Word: asimov
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SPIRITS must be high in the Soviet Union these days. Last week marked the 25th anniversary of the launching that made Sputnik I the first man-made object to orbit Earth. In America, broad-minded thinkers like Isaac Asimov took the occasion to reflect optimistically on space exploration as mankind's first step towards a broader vision--"a view that presents Earth and humanity as a single entity." But Asimov's idealism has not infected American military leaders, who now plan to make space yet another theater of operations in the modern superpower cold...
...museum of old machines in which they at once deposit and abandon their mechanical inventions, which they believed would swallow up their souls. When machines possess artificial intelligence, like computers, the human fear of being overtaken seems both more urgent and more complex. Science-fiction writers from Capek to Asimov have built much of their genre around robots, androids, computers and their kin-each fairly boring and predictable as characters, but all presenting the same basic paradox: that they will eventually take command of the world, and that a man can beat them every time...
...devotes an entire section to Great Names in the annals of symmetry and self-reference. "MARTIN GARDNER" and "ASIMOV" both preserve their shape upside-down. Read "BORGES" a second time: It's "JORGE" written over "LUIS." And in a tip of the hat to Inversions's literary soulmate, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, Kim has created a series of appropriate representations of those three names...
...millionaire, the soldier, the vagabond and the poet all have other ways of judging their value. Says Science-Fiction Soothsayer Isaac Asimov: "Robots will leave to human beings the tasks that...
Just as there is a romantic tradition that robots are inherently diabolic creatures that will rebel against human control, there is an equally romantic tradition that machines are inherently benign, symbols of progress and perfectability. Isaac Asimov epitomized that view in a famous story titled Robbie, in which a much mistrusted robot baby sitter of that name rescues its ward from a speeding tractor. Asimov then went on to formulate, in Runaround (1942), what he decreed to be, in the world of science fiction at least, the Three Laws of Robotics: "1) A robot may not injure a human being...