I once wrote on this page, "Science fiction is to technology as romance novels are to marriage: a form of propaganda" (see "Against Transcendence," February 2005). This represents my sincere view, but stated so baldly, without elaboration, the remark implies a contempt I do not feel. If it is propaganda, I am its happy dupe; and if I am a technology editor and journalist today, it is because between the ages of seven and fourteen, I read little but science fiction. I grew up on a farm on the North Coast of California that had at one time been a kind of hippie commune. Around the various cabins on the property were dozens of yellowed paperbacks of the sort that the counterculture loved; and when I recall my childhood all at once, it is perpetually summer, and I am alone in a field or a tree house, reading Alfred Bester, Algis Budrys, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, or Robert Heinlein.

That was the last time mission controllers heard from it. According to the scenario a NASA accident- review board deemed most likely, the Lander dropped out of orbit, deployed its parachute, and began firing its descent engines to slow its fall-just as it was programmed to do. But as the craft's three landing legs automatically unfolded, sensors in the legs sent false signals to the Lander's control software, indicating that it had touched down. Not programmed to deal with such a scenario, the software ignored signs that the craft was still aloft and, at an altitude of 40 meters, shut down the descent engines. Gravity took over, and the delicate craft slammed into the rocky Martian surface with the energy of a high-speed car crash. That same year, but millions of kilometers away, another NASA craft dealt with crisis more adroitly.

When Stanford University's robotic Volkswagen Touareg, "Stanley," won the Grand Challenge last week, robot enthusiasts everywhere cheered. By completing a 210-kilometer course over difficult desert terrain in just under seven hours, Stanley set an unprecedented milestone for autonomous vehicles. Even more amazingly, four other teams' vehicles also completed the course, with slightly slower times. "It's kind of like if you had challenged people to fly across the Atlantic, and instead of one guy [making it], just Lindbergh, you had five guys flying across at the same time," says Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and the leader of the Stanford team. The Lindbergh analogy is apt.

D-Wave, the small company that sells the world's only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company's latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration -- the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. The lab will explore areas such as machine learning -- making computers sort and analyse data on the basis of previous experience. This is useful for functions such as language translation, image searches and voice-command recognition. "We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics," says a blog post from Google describing the deal.

The ferry arrived, the gangway went down and 7-year-old Emma Powell rushed toward the Statue of Liberty. She climbed onto the grass around the star-shaped foundation. She put on a green foam crown with seven protruding rays. Turning so that her body was oriented just like Lady Liberty's, Emma extended her right arm skyward with an imaginary torch. Then I took my niece's hand, and we went off to buy some pretzels.

In the months leading up to the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, a landmark test for autonomous vehicles, Sebastian Thrun, the head of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, could not know whether his team's robotic vehicle, nicknamed Stanley, would triumph. Yet when interviewed by NOVA producers Jason Spingarn-Koff and Joe Seamans, this robotics enthusiast was brimming with excitement, confident that the race would herald a new era of vehicles that drive themselves. Stanford computer scientist Sebastian Thrun has long been driven to make smart machines. Now a smart machine named Stanley can drive him. Sebastian Thrun: It's a no-brainer for me that at some point our cars will have the ability to drive themselves.

Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure. Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction.

Joseph Weizenbaum, whose famed conversational computer program, Eliza, foreshadowed the potential of artificial intelligence, but who grew skeptical about the potential for technology to improve the human condition, died on March 5 in Gröben, Germany. The cause was complications of cancer, said his daughter Sharon Weizenbaum. Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and 1965 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in "Pygmalion" and "My Fair Lady," was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines. The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client's statements as questions.

But as missions go farther and become more ambitious, long-distance puppetry becomes less and less practical. If dumb spacecraft will not work, the answer is to make them smarter. Artificial intelligence will increasingly give spacecraft the ability to think for themselves. "These technologies are already in operation on specific missions," said Steve Chien, a computer scientist who heads the artificial intelligence group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Scientists discussed some of the recent progress last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Baltimore.

Though most of the truly futuristic projects are probably years from the commercial market, scientists say that after a lull, artificial intelligence has rapidly grown far more sophisticated. Today some scientists are beginning to use the term cognitive computing, to distinguish their research from an earlier generation of artificial intelligence work. What sets the new researchers apart is a wealth of new biological data on how the human brain functions. "There's definitely been a palpable upswing in methods, competence and boldness," said Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is president-elect of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. "At conferences you are hearing the phrase'human-level A.I.,' and people are saying that without blushing."