In a small firm, a single customer enquiry can pass through the person who answers the phone, the person who knows how long a job will take and the owner…
A familiar voice can settle a question before we have consciously decided what evidence we need. In a routine conversation, that shortcut lets us get on with the work of…
A product can be present in a shop’s inventory system and unavailable to the person standing in front of its shelf. A promotional display can be planned at headquarters and…
A pupil who can obtain a fluent answer in seconds still faces an older and harder task: deciding whether the answer deserves to be believed. Artificial intelligence brings that distinction…
Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence concerns the next source of training data. A different question is what a learning system does with experience it has already received. Does…
An AI agent completing a short demonstration can appear remarkably self-contained. It receives a request, chooses a tool and returns a useful result. A production process is less tidy. The…
An environmental decision often begins with an uneven view of the place it concerns. One habitat may have years of surveys, another a few photographs, and a third extensive local…