Word: robotical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...course of the evening, Adam assumed the voice of an Australian zoologist, a gruff machine tank and a sarcastic robot named Marvin...
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...
...working mothers, single parents and gay matrimony, George Jetson and his clan already seem quaint even to the baby boomers who grew up with them. The very term nuclear family gives off a musty smell. The family of the 21st century may have a robot maid, but the chances are good that it will also be interracial or bisexual, divided by divorce, multiplied by remarriage, expanded by new birth technologies -- or perhaps all of the above. Single parents and working moms will become increasingly the norm, as will out-of- wedlock babies, though there will surely be a more modern...