New Philosopher

What happens when a machine can do something better than we can? Well, it’s simple: when machines outperform us – either physically or intellectually – typically we assign the activity to them. A vehicle can transport us faster than our own legs, a d

How important is intelligence in getting ahead, in conquering goals, and generally making a success out of one’s life? Is intelligence the gold standard for who succeeds and who doesn’t? Intelligence tends to be ‘measured’ by the intelligence quotien

Forty-nine years ago, a radio message, known as the Arecibo message, was sent from Earth to anyone in outer space who might listen. The radio transmission was directed towards a cluster of some 300,000 stars, called Messier 13, or M13 for short, a st

Most of us would have met a conspiracy theorist. They’re typically breathless with ideas, over-confident in their hunches, and a touch paranoid. Conspiracy theorists base their theories mostly on anecdotes, or information passed on to them by a frien

When Socrates searched Athens for someone intelligent – specifically a person who was wiser than he was – he encountered something unexpected. “Those with the greatest reputations seemed to me,” he proclaimed, “practically the most deficient [in comm

When police traced the origins of a red laser dot to the third-floor window of the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, they were surprised to discover that the offending room belonged to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis. The esteemed scientist had been staying in th

In February 2023, Australia’s corporate regulator came under fire for hiring a bunch of robots. You might be envisioning a Robocop-type scenario or an army of droid soldiers right now, and I can guarantee you’re about to be disappointed. The robots i

In my early 30s, an editing role came up at the BBC. It involved aggregating news content for their Australian site: deciding what went where on the home page and adding a few original stories. I was unsure whether to apply and approached a friend wh

Who can forget the epic opening scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a blood-thirsty ape, fresh from a fight, hurls a thighbone into the sky and its revolving outline morphs into that of a spaceship? The scene has become somethin

Tell us a little about your background as an artist. When did you start illustrating? I went to school for graphic design in the mid-1980s. The program didn’t teach illustration per se but it was very focused on image and mark making. When I got my

Alexithymia is a condition characterised by the inability to name emotions. The term usually applies to individuals, for whom dozens of books on emotional intelligence have been written. Peter Salovey and John Mayer coined the term in 1990, and Danie

1. the ability to learn, understand and think in a logical way about things; the ability to do this well; 2. secret information that is collected, for example about a foreign country, especially one that is an enemy; the people that collect this info

Being a person comes with a lot of baggage. To say someone is a person seems to imply that they should be treated in a certain kind of way – namely, with a certain amount of respect or dignity. In legal language, we would say that being a person make

We head south. The land is so flat a spirit level would measure perfect horizontality. My eyes trail along a line of wire a metre or so from the roadway. I watch the intermittent tail lights of a truck before us flash on, flash off. Occasionally, a g

One way of exploring the latest generation of Artificial Intelligences is to investigate a topic you’re guaranteed to know more about than any computer: yourself. Here, for instance, is how Google’s AI assistant Bard replied to the query, “Who is Tom

The connotations of ‘intelligence’ are mostly cerebral and academic. Intelligence is about having high level capabilities, typically involving mathematical, logical, or verbal reasoning. Intelligent people are good at problem-solving and finding neat

Theodore is a lonely writer whose marriage has just ended. To solve this problem, he develops a relationship with a woman – who for a while cures his loneliness. The relationship doesn’t last though. After their breakup, he takes the lessons he’s lea

False intelligence is an enemy of mine,A foe that I cannot outwit nor outrun.Though I search with vigour, I cannot divineA way to escape its grasp when it has come. False intelligence brings us to our knees,Confusing us with facts and data streams.It

How and when did you move into art as a full-time occupation? Since I was a child, I wanted to be a professional draftsman. I know that it is a commonplace answer, but please note the important detail: ‘professional’. Unfortunately, I was never in t

“Don’t bother getting a university degree,” the 68-year-old man declares to the recent school leaver, “because AI is going to take all the jobs. Instead,” he continues, “get a trade because that’s safer. Robots aren’t moving into the trades just yet.

Zan Boag: In your book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, you proposed the idea that we all possess different types of intelligences, that the majority of us have a range of these abilities or intelligences to some degree. What was

I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?” This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms “machine” and “think.” The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this

From Aesop’s Fables A crow, half-dead with thirst, came upon a Pitcher which had once been full of water; but when the Crow put its beak into the mouth of the Pitcher he found that only very little water was left in it, and that he could not reach fa