Word: robotical
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Last week, when scientists at Brandeis University announced that one of their machines had finally designed and built a simple, toylike robot, the news immediately invited scary comparisons with such Hollywood rogue robots as The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey's psychopathic HAL. Some futurists, like Sun Microsystem's chief scientist Bill Joy, even warned that this might be one genie that shouldn't be let out of the bottle...
...look a little closer at the work of researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, you'd see their robot creation isn't ready yet to rule the universe. Even compared with other robots, it's primitive: using only four basic parts--plastic cylinders and ball joints, simple circuitry and small motors, along with rules for friction and gravity--it designed little self-propelled crawlers, like the toddler's insect...
...cannot see that far. For now, we assume that self-evolving robots will learn to mimic human traits, including, eventually, humor. And so, I can't wait to hear the first joke that one robot tells to another robot...
...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...
...artificial, will have the more winning personality? Can it be true that humans, being cranky and irrational, have, for all these years, stupidly congratulated themselves on the idea that, whatever their technical imperfections, they have richer personalities (turbulent with love, laughter, passion, envy, etc.) than the merely rational/mechanical robot? Maybe, next to the sleek artificials, we messy biologicals (requiring deodorants and bathrooms and toilet paper and all the rest) will grow self-conscious and ashamed...