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.

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.

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.

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.

Sebastopol, CA - If you're an experienced programmer interested in crunching data, Machine Learning for Hackers will get you started with machine learning--a toolkit of algorithms that enables computers to train themselves to automate useful tasks. Authors Drew Conway and John Myles White help you understand machine learning and statistics tools through a series of hands-on case studies, instead of a traditional math-heavy presentation. "We can see how many people are interested in learning about machine learning (ML), but don't have the mathematical background to read traditional treatments of the book," says White (@johnmyleswhite). "We wanted to get people interested in ML in a hands-on fashion in the way that chemistry sets can get children excited about chemistry before they have the scientific background to learn the subject rigorously." White says that he and coauthor Drew Conway (@drewconway) wrote the book to match the tech community's growing interest in ML.

The film "2001" gained cinematic notoriety with the introduction of a self-aware, independent-thinking, murderous computer named HAL that became a sci-fi icon. In the movie's namesake year, IBM engineers launched an effort to develop technology to help computers monitor, diagnose, and heal their own problems. IBM isn't trying to create a real-life HAL, but it does want to make computers smart enough to heal themselves. The promise of autonomic computing--systems that function automatically, much like reflexive bodily functions such as breathing, without external intervention--still remains formative. Developing these sorts of capabilities often requires multiple vendors to work together toward a long-term vision to build networkwide capabilities, sometimes piece by piece.

For 20 years, computer scientists have been working on improving ways to search among reams of video clips for a particular shot. New research by IBM, Microsoft, and academic teams studying the problem could bring them a step closer to that goal. At a conference in Cambridge, England, last week, an IBM researcher gave the first public demonstration of a computer system called Marvel that uses statistical techniques to learn about relationships between colors, shapes, patterns, sounds, and other clues from video footage that can help identify its content. IBM's prototype then labels the footage so users can go back and find individual shots. That could be a boon not only to TV news producers but intelligence analysts watching surveillance video and even PC users editing home movies.