Word: labs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Miss Urda I. Traenkle, a 24-year-old technician killed last January by an explosion at Harvard's Thorndike Lab in Boston City Hospital, has been commemorated by a scholarship fund in the Faculty of Medicine...
...would be unreasonable not to think, as Marvin L. Minsky, head of M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab, said two years ago, that "machines could become nearly as intelligent as we are and then stop, or to suppose we will always be able to compete with them . . . Whether or not we could retain some sort of control of the machines, assuming that we would want to, the nature of our activities and aspirations would be changed utterly by the presence on earth of intellectually superior beings...
...COMPUTERS that have fore-gone the real world for experimentation in the laboratory have gained exotic accomplishments. A plaque and a trophy sit atop the PDP-6 computer in M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Lab. They were won in chess tournaments. Even psychiatry is tainted. An M.I.T. computer offers comfort to any troubled human. You sit at a typewriter keyboard and inform the machine that your father beats you. "I'm glad you mention your home life," the computer replies politely. "You haven't said much about your mother, for instance...
Computers can do just about everything but leap tall buildings at a single bound, and someday they will be able to do that too. One long-range goal of the technicians in the Artificial Intelligence Lab is to build an "intelligent automaton" that could substitute for men on a Mars expedition. Carrying enough fuel to get to Mars and back seems impossible, so robots will have to go, explore, report back to earth and stay there (safely out of harm's way?). And since there would be a four-minute or worse radio time lag between here and there, communication...
There are basic worries and baroque worries, and a scheme for a robot-astronaut is decidedly baroque. The chief programmer at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, William Henneman, says, "We're still working at things kids have solved by the time they're two years old." What the research on intelligent automata is currently involved in is providing computers with "eyes" and "hands...