Computers

AI is both liberating and enslaving us

29 June 2024 9:00 am

It is becoming more than a useful tool, fears Neil Lawrence. As it takes over most of our work, we grow less and less efficient at doing what remains

A computer will never write the Brandenburg Concertos

20 April 2019 9:00 am

What is creativity? Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and Oxford professor for the public understanding of science, offers this pert…

The inventions (and Welsh rarebit mix) that will change your life

2 December 2017 9:00 am

At last. And just what you’ve been waiting for. The official Wiki Man guide to the best gadgets and gizmos…

The keys to Chinese

7 October 2017 9:00 am

The history of industry is the story of the reduction of complexity to easily manageable, replicable components or actions. But…

The ZX81

When Britannia ruled the digital waves

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Everyone, we hear these days, must learn to code. Being able to program computers is the only way to be…

‘If ever there was a Renaissance Man, John Dee was it’: from ‘The Order of the Inspirati’, 1659

John Dee thought he could talk to angels using medieval computer technology

16 January 2016 9:00 am

John Dee liked to talk to spirits but he was no loony witch, says Christopher Howse

The real reason GPs are grumpy: the robots are coming for them

17 January 2015 9:00 am

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local…

What techies are actually doing when they fix your computer

3 January 2015 9:00 am

Just before Christmas I achieved something so totally, incredibly amazing that I think it probably ranks among the greatest things…

The agony of dying gadgets

29 November 2014 9:00 am

To survive as a technophobe in the 21st century, you must depend on the kindness of strangers

Steve Jobs’s button phobia has shaped the modern world

22 November 2014 9:00 am

An irrational fear that has reshaped the technological world

The Anonymous ghost in the machine

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable…