Word: touched
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Even scientists have developed a touch of comet fever. They have commandeered the world's most powerful telescopes, including the high-flying Hubble, to plumb the secrets of one of the most ancient objects orbiting the sun. Says Daniel Green, an astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts: "It's the brightest one since 1976, and we're dropping everything to study...
...generals in Beijing, says Andrew Nien-Dzu Yang, a Taiwan specialist on the Chinese military, "don't want a confrontation with the U.S.," but some of Beijing's rhetoric about the U.S. commitment to Taiwan has had a harsh tone. Whether with pure bluster or a touch of psy-war, a member of the general staff late last year told Chas. W. Freeman, a former U.S. diplomat in Beijing and Assistant Secretary of Defense, that "America will not sacrifice Los Angeles to protect Taiwan." At this point China lacks the military capability to bring off a successful invasion...
Consider, says Chalmers, the robot named Cog, being developed at M.I.T.'s artificial-intelligence lab with input from Dennett (see following story). Cog will someday have "skin"--a synthetic membrane sensitive to contact. Upon touching an object, the skin will send a data packet to the "brain." The brain may then instruct the robot to recoil from the object, depending on whether the object could damage the robot. When human beings recoil from things, they too are under the influence of data packets. If you touch something that's dangerously hot, the appropriate electrical impulses go from hand to brain...
Though Turing generally shied away from such metaphysical questions, his 1950 paper did touch briefly on this issue. Some people, he noted, might complain that to create true thinking machines would be to create souls, and thus exercise powers reserved for God. Turing disagreed. "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping his power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children," Turing wrote. "Rather we are, in either case, instruments of his will providing mansions for the souls that he creates...
...laboratory without the benefit of any single guiding program. Cog's "mind," similarly, is just a collection of loosely coordinated digital reflexes scattered among its eight processors, with no one place to point to as the seat of intelligence. "There's no there there," notes Brooks with a touch of pride...