She is the perfect the girl and everyone loves her. Too bad she doesn't exist. In 1994 science fiction author William Gibson published IDORU, a novel about a Japanese Pop star who was actually the holographic creation of a distributed artificial intelligence. Now it seems life has taken a few halting steps towards imitating art. Last week Aimi Eguchi, the newest star of the Japanese band AKB48, was revealed to exist only on the hard drives of her creators.

The movie, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was directed by Ridley Scott and stars a young Harrison Ford. For those of you who hadn't seen it, the story is set in a futuristic Los Angeles, AD 2019, just a few years down the road from us. Many regard it as a cult movie, a "neo-noir" or cyberpunk classic, in spite of its poor box office performance in the U.S. Some critics consider it one of the best movies ever made. Be it as it may, the movie does touch upon some very fundamental issues concerning the meaning of being human, which are well worth taking a closer look. From our 2011 perspective, the first thing we notice is how off the movie is in terms of predictions.

Computer Trouble: After growing up without his father, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) falls into a digital world, where he finds his dad and meets Quorra (Olivia Wilde). Together, they embark on a dangerous journey of escape. Rated PG for sequences of sci-fi action violence and brief mild language. When Disney announced it was planning to make a sequel to Tron, its 1982 imagining of a dystopia existing in our computers' circuit boards, the news was greeted enthusiastically by that film's small and adoring cult. But for many, the move was a head-scratcher: a $200 million budget handed to a director, Joseph Kosinski, who'd only ever worked in commercials, to make a 28-years-later sequel to a visually groundbreaking (but narratively dull) sci-fi flick that was only a modest success in its original release.

Wall-E fell in love with another robot in the movie named after him. Researchers have yet to create a sentient machine, but a breakthrough could be on the horizon. Peter Remine says he will know it's time to get serious about rights for robots "when a robot knocks on my door asking for some help." Remine, founder of the Seattle-based American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, says the moment will come when a robot in an automobile factory "will become sentient, realize that it doesn't want to do that unfulfilling and dangerous job anymore, and ask for protection under state workers' rights." Bit by bit, we are growing more comfortable with digital devices in our daily lives.

Baseball games have slowed down because, as players' salaries have increased, the value of each pitch and each swing has increased, as well. When a pitcher gets thirty starts in a season, a hundred pitches each, bucking for a twelve-million-dollar contract, each pitch is worth four thousand dollars. "Avengers: Age of Ultron" cost about two hundred and fifty million dollars to make, and Joss Whedon, its writer and director, appears to have taken his time, too--especially with the script. Whedon has done something similar to what he did in "The Avengers"--namely, to make a film that's in tune with the political zeitgeist as he perceives it. There, it was a post-9/11 revenge fantasy set against a backdrop of unpopular foreign wars.

In Leena Krohn's novella "Datura, or A Figment Seen by Everyone," the narrator, who works for a paranormal-news magazine, transcribes the inscrutable fifteenth-century text known as the Voynich manuscript while slowly poisoning herself with the seeds from a datura plant. Datura is known to cause delirium and dissociation, but it may also ease the symptoms of asthma, which the narrator has. Though she is skeptical of supernatural phenomena, the datura slowly undermines that skepticism; each day seems to bring one serendipitous event after another, not to mention mild hallucinations. The narrator describes feeling as though meaning is floating on the surface of things, untethered from their physical reality. "What does the word refer to," she asks, in a deconstructionist turn, "does it really signify anything at all?"

A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English. The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online. Among the five crosswords were two American-style ones from that day's editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.

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.