In February 2025 Clone Robotics posted forty seconds of footage that got some attention. A pale, muscled, faceless body spookily hung from a rig in a workshop. It was twitching, with movements and bodyshapes that were humanlike - powered by artificial muscles under a translucent skin. The reactions arrived. "Nightmare
This summer, as Rod Stewart's "One Last Time" tour wound through American amphitheatres, something unprecedented happened during his nightly dedication of "Forever Young" to his late friend Ozzy Osbourne. What began as a touching tribute evolved into something far more controversial, and revealing about
How AI transparency requirements are reshaping human-machine interaction In April 2025, Reddit erupted in controversy when researchers from the University of Zurich were discovered to have deployed AI bots that posed as real people in the popular r/changemyview forum. The bots had generated over 1,000 comments, taking
Robotics companies are having to make choices about their robots’ features. Are they humanlike? Are they abstract? Does it even have a face? Every design choice tells a story about its intended relationship with humans. From the deliberately non-facial screen displays of industrial robots to the childlike proportions of
In a groundbreaking legal moment, the voice of a murdered man speaks to his killer through artificial intelligence, raising profound questions about authenticity, ethics, and the future of justice systems. In an Arizona courtroom this May, something unprecedented happened: Christopher Pelkey, a man killed in a 2021 road rage incident,
Agatha Christie, Digital Doubles, and the Future of Knowledge The BBC’s recent release of an Agatha Christie writing course - delivered by a digitally recreated version of the late author - marks a new frontier in digital education. Hosted on the BBC Maestro platform and developed in collaboration with the Christie
In the mid 2010s a new type of digital preservation emerged through projects in the US, UK and Europe. Fuelled by the race against time to preserve the firsthand accounts of Holocaust survivors (and well before the advent of ChatGPT and the public popularisation of AI) the projects combined voice
In 1970, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote a brief essay that would become one of the most cited concepts in robotics and AI. He described a curious psychological phenomenon: as robots become more human-like, our comfort with them increases - until suddenly, it doesn't. At a certain point