All stories by Aeon
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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 ...
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How Cold War rivalry helped launch the Chinese computer
It was the summer of 1959, and the United States needed a Cold War to win. In 1957, the Soviet bloc scored a major technological ...
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Humans should get the credit for AI-made art
In December 1964, over a single evening session in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, John Coltrane, and his quartet recorded ...
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Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material — they do the opposite
Imagine you’re a lecturer teaching a celebrated novel that features violent scenes – say, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The ...
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Why humans are psychologically inclined to mistrust ‘the other’
Whether they are proposing to build a wall or to exit an international coalition, populist politicians like to pitch themselves ...
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Here's why AI deserves the same rights as animals
Universities across the world are conducting major research on artificial intelligence (AI), as are organizations such as ...
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Pro-anorexia forums are dangerous — but they can teach us a lot about community and understanding
In recent years, a cultural movement has emerged online that takes a positive attitude toward eating disorders. So-called ...
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An ant colony has memories its individual members don’t have
Like a brain, an ant colony operates without central control. Each is a set of interacting individuals, either neurons or ...
