For decades, many scientists have relied on the "hard steps" model to suggest that intelligent life is rare — the improbable result of a series of unlikely evolutionary leaps. But new research by ...

The evolution of humans on Earth may not be entirely exceptional. That is because intelligent life is likely to form if certain planetary conditions are met, a new study suggests. This idea displaces ...

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...

Some of the greatest evolutionary biologists of the 20th century famously dismissed the prospect of humanlike intelligence beyond Earth. Elen11 Elen11/Getty Editor’s note: The Focus on Research column ...

Ten years ago, I would have turned my nose up at the idea that we already understood how to get machines to think. In the 2010s, my team at Google Research was working on a wide variety of ...