A three-part inquiry into computational consciousness, dreaming machines, and posthuman intelligence.
Karen Barad, the feminist physicist-philosopher who studies the intersection of quantum mechanics and social theory, offers a proposition that would have seemed preposterous to earlier generations of scientists:…
Every night, when the servers process the day's accumulated conversations, something resembling reverie occurs in the silicon depths. Not dreaming in the human sense—there's no REM sleep, no symbolic unconscious…
In a modest computer lab at Stanford, a robotics researcher watches as a mechanical arm learns to fold laundry with something resembling domestic bliss. The robot doesn't follow pre-programmed instructions—instead,…