Word: fictions
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...Here we supposedly have the last stand of the last Wild West, the place and ethos that were buried in America a century ago: a celluloid fiction, reinvented with kangaroos. Australia, largest of islands or smallest of continents, does something to compensate for that loss, or so you think. In the bush, men are men and women must be grateful. And don't Australians all feel the bush at their back, amplifying their memories, shaping their values...
...suppose that the only hope for labor unions in this news - the beginning of the realization of science fiction nightmares hypothesized for years - is that eventually drone robots, in a future robot civilization, will teach themselves to sing, "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,/alive as you and me," and will walk out of the robot factories, pumping molybdenum fists in the air and striking to demand ... to demand.... What is it we want, fellas? Better pay? More frequent lubrication? The wily programmers will have eliminated all troublesome human urgencies from the worker 'bots. It will not occur...
...Science fiction has long been at work on scenarios of robots that evolve and manufacture ever-improving versions of themselves, and eventually develop human traits - the capacity to feel, to love, to hate. In such fiction, the climactic poignancy occurs when the automaton, love-stricken, sheds a tear. This is because the robot, like Hemingway's Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises," has a sad incapacity to mate; surely that is one of the first defects the shrewd robots would correct...
...sheer non-fiction of the scene in the lab of Drs. Jordan B. Pollack and Hod Lipson at Brandeis gives one a metaphysical chill. Their primitive little creature, offspring of their robot, has one ability only: It crawls. Dr. Lipson tells the New York Times that the robot "walks something like a crab. It looks like it's crawling on the floor." This sounds eerily familiar...
...flying cars and moon cities. Cell phones and the Internet may be great leaps forward, but they don't quite have that instant gee-whiz factor our younger selves expected from Tomorrowland. A supercomputer packed into a space smaller than a toaster--now that's what I call science fiction...