting news for future missions to the Moon as well as other planets, I’ve argued for several years that these superheavy-lift rockets can also boost research in my own speciality, astronomy – the study of stars and galaxies far beyond our solar system…