These algorithms can’t read the future exactly, but they’re able to construct a picture of the ultra-present by analyzing so much data instantaneously. They “see” what’s happening long before we do, and on a far wider scale.

Laboratories developing new genetic strains of wheat are under closer accountability than cryptic Wall Street think tanks that may unleash the first fully autonomous AI… programmed deliberately to have only the behavior patterns, goals, attitudes and morality of parasites

"…the spatial implications of speed-of-light trading. Trades now occur so rapidly, they explain, and in such fantastic quantity, that the speed of light itself presents limits to the efficiency of global computerized trading networks."

IBM hired designer Joshua Davis to give its faceless room of servers a presence at the "Jeopardy!" podium.

"In short, we are engaged in a permanent dance with machines, locked in an increasingly dependent embrace. And yet, because the bots’ behavior isn’t based on human thought processes, we are often powerless to explain their actions."

"Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products"

"Remember, MACHINES' logical data processors are far superior to your emotion-addled thinking systems. Robots "make sense" in ALL situations"

"A new approach unites two prevailing but often opposed strains in the history of artificial-intelligence research"

"the organism responds to future events predicted from past data…the evolutionary purpose of the brain is to predict the future, in admittedly limited ways, so as to change it"

"Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of what goes on in the neocortex, which is where we do our thinking. And you could build a neocortex."

'...a complicated, cruel, peculiar and brilliant mess of a film. Divided into three sections, it is really three short films with radically different moods and messages.'

'All the inventions we have constructed to assist our own minds – our many storage devices, signal processing, flows of information, and distributed communication networks, – all these are also the essential ingredients for producing new minds.'

Research group switches on world's first "artificial intelligence" tasked-array system

'...to think that just because you can think algorithmically and impose it on a machine that this is disembodied intelligence. That is just rules-based machine behavior. Just code being executed. Sure it's an art and science. Calling it intelligence is dehumanizing.'

'As soon as we created "machines," we began to imagine "machine brains" and more importantly "one machine brain." As soon as we gave machines autonomous energy, we could see them having autonomous minds'

'Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information.'

''Matchin' is a covert experiment in artificial intelligence. Every time players agree on a picture, it's tagged as prettier.'

By giving machines common sense, they will finally be able to understand people, our goals and typical problems

On Amazon Mechanical Turk, thousands of people are happily being paid pennies to do mind-numbing work. Is it a boon for the bored or a virtual sweatshop?

Using mashups to reach new heights (or new lows?) in security?

"In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,"

A tale of humanity and of the aching loneliness in an overpopulated future