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LONDON, ENGLAND - MAY 30: A pair of 1X androids are displayed at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) at ExCel on May 30, 2023 in London, England. The event is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's flagship conference and a forum for robotics researchers to present and discuss their work. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Robotics gets less attention than it should given its potential impact

14 June 2023

From self-driving cars to humanoid robots, the world of robotics is a long way from talk of artificial intelligence causing human extinction. It's a breath of fresh air, says Alex Wilkins

2P3HAAK AI technology Robot. ChatGPT, AI-powered chatbot, language processing and machine learning to provide users intelligent conversation. Generative AI

Why we need to be wary of anthropomorphising chatbots

22 March 2023

For all their unsettling emergent abilities, chatbots are still just next-word predictors. We need to remember this and avoid seeing human attributes where they don't exist, warns Alex Wilkins

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Medical AIs are advancing - when will they be in a clinic near you?

25 January 2023

Trained on real electronic health records, medical AIs are making rapid progress. How long before we see these tools widely used in the clinic, wonders Alex Wilkins

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Is our evolving relationship with tech shifting our view of reality?

14 December 2022

This year saw the launch of ChatGPT, an AI that anyone can converse with, and the news that a quantum computer simulated a wormhole. Are our sensibilities about what is real changing, asks Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

If cyberpunk no longer fits our vision of the future, what does?

9 November 2022

Cyberpunk, once a hi-tech picture of the future, now feels passe. A new adaption of sci-fi novel The Peripheral gives a fresh perspective on how tech could transform humanity, says Annalee Newitz

The success of text-to-image AIs raises major ethical issues

12 October 2022

Apps that create images based on text can deliver amazing results, but there are problems with the data sets some are trained on and the lack of compensation for artists, says Annalee Newitz