Around 2018, the first group of children was born that have learned to read and write in a world where ChatGPT was already present. For them, a chatbot is probably something quite normal. A few of them will be amazed: “how is this possible?”: these are the ones that will study computer science or AI.…

How I need car repairs, falling apples and paracetamol to make the AI black box explainable. People want to understand the world: that gives confidence and predictability. What we now call the “natural sciences” stands in a long tradition. In old stories you read about the spirit of the river, which has become angry and…

(This blog is a co-production with Daan Di Scala, colleague at TNO and PhD Candidate at Utrecht University.) An old application of AI that every citizen unknowingly used in the early 90s, was the automated reading of handwritten addresses on letters. This made the sorting process of the postal services considerably more efficient. The requirement…

“The question whether computers can think is not more interesting than the question whether submarines can swim.” Dixit the famous computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra. However, others apparently think this is interesting: there is quite some attention to the question what AI actually does. Can you call that “thinking”? Or at least say that AI “understands”…

More and more human tasks are being taken over by technology – what does that say about us? The British anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that we could only become truly ‘human’ once we were able to consume enough calories to fuel those bizarrely large brains of ours. With raw food, that’s simply not possible, he…

How do we learn language? Children do this without effort. Adults usually need grammar and dictionaries to learn a language. How can computers work with language? The classical Natural Language Processing (pre ChatGPT) works like adults learn a language. The computer is given a list of nouns, verbs, grammar rules, word order and some other…