The annual award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and 24/7 lectures. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Does alcohol enhance one's foreign language fluency? Do West African lizards have a preferred pizza topping? And can painting cows with zebra stripes help repel biting flies? These and other unusual research questions were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2025 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes.

If you want to impress your children with your mental prowess, you might want to give escape rooms a miss and pull out the scrabble board instead. Twentysomethings may have the sharpest minds -- but over-70s have a superior way with words, the Great British Intelligence Test has revealed. The BBC's online test -- developed in tandem with neuroscientists from Imperial College London -- has been taken by more than 250,000 people from across the UK. Researchers found that our ability to solve problems appears to peak in our twenties -- and then declines steadily as we get older. As a result, the experts say that forty-year-old adults have the same problem solving capacities as their twelve-year-old children.

"AI(I) is well until it gets out of control and causes havoc and disruption in our lives." This quote is from Andrew Ng, a Chinese American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is said to be one of the most influential minds in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. According to him the use of Artificial Intelligence will be all pervasive in the future, as is the use of electricity today. His statement puts all of us in a dilemma, that is we need to understand "What is AI?", because like "electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, it is hard to think of an industry that AI will not transform in the next several years" (Andrew Ng).

We should be afraid of collective stupidity. What I am referring to is millions of people displaying a lack of intelligence, particularly in areas where humans have made intelligence breakthroughs in the past. Think of common school subjects like reading, writing and arithmetic. We are collectively more intelligent in these areas today than centuries ago, but many of us are slipping back in time despite being surrounded by modern technology. Artificial intelligence is replacing or competing with human intelligence.

The original vision of AI some 60 years ago was to build machines that can think, learn, and reason like humans. Initial optimism of achieving this in just a few years was grossly misplaced, and indeed continued to haunt AI for decades. As researchers failed to get anywhere near the flexibility and general cognitive ability of humans they turned their focus to solving very specific, narrow problems of'intelligence' -- And to this day'AI' is practiced almost entirely this way. A recent breakthrough in artificial intelligence called deep learning (DL) has been hailed as a major breakthrough-- it changes the development dynamic from having to'program' computers to'teaching' them. This characterizing has some merit, but glosses over the significant human expertise and'tweaking' required to make these systems work.

Despite the rule "never start with a disclaimer", let me do exactly this: there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence, nor an always-applicable test for it. However, in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) we are confronted with the task to define the level of performance of an AI. Due to the fact that AI bases on computers, we could use the typical parameters, such as availability, response time, throughput, floating point operations per second, instructions per second, etc. Although such parameters are important for an AI computer too, they do not represent the adequate framework to conclude on an AI's intelligence. The reason for this is that a slow computer with smart algorithms seems to be "more intelligent" than a fast computer with circuitous ones. Thus, the measurement of intelligence is separate to the measurement of technical performance of an AI.

Predictions for 2018 are here! The "artificial" in artificial intelligence might freak some people out, but thinking about it in a different way could assuage their fears. Airbnb plans to make AR and VR a part of the booking process so you can book with confidence. And in drone news: Add restoring a really old cathedral in Germany to the list of things UAVs can do. Consider this: 450,000 tweets are posted every minute.

Like many people, I feel apprehension whenever I hear or read the phrase "artificial intelligence." The expression often evokes images of the Terminator coming to exterminate people -- or take their jobs. However, firsthand experience has taught me there's nothing artificial about intelligence. In practice, AI is an extension of human intelligence that's guided by people. Far from spelling your doom, AI is more likely to save your life.

Discussions today about the risks of AI often bark up the wrong tree and tend to be misleading. This matters because AI is being invoked left and right. Basic misunderstandings of what AI is and isn't are also creating unnecessary fear, and those fears in turn stifle adoption. Confoundingly, by running away from AI or making false assumptions about its evolution, we potentially make our worst case scenario more likely, not less. We should also be as focused on understanding human intelligence as we are on AI. We need to first get straight on the many different meanings of AI.

Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as the only self-conscious species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular. Our own intelligence is a society of intelligences, and this suite occupies only a small corner of the many types of intelligences and consciousnesses that are possible in the universe. We like to call our human intelligence "general purpose," because compared with other kinds of minds we have met, it can solve more types of problems, but as we build more and more synthetic minds we'll come to realize that human thinking is not general at all. It is only one species of thinking. The kind of thinking done by the emerging AIs today is already somewhat unlike human thinking.