This past Saturday was the anniversary of a highly significant moment in computing - 60 years since the first programmable, digital computer executed its first instructions.
The Baby, as it was known, was the work of researchers at the University of Manchester in England, one of the pioneering groups in computer history (Alan Turing joined the [...]

[Read more →]

A special edition of IEEE’s Spectrum magazine is dedicated to the the Singularity, asking questions about the future of sentient machines.
Among them is this piece by a pair of researchers who believe that many of the things we tend to believe are signs of consciousness are, in fact, unrelated.
Remarkably, consciousness does not seem to require [...]

[Read more →]