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Robots

Fingerfehler

From comments made by Russian chess officials in July, following an incident at the Moscow Open in which a chess-playing robot broke the finger of its seven-year-old competitor. Translated from…

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Made, Not Begotten

This is the new world that I read about at breakfast. This is the great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has been born somewhat appropriately along with…

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Ghosting the Machine

Humans, robots, and the new sexual frontier

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Turndown Service

From reviews, published on TripAdvisor, of the Henn-na Hotel, a robot-run resort in Japan that laid off more than half its automated workforce in January. Henn-na bills itself as a…

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Sex Machina

From a study presented last year at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, in New Zealand. Participants were asked their opinion of various capabilities a sex robot might have. They…

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Machine Yearning

From questions raised by Oliver Bendel, a machine ethicist, in a paper that was published this month on Springer. Bendel presented the paper last year at the Love and Sex…

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Amo Ergo Sum

From a conversation with Bina48, a robot that was created by Hanson Robotics for Martine Rothblatt, the CEO of United Therapeutics, as a clone of her wife, Bina Rothblatt. The…

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Getting to the End

Gambling and suicide in Atlantic City

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The Transhuman Condition

By John Markoff, from Machines of Loving Grace, out this month from Ecco Books. Markoff has been a technology and business reporter for the New York Times since 1988. Bill…

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August 2015

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