Author: The Conversation

Concerns surrounding young people’s screen time are widespread. Australia became the first country to ban social media for users under 16 in December 2025, and Denmark, France and the U.K. have since announced similar restrictions to begin this year. In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 states have passed laws banning or restricting cellphones in K–12 classrooms; in 2023, the U.S. surgeon general issued a formal advisory on social media and children’s and adolescents’ mental health; and bestselling books tell parents that smartphones are “rewiring” their children’s brains. These concerns and policies are part of a quickly changing national and international conversation around how young people spend time on screens…

My wife stared at me in shock as I ripped open the package. The FedEx driver hadn’t even made it back to his truck as I held the item up overhead like a trophy. Fumbling for words, she asked: “Why on earth did you buy a Speedo … with dinosaur tear-away trunks?” Honestly, I couldn’t remember. Maybe it was for a social media skit? Maybe I was planning on making her laugh? Or maybe I was just a “victim” of an online ad that showed me the wrong message at the right time. Scroll on social media for even 30 seconds, and your…

Copyright is built on the idea that human creativity deserves protection. Legally, this is known as “originality”. The principle is simple: people create valuable cultural works, and the law protects that effort. But artificial intelligence (AI) is challenging one of copyright law’s most basic assumptions. In doing so, it may force us to rethink what we mean by intellectual property. AI can now generate songs, images, novels and artworks in seconds. Many of these works are already being streamed, licensed and sold. This raises an increasingly important question: should works produced without direct human authorship receive copyright protection? Most legal…

Older people are being left out of decisions about how artificial intelligence (AI) is being built. Many older adults are highly skilled, curious about emerging technologies and keen to learn about AI; they’re interested in its potential for our society. However, research shows that many employers still assume older employees are less tech-savvy. Consequently, older adults often miss out on job opportunities or are passed over for promotions, even when they have the skills, training and expertise required. The AI industry is a case in point. Rather than reflecting the full range of possible users, its workforce is largely made up…

Martin Scorsese recently announced he will be joining generative artificial intelligence (AI) company Black Forest Labs. He said he would embrace AI for storyboarding – the practice of creating a visual outline in the early stages of developing a movie or TV show. The announcement was met with significant online backlash and sentiments about how AI has the potential to “ruin cinema”. The announcement follows recent viral footage showing graduate students at multiple college ceremonies booing commencement speakers who praised generative AI. Speaking at the University of Florida, property developer Gloria Caulfield declared AI is “the next Industrial Revolution”. The humanities graduates, already burdened with debt and job…

Quantum computers are coming. Or, at least, that’s what current predictions say. These machines harness the power of quantum mechanics, the set of rules governing how physics operates at atomic and sub-atomic scales. Because of this, they operate in radically different ways to current machines. Tasks requiring trillions of years on existing supercomputers might be reduced to days on future quantum computers. They could tackle a range of challenges that are out of reach for existing technology. These potential challenges include code-breaking. In 1994, the American computer scientist Peter Shor came up with a quantum algorithm capable of breaking the form of encryption that would later underpin routine…

When you interact with a large language model (LLM) – one of the systems behind chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude – it can feel as though you are in contact with another conscious mind. But are you, really? Some prominent scientists, such as Geoff Hinton and Richard Dawkins, claim you are. But most experts remain sceptical, arguing that the impressive cognitive capacities of LLMs occur in the absence of consciousness. Last week, researchers at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, waded into this debate with an interesting finding. They claim Claude has a normally invisible set of representations of information which guide its internal…

The risk of students using AI to cheat tends to get a lot of attention – with good reason. A student can simply copy and paste a prompt into a chatbot and receive a polished paragraph, a five-paragraph essay, a lab summary or a reading response almost instantly. Teachers may then be left wondering whether the work reflects the student’s thinking and actual work or what the chatbot generated. An estimated 84% of high school students surveyed said they had used generative artificial intelligence for schoolwork in 2025, according to College Board, a nonprofit that administers the SAT and AP exams. As an assistant professor of school…

Imagine a piece of space debris the size of a hockey puck slams into a Starlink satellite at about 10 kilometres per second. The kinetic energy is equivalent to two kilograms of TNT, or a fully-loaded semi-truck travelling at 100 kilometres an hour. The Starlink satellite sprays out dozens of new debris pieces into an expanding cloud. Other satellites will pass by the new debris within minutes — some will need to manoeuvre to avoid yet another collision. As corporations around the world continue to fill low-Earth orbit with megaconstellations, such collisions are increasingly likely. We have developed something called…

What makes people change their minds, or their behaviour? Social scientists spend a lot of time thinking about this question, and experiments are one of the most powerful ways to answer it. Experiments – testing ideas on real people – take considerable amounts of time and money. Enter large language models (LLMs): artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained to mimic certain kinds of text-based human behaviour based on vast amounts of human-produced text. A new study led by Harvard psychology researcher Ashwini Ashokkumar, published today in Nature, suggests LLMs such as GPT-4 can predict the outcomes of many social science experiments surprisingly well. But the…