SmarterArticles

“What does it mean if someone looks at you a lot but doesn't say anything?” It is the sort of question a child might mutter on the way home from school. At Uppsala University in…

The error codes were lying, and the machine was very sure of itself. In the 1980s, a Xerox field service technician was called out to a photocopier. It produced, in the words of…

For as long as automation has had a sales pitch, the pitch has been the same. The machines will take the drudgery. They will fill in the forms, file the reports, chase the…

On a bright afternoon at a primary school in Hertfordshire, a headteacher did something quietly radical. She cancelled the afternoon's lessons, opened the back doors, and told her…

The email that arrived at an antiquarian bookshop in Haarlem in the summer of 2026 listed 3,001 ISBNs. The bookseller, Pieter de Vries, assumed it was fraud. “Very unusual,” he…

The software on the slide looked like something a sales team would buy. There was a dashboard. There were contact targets for the day. There was a pipeline that tracked each…

The black box sits beside the entrance to Woodland Glen IV, a residence hall on the University of Kentucky's campus in Lexington. Its job is simple to describe. You walk towards…

Somewhere behind a police call in Heber City, Utah, a television was playing Disney's The Princess and the Frog. The officer's body-worn camera picked it up, because body-worn…

Looking for a flat used to mean filters. You set a price ceiling, ticked a box for parking, drew a rough circle on a map and scrolled. Now, increasingly, you talk. On 6 October…

A climber is stranded near a summit. A storm is building. Somebody has to decide whether to send a rescue team up the mountain, and then justify that decision to the authority…