This issue is abridged (busy weekend) but it has some great stuff in it on chat bots, user interface design, space doctors, and personal genome modification.
"In the past, the bots I’ve made have primarily been a tool for exploring systems and culture. I feed the bot data or text and then design constraints around how it can recombine or augment that material to create insight, humor or strange robot poetry."
"Generally though, when we say 'bot,' we usually mean a generally harmless agent that acts on the behalf its creator in some fashion but has limited ambition and basic operations. But, is that all there is?"
"In other words, Victor practices what he preaches: he doesn’t use computers to build better mousetraps, but to explore and communicate ideas in a way that uniquely exploits the properties and possibilities of a programmable, dynamic, interactive medium."
Whatever, scientists. Geez, what do they know about the genome?
The logical conclusion of April Zero.