Word: robots
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other senior men at the Pentagon to call their boss "Mel," fits the vocation. So do his competitiveness in debate and his skill at cloakroom orchestration. Cartoonists err who portray him as a maniacal Strangelove, fondling a missile as if it were a kitten, or as a bullet-headed robot. His phiz, indeed, is a public-relations problem. The high, balding dome over intense eyes and small features makes him look a bit like Hubert Humphrey, minus H.H.H.'s winning innocence...
...always painful to watch on old idol topple. This time it was embarrassing as well. Isaac Asimov's contribution to the anthology was an agonizingly moralistic little tale entitled "Segregationist." It's all about this surgeon who is a robot, you see, and he's trying to convince a VIP who's qualified to receive an artificial heart to accept a fiber heart instead of a metal one because he doesn't like to see "mongrelization" between humans and robots--except that you aren't suppose to know until the end that he's a robot. That's because...
Thus last week, Engineer Mosher introduced CAM, G.E.'s "Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine." Unlike the usual robot, the walking machine has limbs that respond to the actual movements of its human operator's arms and legs. Driven by hydraulic pressure and controlled by servomechanisms, the metal muscles exert far more force than their human counterparts. But they are attached to a sensitive feedback system that gently lets the handler "feel" what the metal limbs are doing...
...someday they will be able to do that too. One long-range goal of the technicians in the Artificial Intelligence Lab is to build an "intelligent automaton" that could substitute for men on a Mars expedition. Carrying enough fuel to get to Mars and back seems impossible, so robots will have to go, explore, report back to earth and stay there (safely out of harm's way?). And since there would be a four-minute or worse radio time lag between here and there, communication would be difficult and the robot would have to be able to make...
There are basic worries and baroque worries, and a scheme for a robot-astronaut is decidedly baroque. The chief programmer at the Artificial Intelligence Lab, William Henneman, says, "We're still working at things kids have solved by the time they're two years old." What the research on intelligent automata is currently involved in is providing computers with "eyes" and "hands...