Word: robotical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...transported to work in his robocar. None of these advances are without their costs and risks. Drexler's assemblers, for example, could create bounties of goods and services -- or they could unleash artificial pests of unimaginable destructiveness. One nightmare creature from Drexler's book: an omnivorous bacteria-size robot that spreads like blowing pollen, replicates swiftly and reduces the biosphere to dust in a matter of days...
Most of the work of investigating and colonizing the solar system (and perhaps beyond) would be done by robot probes smaller and smarter than those of today. Advances in computer technology and genetic engineering, predicts physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, will enable scientists to squeeze the capabilities of a Voyager spacecraft, say, into a 2-lb. package that is half machine, half organism. This he dubs the astrochicken. Launched as an "egg," the astrochicken would sprout solar-panel wings that would double as radio antennae during flight. Arriving at its destination...
...Robot probes no bigger than bacteria will eventually be possible. According to K. Eric Drexler, author of Engines of Creation, they will use nanotechnology to assemble devices atom by atom or molecule by molecule. His colleagues have already made motors smaller in diameter than a human hair. Drexler believes a bundle of nanorobots, weighing practically nothing, would be the perfect interstellar emissaries. Having arrived at a planet or asteroid around some distant star, perhaps in a solar sailship pushed to high speeds by a powerful laser beam from earth, they would go to work, antlike, building radio transmitters and other...
...family of the future, it was a pretty simple exercise. Take your basic nuclear family: the modern, shop-happy housewife, the corporate-drone dad, two rambunctious kids and a dog; house them in a spacy-looking split-level; power their car with atomic energy; equip their home with a robot maid; and, whammo, you had it -- a space-age Cleaver family named The Jetsons...
...most ambitious technique-enhancing device yet may be the robot that is helping prepare America's table-tennis team for Barcelona. Dubbed R-4 and costing $50,000, the robot can simulate the styles of the best Ping-Pong players in the world. A computer-driven motor that spins at 6,000 r.p.m. can shoot a ball at up to 60 m.p.h. "The robot eliminates the need to travel to China and Japan to practice against the best players in the world," says Olympic hopeful Sean O'Neill. "This is a training tool that allows you to practice against them...