You can accidentally and permanently ruin your computer a number of ways, from using a cheap power supply unit to updating ...

A new essay explores which conditions must be met for consciousness to exist. At least one of them can't be found in a computer. Would it be desirable for artificial intelligence to develop ...

In a pitch to investors last spring, Anthropic said it intended to build AI to power virtual assistants that could perform research, answer emails, and handle other back-office jobs on their own. The ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. “Obviously” is a dangerous word, even in scenarios that seem simple. Suppose, for instance, you need to do an important computation. You ...

People who have lost the ability to move or speak may soon have a new option: surgically implanted devices that link the brain to a computer. More than two decades after researchers first demonstrated ...

The Santa Ana winds were already blowing hard when I ran the first worm simulation. I’m no hacker, but it was easy enough: Open a Terminal shell, paste some commands from GitHub, watch characters ...

A quantum computer has demonstrated that it can solve a problem more efficiently than a conventional computer. This achievement comes from being able to unlock a vast memory resource that classical ...