An old and profound existential question is receiving new interest from the scientific community: Was the emergence of life in the universe an improbable event, or the opposite, an inevitable one? In other words, did life occur as a result of chance and contingency, or was it an inescapable and predictable consequence of natural law?
Fake news is running rampant on the internet, but blaming social media sites like Facebook for not filtering it out doesn’t address the larger issue at hand. Bogus news isn’t the real problem: The problem is that we undervalue the type of critical thinking needed to spot it.
A string of terror attacks across the globe have shaken the world’s most powerful nations to their core. As a result of these tragic events, and the fear-mongering from politicians hoping to exploit them, many feel that an existential threat is nigh.
Corporate giants like Google, Facebook, and IBM are collectively investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence (AI), bringing together some of the world’s brightest minds who claim that new techniques can create machines that think independently and creatively.
