All stories by Aeon
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Space exploration is expensive, but it's worth the price
I am one of the few African-American aerospace engineers who helped design the Apollo spaceships that took men to the Moon. ...
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Here's why computer art will never replace human art
In December 1964, over a single evening session in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, John Coltrane and his quartet recorded the ...
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We created near-sentient algorithms — but now they're devolving into bigots
Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android ...
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Algorithms associating appearance with criminality have a dark past
‘Phrenology’ has an old-fashioned ring to it. It sounds like it belongs in a history book, filed somewhere between bloodletting ...
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Coding is not ‘fun’ — it’s technically and ethically complex
Programming computers is a piece of cake. Or so the world’s digital-skills gurus would have us believe. From the non-profit ...
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The distorted idea of ‘cool’ brain research is stifling psychotherapy
‘There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.’ From Prejudices (1920) ...
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How Confucius loses face in China’s new surveillance regime
While conceived of and functioning differently in diverse contexts, ‘face’ describes a phenomenon that exists in every ...
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Could artificial-womb technology be a tool for women’s liberation?
While some women experience pregnancy and childbirth as joyful, natural and fulfilling, others find themselves recoiling ...
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How to recognize an alien when you see one
What would convince you that aliens existed? The question came up recently at a conference on astrobiology, held at Stanford ...
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A tale of ‘trons’: the suffix that tells the story of modern science
If you grew up in the United States in the 1980s, chances are you’ll remember riding the Gravitron at the local fair or ...
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Human art evades understanding so how will we ever ‘get’ machinic art?
Assuming that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible, those minds will feel the urge to create art. ...
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How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road?
Picture yourself driving down a city street. You go around a curve, and suddenly see something in the middle of the road ...
