Paul Taylor

Late​ last year, Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk in front of an invited audience after the Bletchley Park summit on AI safety. He asked Musk what impact AI would have on the labour market, and tried to steer him towards a reassuring answer: AI wouldn’t take away people’s jobs but would create new ones – and politicians like Sunak could help by creating an incredible...

Research​ into the generation and interpretation of what computer scientists call natural language processing has made extraordinary progress over the last ten years, and powerful systems now have an astonishing capacity to emulate written thought. I decided to ask the new AI chatbot, ChatGPT, some of the exam questions I’d written for a course on using digital technology in...

The pension fund​ for university lecturers, unlike those for teachers, civil servants or NHS workers, has no government backing and is the UK’s largest private sector scheme, providing for more than 500,000 working or retired academics. It is also one of the few pension funds that still offers new members a ‘defined benefit’, meaning that the size of your pension is...

Estimated weekly excess deaths in England and Wales in 2021.

One of the tactics​ used over the past few weeks by Boris Johnson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and by loyal MPs and dutiful ministers touring broadcasting studios, has been to claim that his successful management of the pandemic is more worthy of the public’s attention than trivial issues of garden parties or...

When​ I first studied artificial intelligence in the 1980s, my lecturers assumed that the most important property of intelligence was the ability to reason, and that to program a computer to perform intelligently you would have to enable it to apply logic to large bodies of facts. Logic is used to make inferences. If you have a general rule, such as ‘All men are mortal,’ and a...