"By his machines man can dive and remain under water like a shark; can fly like a hawk in the air;
can see atoms like a gnat; can see the system of the universe of Uriel, the angel of the sun..."
Machinery © Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dr. Hugo de Garis, designer of the monolithic First Generation Brain Building Machine, "CAM-Brain Machine" (CBM) appearing in the foreground, has said that artificial intelligence is far more capable of dominating human intelligence than we would believe and he oughta know. Thinking machines have been the stuff of science fiction for decades and not since Marcel Duchamp created The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even have we seen such an aesthetic representation of the emotional, highly Machiavellian machine linking, in CBM's case producing, artificial intelligence to human experience. Fictions of the machine cut a wide path. From Julien Offray de La Mettrie's 1748 Man A Machine to the Surrealists to Isaac Asimov's The Complete Robot, when Earth is ruled by master-machines and when robots are more human than mankind, we have been fascinated with man's unique relationship to machines.
ASIMO, an advanced humanoid robot made by Honda, is presently touring Europe. Humanoid robots work on LINUX (I knew there was a reason LINUX was so kick-mass). The robot, HRP-2P, runs on a real-time version of the LINUX operating system, called ART-Linux, and is designed for robotic applications, data acquisition and systems control functions. Ya'll gonna have some robot babes soon 'cause the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Lab is investigating biologically based models of emotion and compact series elastic actuators for improved force control (wow!), as the roboette COCO "becomes a fully functioning creature." Better than a Stepford Wife. Big Al knows that man can build humanoids, but where's the heart? Well, Abiomed is producing an artificial heart for HUMANS. Hans Moravec, an artificial intelligence theorist, maintains we will be mass-marketing utility robots before 2010 and fully intelligent robots before 2050. Big Al's question is, WHERE'S THE RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE in all this?
