MIT Press Reader
AI morality? Don’t hold your breath
It’s not the AI overlords destroying humanity that we need to worry about so much as a hyperpolarized, hyperweaponized humanity destroying ...
Darwinian survival guide: Evolutionary biologist gives his advice in the face of disruptive climate change
Adaption of humanity: An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival ...
Cognitive shortcuts: How ‘magical thinking’ plays an important role in our lives
Adults often deny believing in magic, but on closer inspection, much of our behavior is more magical than we think ...
‘Picturing the mind’: These clever illustrations help us understand how consciousness evolved
What is consciousness, and who (or what) is conscious — humans, nonhumans, nonliving beings? Which varieties of consciousness do we ...
Ancient skeletons reveal history of inequality
Contrary to popular belief and cinematic glorification, most archaeologists would say that the search for spectacular treasures isn’t their main ...
Are plaque deposits in the brain the true cause of Alzheimer’s disease?
Alzheimer’s disease was to be defined by the presence of plaques. Yet plaques are a feature that is not present ...
Here’s why there are fewer and fewer breakthrough drugs
In the UK, the U.S., France, Germany, and elsewhere, we are seeing the first signs that, for complex reasons, life ...
Should you get a PSA test for prostate cancer? Here’s why this simple antigen blood analysis is so controversial
The [prostate-specific antigen, or] PSA test was first experimentally used to detect prostate cancer in the late 1980s, and in ...
‘There will be no robo-apocalypse’: Why AI is no match for human creativity and ingenuity
Improvements in machine intelligence will not lead to runaway machine-led revolutions. They may change the kind of jobs that people ...
Politics, ideology and values shape science at nearly every stage, from deciding what phenomena to research to how to talk about results
Science has always been political. The science policy scholar Daniel Sarewitz subsumes the idea that scientific research is politically neutral ...
Exploring the mystery of consciousness: Is it everywhere in nature?
Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining ...
‘Tip-of-the-tongue’ phenomenon: Does it signal cognitive decline and dementia?
[A] person is certain she knows the word she is searching for. It may seem as if the AWOL term ...
Contemplating human extinction
Whether designer pathogen or malicious AI, we now recognize many ways to die. But when did people first start actually ...
Viewpoint: Don’t waste your money on banking your baby’s umbilical cord blood
[I]n the U.S., the practice of storing umbilical cord blood is steadily on the rise. Banking cord blood in case a ...
Number instinct: Numerical ability is deeply rooted in our shared animal evolution
Considering the multitude of situations in which we humans use numerical information, life without numbers is inconceivable. But what was ...
Do bilinguals have a lower risk of developing dementia?
If the benefits of being bilingual spill over to other aspects of cognition, then we would expect to see a ...