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The cars use sensors and computing power to maneuver around traffic. The cars use sensors and computing power to maneuver around traffic. From Rosie, the Jetsons' robot maid, to Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg in The Terminator, popular culture has frequently conceived of robots as having a humanlike form, complete with "eyes" and mechanical limbs. But tech reporter John Markoff says that robots don't always have a physical presence. "I have a very broad definition of what a robot is," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

John Markoff talks about his book, "What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." In the 60s, John McCarthy was working on replacing human intelligence using artificial intelligence and Doug Engelbart was working on augmenting human intelligence using computers. Both of them profoundly influenced several other engineers including those at Xerox PARC and the Stanford Artifical Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). John Talks about their contribution and how the PC revolution eventually unfolded. This is Part 1 of a two-part presentation.

UBIQUITY: Congratulations on "What the Dormouse Said" it's a fascinating book. MARKOFF: Well, I guess I'd call it a revisionist history. It about things that happened around Stanford University between roughly 1960 and 1975, and is a kind of pre-history of personal computing and the personal computer industry. What I was trying to do was to get at some of the culture through which the technology was developed. MARKOFF: Because technology never happens in a vacuum. The book was an effort to try to pin down how personal computing first emerged around the Stanford campus at two laboratories in the 1960's: one was run by John McCarthy, and was called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; and the other was run by Doug Engelbart and known as the Augmentation Research Center or the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center.

"Intelligent system designers do have ethical responsibilities." I have interviewed John Markoff, technology writer at The New York Times. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. The interview is related to his recent book "Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, published in August of 2015 by HarperCollins Ecco. Do you share the concerns of prominent technology leaders such as Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, who suggested we might need to regulate the development of artificial intelligence?