Word: robotically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...courage given the climate of the times. Bush proposed his gigantic tax cut just at the moment when polls ranked taxes way down on the list of voter concerns, well below education and debt reduction and Social Security. Gore, meanwhile, remade himself as a Rock'em Sock'em Robot just at the moment people were saying they were tired of all the fighting in Washington, moving rhetorically if not substantively to the left when every pol in the world knew that whoever controlled the center would...
...scientists are placing particular emphasis on one robot, tellingly named Mars 2003. This vehicle, now slated for launch in 2011, will ostensibly touch down, collect soil samples, and zip back to Earth. NASA estimates the 300-pound rover will cost between $1 billion and $2 billion...
...look a little closer at the work of researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, you'd see their robot creation isn't ready yet to rule the universe. Even compared with other robots, it's primitive: using only four basic parts--plastic cylinders and ball joints, simple circuitry and small motors, along with rules for friction and gravity--it designed little self-propelled crawlers, like the toddler's insect...
Other scientists have created similar robots in their computers, to say nothing of systems intelligent enough to play championship chess, but Pollack and Lipson took a giant step out of the virtual world. After they hooked their computer to a $50,000 commercial plastic model-making machine, it produced actual offspring, not just a model on a computer screen. The only human intervention was installing the robot's little motor and computer-programmed microchip ("neurons...
...their report in Nature, Lipson and Pollack admit their "primitive replicating robot" is far from the mythical medieval humanoid, or golem (after whom they've named their project). For one thing, it doesn't actually replicate--it can't make robots that make new robots--nor does it learn from its environment. But, as Rodney Brooks of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab points out, it's a "long-awaited and necessary step" to creating machines that are truly lifelike...