Or maybe just the year of robot nostalgia? This
difficult-to-navigate Carnegie-Mellon robot Hall of Fame includes
Hal 9000 (it's called a robot because it talked? What was actually HAL 9000? A computer? A operating system? A virus... who cares, movie people never made software apart from hardware, at least before The Matrix, Mars Pathfinder, R2-D2 (what's the problem with C3-P0? Are non-humanoid robots not eligible?), and Unimate, who, or which, for once, is a real robot (seen at
Slashdot).
At the same time, Time, in its
Inventions of the year, has a section for gadgets+robots (robots are presumably more-than-pint-size gadgets, or gadgets-that-move-by-themselves), including
lap cat, the sworn (and furrier) enemy of
Aibo (via
blogdex).
The baseline is
put a robot in your life. Now.
