Word: ways
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...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...
...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...
...robot put the eraser down, Breazeal picked it up. Breazeal and Cog continued taking turns picking the eraser up and putting it down. To an outside observer, it might have looked like the robot was intentionally playing with Breazeal, but Cog's mind just didn't work that way. It was while engaging in this deceptively human-feeling interaction that Breazeal decided to try to build a new kind of robot, one that could play the eraser game with her and mean...
Card, by contrast, is a soft-spoken, slightly geeky-looking psychologist and computer scientist; his group is involved in the more practical, down-to-earth business of making the Web more readable. He uses the jargon of Internet ecology, talking about the way we "forage" for information and hunt its "scent" to produce a balanced "diet." But that doesn't make his tools and results any less gee-whiz than Gold's. Step into Card's lab, and he will show you the device he uses on his test subjects, a metal headpiece with little cameras positioned in front...
Take a look at what your eyes are doing right now. It's known as saccadic jumping--the way they skip across the page from left to right before some unseen hand comes in and pushes them to the start of the next line, like the ball on an old typewriter. It's something you've done your whole life. But is it really the most efficient way to read...