Jason Scott's first documentary in 2005 was about bulletin board systems (BBSs), which were in a sense the PC world's parallel evolution of the early Internet. This documentary, really more a multi-disc series of interviews with BBS pioneers than a documentary film as such, brought back to me my early years in personal computing and my subsequent forays into shareware software development through the mid-1990s. Now, Scott has tackled a subject from roughly the same era: the text adventure game. My involvement here was more peripheral but no less a part of my memories. As his new "Get Lamp" documentary recounts, the text adventure genre began with Will Crowther's Colossal Cave Adventure game in the early 1970s, more commonly referred to as just Adventure.

The seeds of the film were sown by celebrated British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss in 1969 when he penned a futuristic tale of a child android given the capacity to love. The short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long set in motion a chain of events that lasted more than three decades and if the final result is considerably different from the origin of the species then one must consider the journey the original idea has taken. "I wrote that story in 1969 when computers were not the household toys, pleasures and working tools they are now - they were lodged in laboratories," explains Aldiss from his Oxford home. "If that was the case, it was quite easy to imagine that one might create an android boy and program him to believe (a) that he was a real boy, and (b) he loved his mother. "The gist of the story is that however the boy android David tried to please his mother, he could never do it - the essence of the story is about love and the failure of love.

To its credit the picture is a quite dark and disturbing story of an abandoned robotic child, the first in the world programmed to love, searching desperately to reunite with his adoptive human mother. The unequivocal winner in this film is 13-year-old actor Haley Joel Osment who gives an outstanding performance as David, the robotic child who can love. Osment appears in nearly every scene and his screen portrayal is every bit as riveting as his haunting performance in The Sixth Sense, which won him an Oscar nomination. Osment provides the emotional core to the story. Audiences may find they strongly connect with this Spielberg-fashioned child yearning for the unavailable love of his mother.

It seems that the robot designers are concentrating on things that are not priorities for potential consumers. Robots for the home will only be purchased when they can perform dull tasks properly without supervision. If I had the money to buy a robot to do the vacuum-cleaning, I wouldn't want to have to pay a cleaner to do the dusting as well; I'd want the robot to do it. Similarly a lawn-mowing robot would also need to be able to dig flower beds and remove weeds without damaging the plants I want to grow. The level of'hand-eye' coordination required for these simple tasks is beyond the capabilities of current robots and until that problem is solved no-one will be interested in whether they appear to have any empathy with humans, how they communicate or what they look like.

If you believed everything you saw in the movies, you could be forgiven for thinking that artificial intelligence (AI) research had not moved on since the late 1950s. In almost all the Hollywood movies that feature AI or explore its implications, the unspoken assumption is that all researchers in the field are out to create surrogate humans or computerised brains that threaten our existence with their utterly impersonal view of events. This is true even of Spielberg's film AI which, despite being set in the future, takes a decidedly old-fashioned view of artificial intelligence. It is perhaps no surprise that it does, given that its screenplay is based on a short story published in 1969. But many other Hollywood movies persist in pushing this view of AI.

Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University gave a Presidential Lecture in the Humanities and Arts. During the second Presidential Lecture of the academic year, Douglas Hofstadter, professor of computer and cognitive science at Indiana University, argued for the central place of analogy in cognition while using a bumper crop of analogies. Analogy is the "motor of the car of thought" and "the interstate freeway of cognition," said Hofstadter in a talk titled "Analogy as the Core of Cognition." Hofstadter, director of the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG) at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at IU, has written on topics including artificial intelligence and poetry translation and is the author of the popular and Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). Far from being a subset associated with problem solving--a tiny "Delaware on the map of cognition"--or a special variety of reasoning, analogy is the main event, Hofstadter asserted during an evening lecture Feb. 6 and during a discussion the following afternoon at the Humanities Center.

Robert Engelmore, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence pioneer, died March 25 during a family vacation in Kauai. He was a former executive director of the Knowledge Systems Laboratory who applied expert systems technology in scientific, industrial and military domains. Engelmore, 68, had been swimming in a rock-rimmed shoreline pool with his 5-year-old grandson, Jack, when they and other swimmers were overwhelmed by giant waves. Engelmore helped lift the child to safety but was pulled out to sea by currents. By the time lifeguards reached him, his heart had stopped beating.

From left, graduate students Ashutosh Saxena and Morgan Quigley and Assistant Professor Andrew Ng were part of a large effort to develop a robot to see an unfamiliar object and ascertain the best spot to grasp it. Stanford scientists plan to make a robot capable of performing everyday tasks, such as unloading the dishwasher. By programming the robot with "intelligent" software that enables it to pick up objects it has never seen before, the scientists are one step closer to creating a real life Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons cartoon show. "Within a decade we hope to develop the technology that will make it useful to put a robot in every home and office," said Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science who is leading the wireless Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project. "Imagine you are having a dinner party at home and having your robot come in and tidy up your living room, finding the cups that your guests left behind your couch, picking up and putting away your trash and loading the dishwasher," Ng said.

Five years ago, when I was trying to name this column, I found that all the clever technology titles involving bytes, bits and so forth had already been taken. So I thought: since I'm interested in how technology will affect us in years to come, why not "Practical Futurist"? It seemed humorous at the time: how many futurists are known for practicality? But within months, people were referring to me as a futurist. And thus I learned my first lesson about the profession: the way you become a futurist is simply to call yourself one. So at the end of July I couldn't resist the opportunity to join more than a thousand fellow futurists at the World Future Society's annual meeting in Toronto, Canada.

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