Inside a large clean room in rural Connecticut, engineers have begun constructing a critical component for a machine that promises to keep the tech industry as we know it on track for at least another decade. The machine is being built by ASML, a Dutch company that has cornered the market for etching the tiniest nanoscopic features into microchips with light. ASML introduced the first extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines for mass production in 2017, after decades spent mastering the technique. The machines perform a crucial role in the chipmaking ecosystem, and they have been used in the manufacture of the latest, most advanced chips, including those in new iPhones as well as computers used for artificial intelligence. The company's next EUV system, a part of which is being built in Wilton, Connecticut, will use a new trick to minimize the wavelength of light it uses--shrinking the size of features on the resulting chips and boosting their performance--more than ever before.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) has made great strides in recent years, it still struggles to provide useful guidance about unstructured events in the physical or social world. In short, computer programs lack common sense. "Think of it as the tens of millions of rules of thumb about how the world works that are almost never explicitly communicated," said Doug Lenat of Cycorp, in Austin, TX. Beyond these implicit rules, though, commonsense systems need to make proper deductions from them and from other, explicit statements, he said. "If you are unable to do logical reasoning, then you don't have common sense."

George C. Devol, a largely self-taught inventor who drew from science fiction to help develop Unimate, the revolutionary mechanical arm that became a prototype for robots now widely used on automobile assembly lines and in other industries, died on Thursday at his home in Wilton, Conn. In the early 1950s, before the advent of industrial robotics, Mr. Devol (pronounced de-VAHL) built on his own work in electrical engineering and machine controls to design a mechanical arm that could be programmed to repeat precise tasks, like grasping and lifting. He applied for a patent in 1954 and explained the concept to a fellow engineer, Joseph F. Engelberger, at a cocktail party where they discussed their favorite science fiction writers. Mr. Engelberger listened with interest and immediately seized on the significance of the new technology. Mr. Devol named the concept Universal Automation -- later shortened to Unimation -- and received a patent in 1961.