You're awake, you're sentient, you might even be upright. You're not comatose or dead, and it's reasonable to assume that if you were on some kind of powerful mind-altering drug then you wouldn't be reading this. The point is, you're here, and you're alive, so therefore you're conscious. OK then, since you're conscious and I'm conscious and everyone else is conscious, go ahead. Does it belong to the mind or the body, or does it exist outside both? Is consciousness part of our souls, or does it live in the things we create – our art, our music, our cities and wars? Could it be mechanical or electronic, and, if so, what makes it operate? Most pressingly of all, is it possible we have now made for ourselves a new kind of consciousness, one which exists independently? If so, then what the hell have we got ourselves into? The search for a definition of consciousness must lay claim to be the world's longest-running detective story. We've had our best minds on it ever since we developed brains big enough to ask questions and, still, we seem to be stumped. Plato and Aristotle couldn't fix it; Kant, Hume and Locke tried different angles; Schroedinger, Heisenberg and Einstein remained in awe before it. None of them came up with the final formula, the definitive, nailed-it for ever, silences-all-critics answer. Lately though, the hunt seems to have changed gear. Despite big differences about how best to conduct the search and where to look, several of the most persistent sleuths have found themselves disconcertingly close to agreement. No-one is yet at the stage when they are ready to call a press conference and announce to the world they have finally apprehended the suspect, but they have at least begun to converge on these two leads: the Omega Point and the Singularity. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is an improbable prophet, partly because he's dead, and partly because he's still associated with a famous palaeontological fraud.

Five actors gathered in a room on Lafayette Street, in downtown Manhattan, to start rehearsing a new work for the Public Theatre, "Joan of Arc: Into the Fire." Written by David Byrne, formerly of the Talking Heads, the show recast the enduring, improbable story of Joan--a teen-age girl in medieval France who experienced divine visions, led an army to defeat an occupying power, and was burned at the stake for heresy--as a rock musical that spoke to the current political moment. It was early January, and, that morning, U.S. intelligence officials had arrived at Trump Tower to brief the President-elect, Donald Trump, on the findings of an investigation into the recent election, in which they had concluded that President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, had acted to insure the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Inauguration Day was looming, and the rehearsal room had a troubled mood that reflected more than the ordinary anxieties of creating a show. The actors arranged four tables into a rectangle and sat down with Alex Timbers, the director of "Joan of Arc." Timbers, who is thirty-eight, is tall and fine-featured. He wore a denim shirt and black jeans that hung off his lanky, slightly hunched frame. His hair is dark and thick, and he frequently runs a hand through it, like a Romantic poet on deadline. Despite the air of disquiet, Timbers, who talks like a cool high-school teacher--lots of vocal fry, the repeated use of "awesome"--addressed the cast with rousing enthusiasm. He explained that, though the show had been in development for two years, it remained a work in progress. "I don't think anything is sacred--we are going to be building this together," Timbers said to the actors, all of whom were men except for Jo Lampert, a thirty-one-year-old newcomer, who was to play Joan. Timbers presented a scale model of the stage design, which had been conceived by Chris Barreca. When built, the set would be black and austere, and filled with enormous L.E.D. screens. A staircase extended from wing to wing, and at center stage there was a vertiginous platform. The set was on a turntable, and as it revolved it represented everything from a cathedral to a prison tower.

Of all the prejudices of pundits, presentism is the strongest. It is the assumption that what is happening now is going to keep on happening, without anything happening to stop it. If the West has broken down the Berlin Wall and McDonald's opens in St. Petersburg, then history is over and Thomas Friedman is content. If, by a margin so small that in a voice vote you would have no idea who won, Brexit happens; or if, by a trick of an antique electoral system designed to give country people more power than city people, a Donald Trump is elected, then pluralist constitutional democracy is finished. The liberal millennium was upon us as the year 2000 dawned; fifteen years later, the autocratic apocalypse is at hand. You would think that people who think for a living would pause and reflect that whatever is happening usually does stop happening, and something else happens in its place; a baby who is crying now will stop crying sooner or later. Exhaustion, or a change of mood, or a passing sound, or a bright light, something, always happens next. But for the parents the wait can feel the same as forever, and for many pundits, too, now is the only time worth knowing, for now is when the baby is crying and now is when they're selling your books.

Will Roper plays video games like the future of the country depends on it, because, well, it kind of does. As director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, Roper spends his days predicting how war will work in the not-so-distant future, and developing the technological capabilities that will enable the American military to lead the way. Because Silicon Valley's companies evolve so much faster than the bureaucracies of Washington can, Roper and the SCO draw inspiration from the private sector picking apart the genius of Pokémon Go. "I think they've solved one of the toughest challenges for warfare," Roper said of the app in a conversation with WIRED's Nick Thompson at South by Southwest Monday. "How do you take amazingly complex information and make it so integrated with the person interacting with it?" Roper envisions a day when soldiers will be able to drop a digital marker on the battlefield that future deployments and faraway units could also see, similar to how Pokémon Go enables millions of strangers to spot the same Jigglypuff in the middle of Times Square.

Smartphone cases don't tend to be the most exciting of accessories, but a company called Esti inc. The firm is aiming to raise $95,000 on Kickstarter for the Eye, an iPhone case that's essentially a full-blown Android handset. The case promises to strap a 5-inch AMOLED screen to the back of a user's iPhone. "The current technology of the iPhone LCD display is old," reads the Kickstarter description. "In comparison, Eye's screen is using the best display technology on the market today called AMOLED. "With this technology, all colors, including real black, are much more vibrant on the screen.

If you knew a catastrophic event were set to wipe out society as we know it, how would you act in the days leading up to the'end of the world'? It's a question that many have considered as apocalyptic narratives cling to popularity – and, researchers say players' behaviour in a video game could tell us what to expect. A new study analyzed people's actions in an'end times' scenario, using a closed beta test of the game ArcheAge as a proxy. While some turned to murder and other anti-social behaviours, the study found most people become more social in the face of impending disaster, creating new relationships even as they abandoned plans for the future. If you knew a catastrophic event were set to wipe out society as we know it, how would you act in the days leading up to the'end of the world'?

Among the startups funded in part by Intel Capital, the chipmaker's venture capital arm, are: Peloton Technology, a Silicon Valley startup in Mountain View, California, focused on automating heavy-duty trucks. Not all U.S. presidents are missed once they leave the White House. In Brexit's wake, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is calling for another vote. Bostic will be the first African-American and first openly gay man to head a regional Fed bank. The president reportedly wants to receive the Chinese premier at his Florida estate in April.

IBM recently announced that it reached a new industry record in conversational speech recognition, which could have big implications for the future of artificial intelligence (AI). The IBM team's system achieved a 5.5% word error rate--down from 6.9% last year. The benchmark was measured on a difficult speech recognition task, with the machine deciphering recorded conversations between humans discussing day-to-day topics such as buying a car. This recording is known as SWITCHBOARD, and has been used for more than two decades to test speech recognition systems, according to a blog post by George Saon, a principal research scientist at IBM. IBM used deep learning technologies to reach the 5.5% record.

Students of artificial intelligence are getting recruited like star athletes, but could a rush to get new technology on the field cause ethical lapses? You walk into a gigantic auditorium. Folding chairs are lined up in evenly spaced rows, with a cold black awning behind the stage and uniform white or yellow lights pouring down on the sea of seats below. A couple of huge screens are to either side of the stage with a third in the center in the middle of the room for those who can't see the presentation. What's about to happen is one of the most important annual gatherings in tech.

Could smartphones and other screens be decreasing the human attention span? Author Adam Alter thinks so. "Ten years ago, before the iPad and iPhone were mainstream, the average person had an attention span of about 12 seconds," Alter tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. Now, he says, "research suggests that there's been a drop from 12 to eight seconds ... shorter than the attention of the average goldfish, which is nine seconds." Alter links our diminished attention spans to the "mainstream adoption of screens."