Two immersive thought experiments lead us right into a flurry of questions surrounding the human mind. You decide where you stand.

Constructing humanlike artificial intelligence often starts with deconstructing humans. Take fingerprints: When holding soapy dishes, we intuitively adjust our grip based on our fingerprint structure. It just doesn’t cross our mind, because we chalk it up to reflex – and for the longest time, so did scientists. No one had any equations to unravel how this works because, well, it didn’t matter much. But the rise of robotics has complicated things.

For a robot to do this, we have to figure out precisely what’s going on, and even turn that knowledge into writable code. Now decoding fingerprint grip matters, and researchers are finally trying to find a new law of physics to explain it.  Read More