In Aeon, David Deutsch explains what’s taking us so long to achieve artificial intelligence: “Present-day software developers could straightforwardly program a computer to have ‘self-awareness’ if they wanted to. But it is a fairly useless ability.” (I’ve always felt it was a little overrated in humans too.)

+ Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg argues that we should “ditch the ‘Singularity’ and focus instead on ‘Multiplicity’, a much more practical and useful model where diverse groups of humans ask important questions and work together with diverse groups of machines to answer them.”

+ “We inadvertently built our own panic and short-sightedness into the very systems designed to protect us from our worst impulses.” Colin Dickey on how technological progress could be making us more vulnerable.

+ Why can’t robots understand sarcasm?