Author: The Conversation

Imagine a world where fresh vegetables and herbs sprout in the heart of our cities without the need for sprawling farms. Hydroponics – a method of growing plants without soil – uses a nutrient-rich water solution instead of earth and is useful in areas where soil quality is poor, land is frequently flooded, water supply is unreliable, or there simply isn’t enough space. Hydroponically cultivated plants use 90% less water than soil-based agriculture. They grow upwards in stacked layers and occupy 99% less land. Some hydroponic crops can yield ten times more produce compared to traditional cultivation methods, depending on crop type and the scale and…

Claims that artificial intelligence (AI) is on the verge of surpassing human intelligence have become commonplace. According to some commentators, rapid advances in large language models signal an imminent tipping point – often framed as “superintelligence” – that will fundamentally reshape society. But comparing AI to individual intelligence misses something essential about what human intelligence is. Our intelligence doesn’t operate primarily at the level of isolated individuals. It is social, embodied and collective. Once this is taken seriously, the claim that AI is set to surpass human intelligence becomes far less convincing. These claims rest on a particular comparison: AI systems…

When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking. The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages. Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content. While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation…

Much is being said about the wonders of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is the new frontier. And while it provides amazing possibilities in fields like medicine, academics are debating its advantages for university students. Peet van Aardt researches student writing and presents academic writing workshops at the University of the Free State Writing Centre, helping students to build clear arguments, summarise essay structure and express their opinions in their own voice. He also spearheads the Initiative for Creative African Narratives (iCAN), a project that assists students in getting their original stories published. Here he shares his experiences and thoughts on the…

If you’re following AI on social media, even lightly, you will likely have come across OpenClaw. If not, you will have heard one of its previous names, Clawdbot or Moltbot. Despite its technical limitations, this tool has seen adoption at remarkable speeds, drawn its share of notoriety, and spawned a fascinating “social media for AI” platform called Moltbook, among other unexpected developments. But what on Earth is it? What is OpenClaw? OpenClaw is an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that you can install and run a copy or “instance” of on your own machine. It was built by a single developer, Peter Steinberger,…

A South African solar manufacturer, ARTsolar, is taking the government and several renewable energy developers to court. The case focuses on local content rules for renewable energy projects. ARTsolar says it invested in new manufacturing capacity because it expected these rules to lead to orders for locally assembled solar panels. That did not happen. Wikus Kruger has researched renewable energy financing and procurement in Africa for 15 years. He argues that the ARTsolar court case points to a deeper policy problem. Local manufacturing requirements were added to South Africa’s renewable energy programme without a clear industrial strategy. The government created obligations, but not the conditions needed…

When you hear the word “dinosaur”, the first thing that might spring to mind is a hulking skeleton like Sue the T rex in Chicago’s Field Museum or Sophie the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London. Dinosaur skeletons give us striking evidence of what these ancient animals looked like, from the plates and spikes on stegosaurs like Sophie to the long-necked, aeroplane-sized bodies of titanosaurs. However, despite their iconic status as museum centrepieces, skeletons are not the most common type of dinosaur fossil known. That prize goes to dinosaur footprints. The abundance of dinosaur footprints is intuitive. Each dinosaur could only leave…

At its best, artificial intelligence (AI) can assist people in analysing data, automating tasks and developing solutions to big problems: fighting cancer, hunger, poverty and climate change. At its worst, AI can assist people in exploiting other humans, damaging the environment, taking away jobs and eventually making us lazy and less innovative. Likewise, AI is both a boon and a bane for the music industry. As a recording engineer and professor of music technology and production, I see a large grey area in between. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences has taken steps to address AI in recognising contributions and protecting…

How do you translate ancient Palmyrene script from a Roman tombstone? How many paired tendons are supported by a specific sesamoid bone in a hummingbird? Can you identify closed syllables in Biblical Hebrew based on the latest scholarship on Tiberian pronunciation traditions? These are some of the questions in “Humanity’s Last Exam”, a new benchmark introduced in a study published this week in Nature. The collection of 2,500 questions is specifically designed to probe the outer limits of what today’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems cannot do. The benchmark represents a global collaboration of nearly 1,000 international experts across a range of academic…

For half a century, computing advanced in a reassuring, predictable way. Transistors – devices used to switch electrical signals on a computer chip – became smaller. Consequently, computer chips became faster, and society quietly assimilated the gains almost without noticing. These faster chips enable greater computing power by allowing devices to perform tasks more efficiently. As a result, we saw scientific simulations improving, weather forecasts becoming more accurate, graphics more realistic, and later, machine learning systems being developed and flourishing. It looked as if computing power itself obeyed a natural law. This phenomenon became known as Moore’s Law, after the businessman…