Word: robots
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Walk into room 922 of the artificial intelligence lab at M.I.T., and you may notice a winsome robot in the corner trying desperately to get your attention. When Kismet is lonely and spots a human, it cranes its head forward plaintively. It flaps its pink paper ears and vocalizes excitedly in a babylike patter. Kismet's handlers call this an "attention-getting display." You would have to have a heart of stone to ignore this cute little aluminum...thing...
...something that does, like a VCR. Once your DVR is up and running, you plug it into a phone jack, so that it can download the week's program listings. (ReplayTV automatically makes a short phone call every morning at around 2; it's like having a weird nocturnal robot roommate...
...Joey Skaggs. It's not hard to see the story's appeal. After a socially and racially divisive trial, many Americans--especially non-African Americans--believed that 12 Angelenos had rejected irrefutable DNA evidence to set a murderer free. Solomon played to a machine-age civic fantasy: a bloodless robot, immune to gambits and race cards, that would dispense justice like a candy machine. (Nor is it only a conservative wish; the anti-death penalty crowd has embraced DNA evidence to reopen capital cases...
...elected, got him in trouble, and finally, set Gore up for a defeat. It was Bush, after all, who charmed voters, not Gore. It was Bush who managed to captivate with his easy laugh and his loose-limbed grace. Gore was stuck with the old caricature: A stiff, a robot, a typical policy wonk...
From designs for Renaissance forts to a replica of the sexy robot from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 1926. From baroque engravings of New World cannibals in grass huts to pictures of yuppies enjoying a stroll through Celebration, Disney's "ideal town" in Florida. From Nazi racial propaganda to unalluring photos of early kibbutzim in Israel. From Stalinist kitsch in the '30s to Haight-Ashbury peace-and-love kitsch in the '60s. This intriguing range of objects and images is contained in "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World," the sprawling show that kicks...