Art is often viewed as a powerful method of social and political change. Paula Rego, who sadly passed away on the 8th June, blazed her own trail in this regard. Her work had a significant impact on the decision to legalise abortion in Portugal, …
Elon Musk plans to build his Tesla Bot, Optimus, so that humans “can run away from it and most likely overpower it” should they ever need to. “Hopefully, that doesn’t ever happen, but you never know,” says Musk. But is this really enough to make an AI safe …
We instinctually ascribe political and strategic genius to the authoritarians of the world. One American commentator described Putin as a "grandmaster of chess" when it comes to strategy. But anyone that acts as a tyrant over the people of their …
Metaphysics wants to know what, ultimately, exists. What is true. What is good. For metaphysics, philosophy’s ultimate aim is a complete account of reality, as it is in itself. Richard Rorty made a name for himself by claiming that this metaphysical …
Whether it’s repeatedly falling into the same relationship pattern (even with different partners), or continually making the same old mistakes, many of us often wonder ‘how did I get here again?’. Life is a spiral, not a straight path, in which we …
From misremembering the names of our acquaintances, to failing to recall a memory accurately, for decades we have viewed forgetfulness as a shortcoming of the human mind. Yet recent neuroscience and psychology demonstrates this to be a myth, argues Scott A …
A Google AI engineer has been put on leave for thinking an AI has become sentient. However, this is an illusion caused by a clever language model and a human anthropomorphising, writes Gary Marcus. Blaise Aguera y Arcas, polymath, novelist, and Google VP, …
NATO was proclaimed brain-dead only three years ago by France’s President. Now it seems resurrected. Key member states like the USA and Britain have rallied around Ukraine, arming its resistance against Russia. Finland and Sweden are on course to join the …
From Walter White to Don Draper, Marty Byrd to Elizabeth Jennings, most of our favourite films and TV shows involve antiheroes. We are compelled by the figures and their morally iniquitous actions. Yet strangely, we also can’t help but like these …
A recession is coming. And there's a danger it will be deeper and last longer than the 2008 crisis. But was this inevitable, or the making of central banks? David Blanchflower argues that a certain group-think is driving central banks to overreact to …
Many of us recognize the serious ethical problems confronting us, and want to change the world towards the better. So why do so few of us go on to do so, even when we are convinced that we should? At least since Plato philosophers have argued over the …
On day 3 of HowTheLightGetsIn at Hay, an extraordinary panel of theoretical physicists debated the reality of the multiverse. Nobel prize-winner Roger Penrose, string theory pioneer Michio Kaku, and quantum gravity researcher Sabine Hossenfelder, argued …
On the second day of HowTheLightGetsIn festival at Hay, one of the panel debates turned to the question of whether lying is necessary, and even justified, for the smooth running of society. Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, philosopher of swearing Rebecca …
On a fine summer day In Hay, at the packed main stage of HowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s biggest philosophy festival, Yuval Noah Harari and Slavoj Žižek appeared together on a panel for the first time. Nature was on the agenda. Is it an existential threat …
The idea that the universe started with a Big Bang is a key tenet of the standard model of cosmology. But that model is a lot less scientific than it’s taken to be. To begin with, we can never have direct evidence of the Big Bang itself, and so if we are …
Progress in the foundations of physics has been slow since the 1970s. The Standard Model of particle physics is both very successful, but also displays a fundamental weakness: it can’t make sense of gravity. Physicists have pursued a number of pet projects …
Good and evil are still the moral categories through which we judge people’s actions. But these seemingly universal and inescapable moral concepts are anything but. They are the product of a European history and power structure that construed the perceived …
We think of love as something mysterious, sublime, even divine, something that can only grow and be sustained organically. But love is just a human emotion with a biochemical basis that can be altered and manipulated. So what if we could ‘hack’ love and …
The topic of free will continues to be a hotbed for discussion and disagreement. The most pressing questions remain: What is free will? And how does it affect the notion of moral responsibility? Here, Derk Pereboom and Dana Nelkin tussle over this issue, …
The western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to help the latter by punishing the former. That strategy isn’t working. Punishing Russia economically is suring up Putin’s position domestically, NATO’s expansion is strengthening the China …
