Author: The Conversation

Technological progress has taken more than its fair share of the workload from humans over the years. Washing machines clean our clothes, tractors plough the fields, and computers sort out the admin. Meanwhile, economic growth and redistribution of wealth mean most workers in industrialised countries do not need to spend most of their waking hours on gainful employment. The 12-hour working day that was common during the 19th century has been largely reduced. So will developments in AI help us gain even more free time? Not necessarily. In fact, AI might actually cause working hours to increase. One reason for this…

Sometime this week, you probably did it: A question came up, and instead of searching for the answer online or reaching for a book, you asked a chatbot for it. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. By February this year, ChatGPT alone had 900 million weekly users, and a large study found that people mostly use it for searches under the broad topics of “seeking information,” “practical guidance” and “writing.” As a researcher with a PhD in developmental psychology, studying how people learn and stay informed in digital environments, I believe there is a lot we don’t yet understand about what…

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are starting to do more than answer questions. New AI “agents” can remember information from previous interactions, plan a series of steps and use digital tools to complete tasks. Memory is part of what makes these systems useful. But my recent research, conducted with my colleague Hadis Karimipour at the University of Calgary, shows that memory can also create a security weakness that is easy to overlook. Think of an AI agent as an assistant that keeps a notebook of what it learns. Each time it completes a task, useful information can be written into the notebook and consulted later. Now…

Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation on the Greek island of Crete, has neither. Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century. Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A…

Imagine overhearing on a bus that the city council plans to implement new restrictions under an urban planning program called “15-minute cities”. Curious, you search the term on Google. It’s likely that at the top of the results page, an AI-generated text summarising the search results will appear. This text synthesises content from various webpages that answer specific search queries. They are increasingly appearing not only in Google, but also in other search engines, and users are now likely to stop reading the search results page beyond this AI-generated text. But what if the AI-generated answer – the only search result users may…

South Africa’s coal-fired power stations are retiring. The country must replace a huge amount of electricity over the next two decades. Currently, coal still supplies 74% of the country’s power. But the government’s national energy plan has largely overlooked one technology South Africa is particularly suited to build: concentrating solar power. There are two main ways of generating electricity from the sun. Photovoltaic (rooftop) solar panels convert sunlight directly into electricity. Big concentrating solar power farms use mirrors to concentrate sunlight into heat. This heat is then used to produce steam that drives a turbine to generate electricity. Concentrating solar power works only with…

Scientists have crossed an important line in biological engineering. In a recent study, researchers used artificial intelligence to design complete sets of genetic instructions for bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria. Some of those computer-generated designs produced working viruses when they were built and tested in the laboratory. These viruses were designed to infect bacteria rather than people. The researchers worked with bacteriophages that target E. coli, and one of the AI models they used, Evo 2, was developed with safety restrictions. Its developers excluded viruses that infect organisms such as animals, plants and humans from the data used to train it. Even so, the…

The 1960s were a time of great change in technology, culture and politics. Television was radically altering the media environment, and nobody was quite sure how to think about it. As the world struggles with the impact of another new high-tech medium – generative artificial intelligence (AI) – two thinkers from that era have acquired new relevance for understanding what is happening and where we’re heading. Investors are sinking billions of dollars into AI companies and data centres in the belief that AI will change the world. But how should we think about AI? Is it a powerful tool we…

For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content, you give credit by linking to the source. Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate). When you search for something, ChatGPT’s response or Google’s AI Overviews may still include links to sources, but they’re a kind of optional extra to the main answer. This has triggered…

The recent confirmation of an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet called LHS 1140b has created a wave of interest within the astronomy community. The planet orbits within the habitable zone around its parent star – a red dwarf located some 48 light-years from Earth. The habitable zone is the region around the star where temperatures are just right for water to remain liquid at a planet’s surface. Astronomers detected helium being lost from the upper atmosphere of LHS 1140b. But heavier chemical compounds, such as water, which is a key ingredient for life, could exist lower in its atmosphere. Observing distant exoplanets using…