Word: robotically
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Consider, says Chalmers, the robot named Cog, being developed at M.I.T.'s artificial-intelligence lab with input from Dennett (see following story). Cog will someday have "skin"--a synthetic membrane sensitive to contact. Upon touching an object, the skin will send a data packet to the "brain." The brain may then instruct the robot to recoil from the object, depending on whether the object could damage the robot. When human beings recoil from things, they too are under the influence of data packets. If you touch something that's dangerously hot, the appropriate electrical impulses go from hand to brain...
These two "hard" questions about consciousness--the extraness question and the water-into-wine question--don't depend on artificial intelligence. They could occur (and have occurred) to people who simply take the mind-as-machine idea seriously and ponder its implications. But the actual construction of a robot like Cog, or of a pandemonium machine, makes the hard questions more vivid. Materialist dismissals of the mind-body problem may seem forceful on paper, but, says McGinn, "you start to see the limits of a concept once it gets realized." With AI, the tenets of strict materialism are being realized...
...quests to build what may be the world's first convincingly humanlike computer programs have been compared to the dramatic 1911 Amundsen-Scott race to the South Pole; but even that analogy falls short. For the rivalry between the two researchers is not merely personal (Brooks considered naming his robot Psych! just to get Lenat's goat) but deeply philosophical as well, straddling the almost theological schism that runs down the middle of contemporary...
...finalists for the editing Oscar this year, each illustrates an interesting facet of the craft: the integration of special effects and character development of Apollo 13, the mix of animals and robot beasts in Babe, the bloody briskness of the battle sequences in Braveheart, the claustrophobic submarine struggle in Crimson Tide and the jolting impact of Seven. Character study, animal film, martial epic, macho debating, upscale splatter--all genres sizzle or sink depending on the editor's skill...
...that time NASA will have plenty of other missions to manage. The next project in the Discovery series is the Mars Pathfinder, scheduled for launch next December, which will land on the Red Planet and send a robot rover off to explore. Then comes Lunar Prospector in 1997, designed to chart the mineral composition of Earth's nearest neighbor, and after that a mission to bring a chunk of comet back to Earth, slated for 1999. Each is supposed to cost a few hundred million dollars at most, and thanks to NEAR that goal, considered highly improbable when...