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Robot Evolution
Will we see self aware robots in our lifetime? At least the most rabid proponents of the Singularity think so. Science fiction created the idea of space travel, and now humans travel in space....
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R. Daneel Olivaw and Lady Constance Chatterley
Who are these people? They are two characters from classic novels, one from the genre of science fiction and the other from English literature. R. Daneel Olivaw is a humanoid robot from The Caves of...
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Will Robots Have Gender?
Should an intelligent machine be a he or she? Or an it? We homo sapiens tend to anthropomorphize our machinery, like naming our cars and military aircraft after women. And like God, we want to make...
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The Cat, The Dog, The Robot and The Soul
Since before Biblical times men and women believed that human beings were unique, superior to the other animals that inhabited the Earth. Later theologians would claim we had souls and animals didn’t....
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Wake by Robert J. Sawyer
Wake by Robert J. Sawyer is the first novel of a trilogy, it came out in 2009, Watch, the second book, came out this year, and Wonder will come out in 2011. Sawyer calls them the WWW Trilogy, and it...
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Will Science Fictional Reality Ever Change People?
Life in the 21st century seems all about change. Back in 1970 Alvin Toffler wrote the bestseller Future Shock predicting the rapid pace of change would overwhelm society and cause future shock. This...
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Are Smartphones Nanocomputers?
Young people will probably not know this, but back in the 1970s personal computers were called microcomputers. The dinosaur of computers, mainframes, were huge, some as big as houses, and cost...
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The Implications of Watson
Watson, the supercomputer contestant on Jeopardy this week represents a stunning achievement in computer programming. People not familiar with computers, programming and natural language processing...
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Why Humans Won’t Be the God of Robots
There’s a scene in the film Prometheus where an android asked a human why he would want to meet his maker? The human replied that he’d like to ask his maker why he made him. So the android said to...
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Robot and Frank–The Best Science Fiction Film Since Gattaca
When I was growing up in the 1950s I was sure flying in a spaceship would be in my future. Now that I’m getting old, I wondering if a robot will be my companion for my waning days of life. Robot and...
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The Evolution and Education of Artificial Minds
After space travel, one of the most loved themes of science fiction is robots. Many people, going back centuries, have imagined creating artificial people. Writers of robot stories have seldom...
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Is an International Nonprofit Space Program Possible?
Ever dream of being an astronaut? Ever fantasize about developing a new rocket system to take people to Mars? Ever wanted to be a colonist on the Moon? For decades only the richest of nations could...
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Why Don’t Politicians Have PhDs in Economics?
It seems like every politician in Washington KNOWS the absolute solution to our economic problems. But how do they know? The Tea Party has Washington gridlocked because they claim to know, but is...
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Has Humanity Given Up on the Three Major Promises of Science Fiction?
Science fiction has been around a very long time, but it wasn’t always called that. The essential core of science fiction has always been three promises: space travel, intelligent alien beings and...
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A Bacterium, Ant, Cockroach, Mouse, Cat, Extraterrestrial and Robot Walked...
Infinity is a very large number. Larger than you can ever imagine. But let’s try. Until recently we lived in a universe – billions of galaxies, with billions of stars each. Big numbers, but nothing...
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Human 2.0 versus Robot 4.0
If we think of all the versions of genus Homo leading up to modern man as alpha and beta tests, we can call the average person today Human 1.0. Science fiction has often explored the idea of the next...
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What Happens When Humans Aren’t the Smartest Beings on Earth?
What if people weren’t the crown of creation? What if we had to play second banana to Humans 2.0, AI machines, visiting aliens, cyborgs or other potentially smarter beings? I think our fear is they...
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Could You Love A Robotic Puppy?
If you could buy a robotic puppy that was indistinguishable from a real puppy except that it didn’t eat, drink and go to the bathroom, would it be as satisfying as having a real puppy? This is...
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By 2020 Robots Will Be Able to Do Most People’s Jobs
By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, December 17, 2014 People commonly accept that robots are replacing humans at manual labor, but think they will never replace us at mental labor, believing that our...
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Why Did The Robot in Ex Machina Look Like a Beautiful Woman?
By James Wallace Harris, Thursday, April 30, 2015 Ex Machina is a 2015 British science fiction film about artificial intelligence (AI) written and directed by Alex Garland. The story is about a...
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