Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas

This poem was partly inspired by my first foray into the world of Sámi reindeer herding back in 2013. In this new year of 2022, I’ve been reflecting on some of my experiences doing anthropological fieldwork in Norway and thinking about separation and separate-ness, prime emotional territory given the social distancing of the past two years.
But this isn’t a pandemic poem. Nor is it purely a reindeer poem. In times of great disjuncture, the meaning-making impulses of our species often come to ...

An anthropologist asks what algorithms and astrology have in common in a digital era of predictive technologies.
A man stands in front of a judge, accused of stealing. The judge consults a source that will determine whether to grant bail.
A woman stands in front of a judge, accused of adultery. The judge consults a source that will determine if the claim has merit.
In the first case, the source is a computer; in the second, it’s a chicken.
Both cases, though, are forms of divination: using so...

Artificial intelligence can perform feats that seem like sorcery. AI can drive cars and fly drones. It can compose original music, write poetry that isn’t too awful, and design recipes that do sound awful (blueberry and spinach pizza, anyone?).
AI can do some things better than humans: lip reading, diagnosing diseases such as pneumonia and some cancers, transcribing speech, and playing Jeopardy!, Go, Texas Hold ’em, and a variety of video games. AI software can even learn to make its own AI s...

Previous research in similar populations has tended to focus on ‘intensive childcare activities’, such as holding, feeding or cleaning a child. Collecting this type of data is hard and time-consuming – it involves a researcher following and watching interaction with a particular child during a specified time period, commonly between one and nine hours. This approach produces a wealth of in-depth data, but also severely limits the sample size of the data, which limits the types of questions yo...

When you hear the word “cyborg,” scenes from the 1980s films RoboCop or The Terminator might spring to mind. But the futuristic characters made famous in those films may no longer be mere science fiction. We are at the advent of an era where digital technology and artificial intelligence are moving more deeply into our human biological sphere. Humans are already able to control a robotic arm with their minds. Cyborgs—humans whose skills and abilities exceed those of others because of electric...

For decades, two mummies lay in the British Museum concealing a secret. The ancient Egyptian pair, nicknamed Gebelein Man A and Gebelein Woman, were recently discovered to have the earliest-known figurative art tattooed on their bodies. Before the first Pharaoh unified the region around 3100 B.C., people were permanently marking their bodies with figures such as wild bulls and Barbary sheep. Gebelein Woman even has an intriguing snakelike parade of s-shaped figures tattooed on her upper arm a...

Researchers have built a robot that can transfer its skills to other robots. Could this advance pave the way for a robot form of culture?

Modern-day machines, such as Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, lack intelligence and empathy. Insights from hunter-gatherer communities could pave the way toward more sophisticated gadgets.

What can studies of human relationships tell us about whether or not we should trust artificial intelligence?