Deliver us from evil. The line is among the most familiar, in one of the oldest Christian prayers. Most of us are wary about using the E-word, because grown-up people know that few issues, or indeed people, can rightfully be characterised as either wholly good or the other thing, but instead exist somewhere between. Yet it seems hard to consider ...

It has been an exasperating week for computer scientists. They’ve been falling over each other to publicly denounce claims from Google engineer Blake Lemoine, chronicled in a Washington Post report, that his employer’s language-predicting system was sentient and deserved all of the rights associated with consciousness. To be clear, current artificial intelligence systems are decades away from being able to ...

  Has the UK property market moved beyond cycles of boom and bust? London house prices soared in the aftermath of the financial crisis but have since largely flatlined. Now real estate throughout the UK is facing stiff headwinds, and the red flags are popping up. Interest rates are rising and economists expect more increases. Buyer inquiries fell in May ...