Word: robotized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...inner solar system, comets were widely viewed as omens of disaster. Astronomers now look upon them as primordial chunks of matter that offer clues to the solar system's formation. The budget-conscious U.S. has bowed out of the race to intercept Halley's comet with a robot spacecraft, thus leaving the field to the Soviets, Western Europeans and Japanese. But NASA plans a relatively cheap ($2 million) alternative: diverting an unmanned ship already in orbit for an inspection of a comet called Giacobini-Zinner, which will appear a few months ahead of its famous...
...want to see such parallels sensitively drawn, a fine modern interpretation of The Tempest does exist in the 1956 science-fiction thriller Forbidden Planet, with Walker Pidgeon as a Phillip-like character and Robbie the Robot as his Kal-bonos. Catch it on a Saturday afternoon double creature feature. At least it'll cost you less than Mazursky's offering...
Gerrit Nijland, a professor of industrial robotics at Berenschot Management Training Center in The Netherlands, has just concluded a study of the acceptance of the automatons in his country, where 70 firms currently use robots. He found that the most common form of sabotage was to slow down the machines by feeding them parts in the wrong order, with the hope that management would be disappointed in robot performance. In other cases, employees repaired the machines incorrectly, mislaid essential spare parts or put sand into the robots' lubricating oil. In one metal construction plant, production was reduced for more...
...sent some 40 spacecraft soaring into the cosmos. The J.P.L.'s sophisticated machines, operating on complex instructions stored in silicon brains, have explored every member of the sun's family of planets, from inner-most Mercury to the remote giant Saturn. Even now a J.P.L. robot is speeding toward Uranus, 1.7 billion miles away, for a 1986 photographic reconnaissance...
...hunters who phoned the Softwork Voyce employment service in Cambridge, Mass., last week heard the greeting: "Hello, I am the Voyce. I am a robot helping employers and job seekers meet each other." The Voyce, which is a computer at Softwork headquarters, explains that it will compile a résumé for the caller if he answers the robot's questions by pushing the proper buttons on a touch-tone phone. If the caller is using a dial phone, the Voyce tells him that it cannot hear his answers. A sample question: "Are you presently a student...