For this week's Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled "Strange Playfellow." It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the first to explore such technology. In Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R.," which débuted in 1921 and introduced the term "robot," artificial men overthrow humanity, and in Edmond Hamilton's 1926 short story "The Metal Giants" machines heartlessly smash buildings to rubble.

X-ray imaging is pivotal in medical diagnostics, offering non-invasive insights into a range of health conditions. Recently, vision-language models, such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model, have demonstrated potential in improving diagnostic accuracy by leveraging large-scale image-text datasets. However, since CLIP was not initially designed for medical images, several CLIP-like models trained specifically on medical images have been developed. Despite their enhanced performance, issues of fairness - particularly regarding demographic attributes - remain largely unaddressed. In this study, we perform a comprehensive fairness analysis of CLIP-like models applied to X-ray image classification. We assess their performance and fairness across diverse patient demographics and disease categories using zero-shot inference and various fine-tuning techniques, including Linear Probing, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), and full fine-tuning. Our results indicate that while fine-tuning improves model accuracy, fairness concerns persist, highlighting the need for further fairness interventions in these foundational models.

Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of vagueness in terms of mixed strategy that leads to a puzzle: vagueness cannot be strictly better than precision at equilibrium. More recently, \'Egr\'e, Spector, Mortier and Verheyen have put forward a Bayesian account of vagueness establishing that using vague words can be strictly more informative than using precise words. This paper proposes to compare both results and to explain why they are not in contradiction. Lipman's definition of vagueness relies exclusively on a property of signaling strategies, without making any assumptions about the lexicon, whereas \'Egr\'e et al.'s involves a layer of semantic content. We argue that the semantic account of vagueness is needed, and more adequate and explanatory of vagueness.

In Isaac Asimov's classic science fiction story "Robbie," the Weston family owns a robot who serves as a nursemaid and companion for their precocious preteen daughter, Gloria. Gloria and the robot Robbie are friends; their relationship is affectionate and mutually caring. Gloria regards Robbie as her loyal and dutiful caretaker. However, Mrs. Weston becomes concerned about this "unnatural" relationship between the robot and her child and worries about the possibility of Robbie causing harm to Gloria (despite it's being explicitly programmed to not do so); it is clear she is jealous. After several failed attempts to wean Gloria off Robbie, her father, exasperated and worn down by the mother's protestations, suggests a tour of a robot factory--there, Gloria will be able to see that Robbie is "just" a manufactured robot, not a person, and fall out of love with it.

For more than 15 years, Wikipedia discussed what to call the third child of Ernest Hemingway, a doctor who was born and wrote books as Gregory, later lived as Gloria after undergoing gender-affirming surgery, and, when arrested for public disorderliness late in life, used a third name, Vanessa. Last year, editors on the site finally settled the question: The Gregory Hemingway article was deleted, and its contents were moved to a new one for Gloria Hemingway. This would be her name going forward, and she/her would be her pronouns. Wikipedia's billions of facts, rendered as dry prose in millions of articles, help us understand the world. They are largely the brain behind Siri and Alexa.

Gloria is an ardent lover of technology and part of the content team at WebsitesThatSell.com.au - She provides an intelligent, lucid and authoritative filter for the overwhelming flood of information about technology. She does this in features, website analysis, and interactive digital experiences that invite the readers to probe deeper, examine data, and get to know experts and their opinions to see, explore, and understand new technologies and their impact. Gloria does it with her team with beautifully designed platforms, publications online, in print and on mobile.

"The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planet-wide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict." Written by famous and farsighted Phillip K. Dick in 1955, his central characters, three human survivors of the War, fight these factories and finally succeed in regaining control by eventually turning them against each other and thus making them destroying themselves. Above scenario describes a world in which humans constantly struggle to outsmart machines that are as smart as mice.

Henry Wellman is the Harold W. Stevenson Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. Kimberly Brink is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov collected a series of his short stories on robots in his now famous anthology I, Robot. The series "revolutionized science fiction ... and made robots far more interesting than they ever had been," according to the Saturday Evening Post. I, Robot begins with a lesser-known story: Robbie.

Initially, everything about Colossal seems inexplicably, gratuitously absurd. Or Anne Hathaway being involved with any of the above. Yet, after nearly two hours, the movie manages to sweep you up in its world, and it starts to make a weird kind of sense. And eventually, all the things that seemed unfathomable at first become exactly what makes its message so clear. That's not to say writer/director Nacho Vigalondo's (Timecrimes) latest film is perfect. But considering there's never been a kaiju movie that's an allegory for destructive relationships, it might be downright revolutionary.