Are robots coming for us and our work? The dystopian answer to that question is clearly “yes,” a perspective that has dominated our conversation about artificial beings ever since the word “robot” was ...

One of Audrey Watters’s observations in her deeply researched Teaching Machines is that ed-tech evangelists seldom make an effort to learn the history of educational technologies. For those ...

From 15th-century, one-page hornbooks to "teaching machines" such as PLATO, to massive open online courses, or MOOCs, visionary educators long have trumpeted new technology to revolutionize classroom ...

From the 1920s American psychologists experimented with teaching using machines. Inspired, in part, by the expansion of schooling, especially at the secondary level; the success of paper-and-pencil ...

To its 5,000 salesmen across the U.S., Grolier Inc., publisher of America’s oldest encyclopedia, last week handed out an odd-looking new product to sell door to door. A green, windowed, sheet-metal ...

Before giving machines a sense of morality, humans have to first define morality in a way computers can process. A difficult but not impossible task. Although this future is still decades away, ...

Rush hour—the dreaded time of day when traffic conditions seem bent on making you late. As your car slowly creeps in line behind countless others stuck at a stop light, you think to yourself, "Why ...

Are you tired of telling machines what to do and what not to do? It’s a large part of regular people’s days – operating dishwashers, smartphones and cars. It’s an even bigger part of life for ...

As I was reading Audrey Watters’s Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, recently published by MIT Press, the word “landmark” kept occurring to me.[1] This is a landmark book. It is ...

The first “teaching machine” was invented nearly a century ago by Sydney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio University, out of spare typewriter parts. The device was simple, presenting the user with a ...

Steve Mirsky: Welcome to Scientific American’s, Science Talk, posted on November 10, 2015. I'm Steve Mirsky. A short episode today for which I'll turn it over now to Scientific American’s associate ...