Word: humanize
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...pace of invention continues at the rate suggested by the preceding pages, the world will become a really boring place. The human species needs its daily grapplings with the illogical, the clunky, the imperfect if it is to preserve that which separates us from animals and household appliances. Man likes doing some things the hard way, the wrong way, the old-fashioned way. And too often, an invention that solves one superficial problem creates profound new others. Four new inventions in particular must be blocked at all costs if humanity as we know it is to survive...
...PILOT: All that's keeping the human element alive in an ever more relentlessly robotic info-storage world is a few square inches of warm, floppy leather in our hip pocket: the wallet. The wallet, where strangers' business cards go to be forgotten, where 10,000-lire bills from a three-year-old Italian vacation retire, where 1997 restaurant receipts and 1994 family snapshots dwell. Where it takes 10 minutes not to find what you're looking for amid the detritus stuffed over the years into that labyrinth of folds and pockets. And where, occasionally, you come across a long...
...CURE FOR THE COMMON COLD: Forget all those lurid statistics constantly peddled by the Goody-Two-Shoes lobby about the common cold's toll of billions of lost man-hours. See it in human terms: the common cold is a godsend, the greatest benefactor to the working stiff since the advent of the boring job. It's technically an illness; in reality it's a universally acceptable excuse to declare yourself hors de combat and take a day off from work. Wipe out the common cold and you rob millions of Americans per week of their sacred rights not only...
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...
...doesn't even have arms, legs or a body. What sets Kismet apart is that it has been built with drives and equipped to engage in an array of interactions with people to satisfy those drives. In social terms, big-eyed, babbling Kismet may be the most human robot ever built. And it may be the closest we have yet come to building the kind of robots that populate science fiction and interact with humans in a natural way, like C-3PO from Star Wars...