While the billion-dollar question is about when quantum computing will become commercially viable, among the problems being tackled at the moment is how to make the ...

People often blame social media algorithms that prioritize extreme content for increasing political polarization, but this effect has been difficult to prove. Only the platform owners have access to ...

Personalized algorithms may quietly sabotage how people learn, nudging them into narrow tunnels of information even when they start with zero prior knowledge. In the study, participants using ...

Media personalities and online influencers who sow social division for a living, blame the rise of assassination culture on Antifa and MAGA. Meanwhile, tech CEOs gin up fears of an AI apocalypse. But ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price.

As the world races to build artificial superintelligence, one maverick bioengineer is testing how much unprogrammed intelligence may already be lurking in our simplest algorithms to determine whether ...

Imagine a town with two widget merchants. Customers prefer cheaper widgets, so the merchants must compete to set the lowest price. Unhappy with their meager profits, they meet one night in a ...

As social media platforms increasingly rely on algorithms to moderate content, online communities are changing how they speak to evade their censors. Sensitive or suggestive topics such as suicide and ...

When it comes to teaching math, a debate has persisted for decades: How, and to what degree, should algorithms be a focus of learning math? The step-by-step procedures are among the most debated ...

Have we tried everything to tackle the climate crisis? At least one simple idea has hardly been explored: prioritizing climate content on social media. The climate crisis is seriously aggravated by a ...

Mr. Ferguson is a documentary filmmaker. As you scroll through the internet, you’ve probably noticed the same problem Kirby Ferguson has: “Everything looks the same, sounds the same, is the same.” In ...

It’s a situation many of us know all know too well: You find yourself endlessly scrolling through social media, only to realize that much more time has passed than you realized, or intended to spend ...