Two years ago, in March 2020, my book Future Minds was published. An exploration of the nature of intelligence in the universe and how this might evolve for us in the future, its release coincided with another far more challenging development, the onset of our most recent pandemic. While the […]
My new article for Scientific American explores the rising threat of cybercrime, including the near-term potential for the world’s first “online murder.” By this, I don’t mean streaming a video of someone’s death – as horrific as that is – but rather the remote manipulation of data to assassinate a […]
I’m beginning a short series at Psychology Today about the ongoing advances being made in machine intelligence. I’d originally thought about using “The Ascent of Machine” for the series title — after Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful work, “The Ascent of Man”, which I found so inspiring when it first came out. […]
What do nuclear technology, embryonic stem cells, synthetic life and molecular nanotechnology have in common? For many people, these are strange and frightening concepts which conjure erroneous, often very dystopic visions of the future. They’re also technologies with enormous potential; they could seriously damage our world or they could be […]