Can You Reclaim Your Mind? To feel mentally alive, you have to do more than defeat distraction. Looking back over the columns I've written in 2025, I can see that a lot of them, broadly construed, have been about reclaiming one's mind. I wrote about living in the present, picturing the future, and exploring one's memories; about reading, learning, and making the most of one's spare time; and about whether artificial intelligence will end up expanding our thinking or limiting it . The shared subject was resistance to the forces, malevolent or inertial, that can render us mentally exhausted and scattered.

Partway through 2023, I caught up with a respected, high-ranking tech writer at another publication. We gossiped and nattered, and, a bit exasperated, empathised with each other: we were run ragged. The last two years have raised the stakes for what tech journalists do from serving a small niche community to covering stories that have an impact on the wider world. It's also down to the characters involved and what's at stake. Tech journalists have lived on fast-forward since Elon Musk first lodged his bid to take over Twitter – now X – in April 2022.

There is too much internet and our attempts to keep up with the breakneck pace of, well, everything these days -- it is breaking our brains. Parsing through the deluge of inundating information hoisted up by algorithmic systems built to maximize engagement has trained us as slavering Pavlovian dogs to rely on snap judgements and gut feelings in our decision making and opinion formation rather than deliberation and introspection. Which is fine when you're deciding between Italian and Indian for dinner or are waffling on a new paint color for the hallway, but not when we're out here basing existential life choices on friggin' vibes. In his latest book, I, HUMAN: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, professor of business psychology and Chief Innovation Officer at ManpowerGroup, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic explores the myriad ways that AI systems now govern our daily lives and interactions. From finding love to finding gainful employment to finding out the score of yesterday's game, AI has streamlined the information gathering process.

On the day IBM announced she'd be stepping down, exiting CEO Ginni Rometty called Arvind Krishna "the right CEO for the next era" at the company. "He is a brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain," she said. Indeed, Krishna has spent his entire professional career at IBM. The electrical engineering doctorate, who has more than a dozen co-author credits on technology patents, started at the company's Watson Research labs in 1990. He stayed there for nearly two decades and later served as head of IBM's cloud and cognitive software division.

In the digital world, data has taken the role of our hands. How can we preserve the language of our physicality, or rather, how can we reclaim the use of our hands in the digital age? We have already accepted that everything is united under the same code, that we live in a common environment, that we share the same language. Physicality is becoming more and more immaterial. How can we reclaim the use of our hands in the digital age?

In the digital world, data has taken the role of our hands. How can we preserve the language of our physicality, or rather, how can we reclaim the use of our hands in the digital age? We have already accepted that everything is united under the same code, that we live in a common environment, that we share the same language. Physicality is becoming more and more immaterial. How can we reclaim the use of our hands in the digital age?

Updated July 19, 2017, to reflect changes based on Windows 10's Creators Update. There's no doubt about it: Windows 10 is studded with data-tracking tidbits and hooks into all sorts of Microsoft's online services. Handing over all that data has some tangible benefits, like Windows 10's OneDrive integration and the Bing-powered brains behind the Cortana digital assistant, but not everyone is thrilled with the idea of an operating system that's constantly looking over their digital shoulder. I'm here to show you how to get your PC and its data out of the cloud and back on silicona firma. This guide will show you how to disable Windows 10's integration, as well as provide tips on what those features actually do.

I was eager to learn about the latest developments in the Semantic Web through the lens of a "new kind of semantics" as Abraham Bernstein et al. explored in their Viewpoint "A New Look at the Semantic Web" (Sept. If I understand it correctly, semantics is a mapping function that leads from manifest expressions to elements in a given arbitrary domain. Based on set theory, logicians have developed a framework to set up such mapping for formal languages like mathematics, provided one can fix an interpretation function. On the other hand, 20th-century logicians (notably Alfred Tarski) warned of the limits of the framework when applied to human languages. Now, to the extent it embraces a set-theoretic semantics (as in the W3C's Ontology Web Language), the Semantic Web seems to be facing exactly such limitations or experiencing, dealing with, and suffering them.