Disasters like Grenfell offend our sense of control over the world, and challenge the unconscious faith we have in a ‘system’ that cares about us

Don’t be fooled by apparently good numbers. Despite Labour’s recent gains, regional trends in recent polling suggest big names like Tom Watson and Clive Lewis, along with Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, could be under threat

Conventional wisdom suggests the Tories could bleed Remain votes to the Lib Dems. Our detailed data analysis suggests this idea could be very wrong indeed

Every few years, someone suggests forming a progressive coalition to beat the Conservatives. Could a Lib/Lab/Green alliance really beat Theresa May?

Everyone’s theories are wrong: through cunning and selective use of statistics, I can prove that my pet whinge is the reason for Trump’s election win

Martin Robbins: Automated fact-checking is hard enough, but Trump’s ‘chaos by design’ threatens to render it obsolete. Can Artificial Intelligence keep our grip on reality?

Martin Robbins: The park engineers in HBO’s Westworld should probably be fired for some of the bad choices they made

Martin Robbins: It has been suggested that Labour should focus on the Green vote in marginal constituencies. What would happen if they succeeded?

Recommender systems influence our cultural, social and political lives, but are they agents of diversity or conservative guardians?

Martin Robbins: To find out whether the ‘wisdom of crowds’ is real, I asked people on Twitter to guess the weight of my scotch. With Britons voting in a referendum to leave the EU, their responses speak volumes about the ability of populations to find the right answers

Martin Robbins. As autonomous vehicles rack up more and more miles on our roads, the odds of a fatal accident are shortening by the day. How will we react?

Is a picture made by an artificial intelligence ‘art’ if there’s no emotion involved? And what happens if you train a neural net to make music using only the Friends theme tune?

Training a computer to play Go is an impressive achievement, but AlphaGo may be a long way from being a useful product.

A killer machine-learning algorithm guiding the U.S. drone program has killed thousands of innocent people according to some reports. What’s the truth?

From droids in a galaxy far, far away to the computers in our back pockets, we make huge assumptions about the identities of our machine companions

Even with its flaws, last year’s Ex Machina perfectly captured the curious relationship between artificial intelligence, God and ego. A tiny change in its closing moments would have given it an intriguing new dimension.