Philosophy
Old questions that refuse to go away.
“Can machines think?”: Turing’s 1950 question
Alan Turing opened a 1950 paper with that question, then replaced it with a test, and answered Ada Lovelace by name.
Chesterton’s fence: ask why it’s there before you tear it down
A 1929 essay gave us one of the most useful rules for anyone who wants to change something: understand it first.
The dream of thinking machines is thousands of years old
Long before computers, people imagined bronze giants, reasoning wheels and a language in which arguments could be settled by calculation.
The Pale Blue Dot
In 1990, from about 6 billion kilometres away, Voyager 1 turned around and photographed Earth. We take up less than a pixel.
The Ship of Theseus
If you replace every plank of a ship one by one, is it still the same ship? And if someone builds a second ship from the old planks, which one is the original?
The spandrel: a by-product that looks like a purpose
Not every feature of a living thing was ‘designed’ for a job. Two biologists borrowed a word from cathedral builders to make the point, and then architects argued about whether they had the cathedral right.
The veil of ignorance
Design a society without knowing which person in it you will be, and watch what changes.