InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
Welcome to the first Emerging Scholars Network Sci-Fi Film Festival! I’ll be having a conversation here on the blog on various classic and current science fiction movies. Feel free to watch alonggh and join the conversation. This week’s film isRead more…
The periodic table turned 150 earlier this year, or at least March 1 was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Dmitri Mendeleev’s version.Read more…
[The Big Nine] reads like a blend of science fact and fiction as [author Amy] Webb tells us where we’ve been and imagines where we might go.Read more…
Listening to the recent debate between human debating champion Harish Natarajan and IBM’s Watson-derived Project Debater, I was amused to hear the AI conclude her remarks with a Benjamin Disraeli quote.Read more…
Making decisions is challenging and risky. Why not let someone more intelligent with more information have that responsibility, even if that ‘someone’ is implemented in software.Read more…
J. Nathan Matias and colleagues took up the possibility of using more sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) to predict mental health outcomes for individuals.Read more…
I commend the whole series [on AI and Christianity] to you; the articles are brief introductions to a variety of topics in artificial intelligence and how they intersect with traditional Christian thinking and concerns, along with resources for more details.Read more…
Indeed, it is not hard to imagine a day when computers are deemed to possess comparable intelligence to humans because we have convinced ourselves that our own intellects are entirely computational.Read more…
One of the benefits of teaching a computer how to do a task like composing music is that it forces us to really understand both how we ourselves accomplish that task and how we know when we’ve succeeded.Read more…
A little randomness turned out to be a boon to the groupRead more…
I’ve consulted Dr. Internet myself, so I figured maybe you have too and you’d want to know about the good doctor’s performance.Read more…
What’s more striking to me is how counter-intuitive God’s solution is. No one expected the Messiah to die. No one expected the King of Kings to be coronated at his funeral. What comes naturally to us may not be part of God’s best plan for us.Read more…
[H]ow a message is framed strongly influences how we respond to the message itself. . . . Tomorrowland doesn’t claim that just changing the kind of science fiction we tell will be enough to address the concerns it has. Read more…
Note: This is a spoiler-free comment on Avengers: Age of Ultron. If you have seen any trailers for the film or are at all familiar with the character of Ultron, none of this should be news. Assuming a single weekendRead more…
The tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans has been a boon to science. Adult worms have a consistent number of cells, and we have been able to work out where each one comes from during the developmental process. They also have aRead more…
This post is a patchwork of tattered reflections on a slew of topics ranging from humans behaving like robots to robots behaving like humans, mind-reading technologies, maybe cyborgs and so forth. There is no grand thesis tucked away in aRead more…
Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike. From Tom I received a forward of the First Things online surveyRead more…