Author: The Conversation

Some 540 million years ago, diverse life forms suddenly began to emerge from the muddy ocean floors of planet Earth. This period is known as the Cambrian Explosion, and these aquatic critters are our ancient ancestors. All complex life on Earth evolved from these underwater creatures. Scientists believe all it took was an ever-so-slight increase in ocean oxygen levels above a certain threshold. We may now be in the midst of a Cambrian Explosion for artificial intelligence (AI). In the past few years, a burst of incredibly capable AI programs like Midjourney, DALL-E 2 and ChatGPT have showcased the rapid progress we’ve made in machine…

With generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT and StableDiffusion being the talk of the town right now, it might feel like we’ve taken a giant leap closer to a sci-fi reality where AIs are physical entities all around us. Indeed, computer-based AI appears to be advancing at an unprecedented rate. But the rate of advancement in robotics – which we could think of as the potential physical embodiment of AI – is slow. Could it be that future AI systems will need robotic “bodies” to interact with the world? If so, will nightmarish ideas like the self-repairing, shape-shifting T-1000 robot from the Terminator…

Our Earth is structured sort of like an onion – it’s one layer after another. Starting from the top down, there’s the crust, which includes the surface you walk on; then farther down, the mantle, mostly solid rock; then even deeper, the outer core, made of liquid iron; and finally, the inner core, made of solid iron, and with a radius that’s 70% the size of the Moon’s. The deeper you dive, the hotter it gets – parts of the core are as hot as the surface of the Sun. Journey to the center of the Earth As a professor of…

Of all the reactions elicited by ChatGPT, the chatbot from the American for-profit company OpenAI that produces grammatically correct responses to natural-language queries, few have matched those of educators and academics. Academic publishers have moved to ban ChatGPT from being listed as a co-author and issue strict guidelines outlining the conditions under which it may be used. Leading universities and schools around the world, from France’s renowned Sciences Po to many Australian universities, have banned its use. These bans are not merely the actions of academics who are worried they won’t be able to catch cheaters. This is not just about catching students who…

There are hundreds of millions of asteroids in our Solar System, which means new asteroids are discovered quite frequently. It also means close encounters between asteroids and Earth are fairly common. Some of these close encounters end up with the asteroid impacting Earth, occasionally with severe consequences. A recently discovered asteroid, named 2023 BU, has made the news because today it passed very close to Earth. Discovered on Saturday January 21 by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov in Crimea, 2023 BU passed only about 3,600km from the surface of Earth (near the southern tip of South America) six days later on January 27. That distance is just slightly farther than…

Most of us have felt either too hot or too cold at some point in our lives. Depending on where we live, we may feel too cold quite often each winter, and too hot for a few days in summer. As we’re writing this in late January 2023 many southern Africans are probably feeling very hot and fatigued; a prolonged regional heatwave began around 9 January. Being too hot isn’t just uncomfortable. Heat stress causes dehydration, headaches, nausea – and, when people are exposed to high temperatures for protracted periods, they risk severe health outcomes and could even die. For instance,…

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being rolled out all around the world to help make decisions in our lives, whether it’s loan decisions by banks, medical diagnoses, or US law enforcement predicting a criminal’s likelihood of re-offending. Yet many AI systems are black boxes: no one understands how they work. This has led to a demand for “explainable AI”, so we can understand why an AI model yielded a specific output, and what biases may have played a role. Explainable AI is a growing branch of AI research. But what’s perhaps less well known is the role philosophy plays in its development. Specifically, one idea called…

When people think about artificial intelligence (AI), they may have visions of the future. But AI is already here. At its base, it is the recreation of aspects of human intelligence in computerised form. Like human intelligence, it has wide application. Voice-operated personal assistants like Siri, self-driving cars, and text and image generators all use AI. It also curates our social media feeds. It helps companies to detect fraud and hire employees. It’s used to manage livestock, enhance crop yields and aid medical diagnoses. Alongside its growing power and its potential, AI raises moral and ethical questions. The technology has already been at the centre of multiple scandals: the infringement of laws and rights, as well…

The internet plays a central role in our lives. I — and many others my age — grew up alongside the development of social media and content platforms. My peers and I built personal websites on GeoCities, blogged on LiveJournal, made friends on MySpace and hung out on Nexopia. Many of these earlier platforms and social spaces occupy large parts of youth memories. For that reason, the web has become a complex entanglement of attachment and connection. My doctoral research looks at how we have become “databound” — attached to the data we have produced throughout our lives in ways we both can and cannot control.…

Tech companies are always in the news, usually touting the next big thing. However, the tech news cycle recently hasn’t been dominated by the latest gadget or innovation. Instead, layoffs are in the headlines. In the last year, more than 70,000 people globally have been laid off by Big Tech companies – and that doesn’t count the downstream effect of contractors (and other organisations) losing business as budgets tighten. What exactly led to this massive shakeout? And what does it mean for the industry, and you? What’s the damage? Since the end of the pandemic hiring spree, large numbers of employees…