Word: robots
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...suppose that the only hope for labor unions in this news - the beginning of the realization of science fiction nightmares hypothesized for years - is that eventually drone robots, in a future robot civilization, will teach themselves to sing, "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,/alive as you and me," and will walk out of the robot factories, pumping molybdenum fists in the air and striking to demand ... to demand.... What is it we want, fellas? Better pay? More frequent lubrication? The wily programmers will have eliminated all troublesome human urgencies from the worker 'bots. It will not occur...
Perversely timed to Labor Day comes news, in the journal Nature, that computer scientists at Brandeis University have created a robot that can make a robot, almost entirely without human help...
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...
...Give me the name of a good drama playing at my local theater." Instead, I had to say "movies" (pause), "Upper West Side" (pause), "drama" (pause). Then, after listening to a long list of films, I had to bark out more commands to get show times. Speaking like a robot and getting lost in a verbal maze was so annoying I was forced more than once to hang...
Other scientists are content to speculate. Not Cady. She's collecting samples not only in Yellowstone but also in the Taupo Volcanic Zone in New Zealand and the frigid depths of a lake in British Columbia. When astronauts or robot craft finally start hauling home rocks from other planets, those specimens can be compared with Cady's for the tiny thumbprint of life both may contain. The trick, she says, "is knowing what clues to look...