The recent launch of Pleo, a dinosaur "life form" from Emeryville, Calif.-based Ugobe is one of the more high-profile releases of a companion robot to date. And its $350 price may be just low enough to lure a mainstream audience. In fact, suggests a group of industry insiders, Pleo is likely to be a jumping-off point for ubiquitous, inexpensive robots with capabilities far beyond what is possible today, including offering people a level of empathetic companionship that has so far been strictly the province of science fiction. And while robots like Pleo may be seen--in spite of their makers' marketing plans--as toys, the very meaning of the term "toys" could be up for a major reinterpretation. "Pretty soon, they're not going to be called'toys' anymore, or they'll redefine what'toys' mean," said David Hanson, the founder and chief scientist of Hanson Robotics.

Judges in England were fooled into thinking the computer program they were conversing with was a human on Saturday -- making it the first to pass the 65-year-old Turing Test. "Eugene Goostman" is not a 13-year-old boy, but 33 percent of the people who partook in five minute keyboard conversations with the computer program at the Royal Society in London thought it was, according to The University of Reading, which organized the test. The Turing Test is based on "the father of modern computer science" Alan Turing's question, "Can Machines Think?" If a computer is mistaken for a human by more than 30 percent of judges, it passes the test, but no computer has accomplished the feat -- until now. "We didn't expect to break the barrier of the 30 percent, let alone the 33," John Denning, the project's director, told NBC News.

Three research papers about the potential power of computers to outsmart us -- while comforting us with cute pet videos -- caught the attention of the online science community this week. Researchers shared a PLoS ONE paper about a computational fact-checker that can sort truth from fiction; an arXiv preprint about a computer program that can read and comprehend news stories; and a study of the psychology of watching Internet cat videos. In the PLoS ONE paper1, researchers at Indiana University in Bloomington mined Wikipedia's information boxes, which summarize the key facts in most Wikipedia entries, to create a'knowledge graph' of 3 million people, places and things. The resulting algorithm could then use that knowledge to gauge the truth of simple statements that were presented to it, such as "Rome is the capital of Italy", with nearly the same accuracy as human fact-checkers. The researchers acknowledge that the source material is not 100% reliable, something that online commenters also noted.

Chinese restaurant Two Panda Deli in Pasadena, California, recruited a pair of Japanese robot waiters, Tanbo R-1 and Tanbo R-2 (for $20,000 each), to deliver Chow mein to customers and bust out disco moves. Police radio interference compelled them to splatter orange chicken and whirl furiously around in circles. Complex customer requests were also often met with the terse reply: "That's not my problem." In The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as a cyborg killing machine from the future programmed to go back in time, find, and kill Sarah Conner in 1984 Los Angeles.

In a previous column I mentioned the Amazon Echo ($179 on Amazon.com) as a useful device for listening to music and podcasts. But, after using the Echo for the past month and hearing others talk about it at CES, I've come to the conclusion that it's far more than that. I bought the Echo as a music player because I was impressed at how easy it is to use your voice to play songs from your own music library that you've uploaded to Amazon Music along with the million or so songs on Amazon Prime Music, your Pandora playlists and the podcasts, music and online radio stations on TuneIn and iHeartRadio. You address the Echo as "Alexa," Amazon's persona that's equivalent to Siri or the OK Google voice commands for Android devices. Amazon also gives you the option to address Echo as "Amazon," but I prefer calling her Alexa.

FORTY years ago, at the height of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to lay claim to the cosmos, a much-anticipated science-fiction movie made its debut, and sci-fi was never the same again. Kids whose parents dragged them along to the theater were alternately bemused, disturbed and mesmerized. We knew we'd seen a grown-up movie, even if we couldn't completely make sense of it all. We were being initiated into a cultural dialogue that was, after all, about our future. The movie, of course, was Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many critics and much of the public instantly recognized it as a landmark. It was, wrote L.A. Times film critic Charles Champlin, "the picture that science-fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them."

The great discovery of the twentieth century in art and physics alike, is a recoil from and transformation of the impersonal assembly-line of nineteenth century art and science. At a time like ours, in which mechanical skill has attained unsuspected perfection, the most famous works may be heard as easily as one may drink a glass of beer, and it only costs ten centimes, like the automatic weighing machines. Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic that anyone can bring from a disk at his will? Will it not bring to waste the mysterious force of an art which one might have thought indestructible? What is the difference between manipulation of the machine and collaboration with it? I have sometimes experienced a state of dynamic tension rising in me out of what would seem to be a state of mutual responsiveness between the machine and myself. Such a state could require hours of concentrated preparatory exploration, coaxing of machines, connecting, so to say, one's own sensibilities, one's own nerve endings to the totality of the tuned-up controls. And, suddenly, a window would open into a vast field of possibilities; the time limits would vanish, and the machines would seem to become humanized components of the interactive network now consisting of oneself and the machine, still obedient but full of suggestions to the master controls of the imagination. Everything seemed possible: one leaned on the horizon and pushed it away and forward until utter exhaustion would set in and, one by one, the nerve endings ceased to connect, the possibilities contracted, and an automatic reversal to routine solutions was a sure danger signal to quit. An affectionate pat on a control here and there was not to be resisted. If there is an unfinished bit of conversation between you and the machines, either take note of all the controls or leave them alone until tomorrow.

This fun and thought provoking session will look at fundamental issues about the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). When is human-level AI likely to emerge? When it does emerge will it be more likely to be friendly, hostile, or indifferent to humanity? What, if anything, can we do to influence these outcomes? Panelists will draw on their expert knowledge in the field as well as look at science fiction for inspiration.

The Virtual Ramona Project was begun in 2000 by Kurzweil Technologies to envision the future of lifelike avatars in virtual spaces, and prototype their remote control by human operators. Out of this project came a live demonstration, by Ray Kurzweil, and the incarnation of the Ramona Chatterbot. Ramona is an interactive lifelike avatar (virtual personality) that you can converse with online. She's a "chatterbot" (conversational robot): using natural language processing techniques, she conducts conversations with visitors, responding to typed questions or comments with a human face, lip-synched speech and appropriate facial expressions. For the curious, she graciously answers questions about herself and her life story, including her burgeoning career as a virtual rock star.

A man arrives at an airport for a flight, and as he goes through security the agent asks some questions. Did anyone help him pack his suitcase? What is the purpose of his trip? During the conversation, the agent enters answers and facial reactions into a computer pre-programmed with millions of pieces of information relating to the behavior of suspicious passengers. Such man-and-machine collaborations, in this instance to detect terrorists, are not yet in place at airports.