Word: robotically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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...
Science fiction has long been at work on scenarios of robots that evolve and manufacture ever-improving versions of themselves, and eventually develop human traits - the capacity to feel, to love, to hate. In such fiction, the climactic poignancy occurs when the automaton, love-stricken, sheds a tear. This is because the robot, like Hemingway's Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises," has a sad incapacity to mate; surely that is one of the first defects the shrewd robots would correct...
...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...