Astronomers discover signs of alien intelligence, with clues to new, more powerful technology. What if it happens (relatively speaking) all the time?

The problem isn’t that the research station is completely quiet; it’s noon, after all. But the interior decoration is deeply unsettling.

There’s nothing so primitive as a point of view in a swarm.

You don’t switch off the union’s AI overlay in your glasses because you’re a bad cop. You’re every bit as good as somebody call Sofía Rodriguez would have to be to become and remain one in Arkansas - and you wouldn’t want to forfeit the union’s legal protection, which is tied to using their version of the AI.

The five stages of ecological grief were climate denial, ethno-nationalistic anger, economic depression, and then bargaining with Alison Brun’s company but quickly accepting her terms. She was, after all, the most famous environmental urban engineer in the world, the woman who saved Chennai (for a while), and the last person to leave Houston besides the soldiers and biologists of the informally named North Hell Base.

The place is an old-fashioned coworking space, poorly maintained. About two dozen men, most of them in their forties and wearing faded crypto t-shirts, wait as a presentation adjusts itself to their psychological and semiotic profiles.

No AI built today has anything remotely approaching consciousness or personhood; the unstable mess of a Windows operating system is structurally more life-like than any of them. So why the increasing focus on robot ethics?

If your business or cultural strategy was based on attention at scale, the first years of the century felt great, as the leading Internet platforms offered the possibility of nearly limitless, precisely targeted traffic. Then came the troubles

A database is a tool for forgetting; it decays on command, faster than nightmares and more thoroughly than graves.

Call it machine learning, Artificial Intelligence, or simply computational intelligence: countries are rushing to apply new technologies to combat crimes, but how they do so — and even what counts as crime — varies among them, and says much about their societies, priorities, and future.