I recently attended a panel discussion titled Being Human in the Age of Intelligent Machines. At one point during the evening, a philosophy professor from Yale said that if a machine ever became ...

What is consciousness? This question has occupied philosophers for millennia and remains a major mystery of science today. Aristotle believed that consciousness exists as a continuum. So plants have a ...

The only reason humans know about the existence of consciousness — the phenomenon of having subjective feelings and experiences — is because we have feelings and experiences. But despite centuries of ...

A funny thing happened at a press conference with a group of internationally renowned scientists who were asked about the potential for artificial intelligence to become their world's equivalent of ...

An image generated by prompts to Google Gemini. (Courtesy of Joe Nalven) This column was composed in part by incorporating responses from a large-language model, a type of artificial intelligence ...

For decades, artificial intelligence has existed only in our fiction. We’ve imagined intelligent computer programs and malicious machines in everything from Terminator and The Matrix to I, Robot, and ...

As you read this, it is likely you are conscious. After all, you are seeing words and are aware of their meanings. You may also be aware of your phone or computer screen and some of the things ...

The biological cycle of our existence seems relatively straightforward: we’re born, we live, we die. The end. But when you examine existence at the cellular level, things get a bit more interesting.