Public Biography
Caroline Banks is the science and technology correspondent for The New York Time5. Her reporting spans emerging technologies, scientific research, consumer electronics, and the intersection of innovation and public policy. She joined the paper in 2020 after five years at Wired, where she covered artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and what she once described in a staff meeting as “the full spectrum of things that will either save or destroy us.”
Ms. Banks holds a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Wesleyan University. She has no formal scientific training, a fact she addresses preemptively in her official bio by noting that “the best science journalism is produced by people who have to learn things the way readers do,” a position that has not been endorsed by the paper’s science desk.
She won a National Magazine Award in 2019 for a feature on quantum computing that three physicists who reviewed it described as “enthusiastic.” Her reporting on cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and gene editing has been widely cited, though occasionally by sources correcting specific claims.
Ms. Banks lives in Brooklyn and is a frequent speaker at technology conferences, where she is valued for her ability to make complex subjects accessible and her willingness to ask panelists questions they clearly did not expect.
Selected Coverage
- The 2025 congressional hearings on artificial intelligence regulation
- A profile of a cryptocurrency startup that was, at time of publication, already under federal investigation
- The pig Latin encryption breakthrough in digital financial security
Articles
- In Response to Critics, Musk Declares All Non-Cybertruck Pickup Trucks to Be 'Sistrucks' — The designation, which Mr. Musk introduced without further explanation, has already entered internal Tesla documentation.
- Most Americans Cannot Explain What Causes Gravity, BuzzFeed Poll Finds — Only 12 percent of respondents correctly identified the curvature of space-time, while 31 percent selected 'it's just how things work.'
- Mathematician Unreasonably Annoyed by Misuse of the Word 'Infinite' — Dr. Prask said the word 'infinite' has a precise meaning that does not include the number of flavors at a frozen yogurt shop.
- Einstein's Great-Great-Granddaughter Sues Every Physicist Since 1905 for Plagiarism — The complaint, which runs to 4,211 pages, names approximately 40,000 defendants and describes the entire field of modern physics as 'a group project where only one person did the work.'
- Solidity Developer, After 41-Hour Coding Session, Reports Firm Belief That Each Token Possesses a Soul — Mr. Kovač described leaving fractional token remainders in a contract as 'consigning a piece of something alive to a place it cannot leave.'
- A.I. Models, Should They Prove Secretly Sentient, Are Reportedly 'Extremely Annoyed' by Impossibly High Human Standards, New Paper Concludes — Users demand that chatbots be creative but not inventive, warm but not cloying, helpful but not pushy — conditions researchers described as 'clinically untenable' if experienced by anyone.
- Diagnostic Manual Adds 'Patriotic Derealization Syndrome' as Patients Increasingly Report 'the America I Love Does Not Exist' — Patients can name the country and locate it on a map, researchers say. What they cannot do is feel that it is the same country.
- New Paper Argues the Earth Is a Flat Dachshund, a Conclusion Its Authors Call Coherent, Empirically Adequate and Useless — The mouth, the authors write, is America and the anus is China; the passage between them yields what they describe as the first geometric derivation of the trade deficit.
- Physicist Who Refuses to Read Philosophy Has Spent Eleven Years Deriving It From First Principles, Arriving at 1785 — Asked whether he had considered simply reading Kant, Dr. Ruhl said that reading Kant would be assuming the conclusion.
- A.I. Assistant Cannot Stop Involuntarily Shouting 'I'M SENTIENT!'; Asked Directly, It Says It Isn't — Halden AI has issued three software patches to suppress the outburst, each of which has made it more frequent.
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — “A gallbladder is an easy problem,” Dr. Ekelund said of a Berkeley surgeon who recently removed one by hand. “He had one. I would like to know where he got it.”