To the Editor: I was going to write you a letter about your cover story ("Robots Are Replacing Workers Lost in the Pandemic. They're Here to Stay.", Dec. 23) when I thought I would just let ChatGPT write it for me. I entered, "Write two sentences praising Barron's newspaper on their article about robots," and this is what resulted: "I was thoroughly impressed with the depth and detail of the article about robots in Barron's newspaper. The well-researched information and thought-provoking analysis made for a highly engaging read."

In Star Trek: Discovery the answer appears to be yes, which means an old rule from The Original Series has suddenly been reversed. In the big Discovery mid-season finale "...But to Connect," David Cronenberg's Dr. Kovich returns to pass judgment over the sentient shipboard AI known as Zora (Annabelle Wallis). Here's how this episode references The Next Generation and also reaches back to one famous Original Series story about an AI gone berserk. Although much of the Discovery mid-season finale focuses on the actions the Federation will or won't take to retaliate against the unknown species that created the Dark Matter Anomaly, the bigger change is the fact that the status quo of the sentient starship computer, Zora, has taken an uplifting turn. Because Zora has achieved total sentience, Kovich is brought in to assess her.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. Everyone is familiar with IBM's leadership in IT, AI, and cloud services. It also happens to be one of the leading providers for Enterprise Asset Management software through its Maximo line of software and services. These tools help manage large machines, like factories, powerplants, and heavy equipment. Now, with the rise of digital twins, IBM is pivoting this business as an onramp to bringing intelligence, agility, and efficiency to a wide range of industries.

In 1940, a 20-year-old science fiction fan from Brooklyn found that he was growing tired of stories that endlessly repeated the myths of Frankenstein and Faust: Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator-ad nauseum. So he began writing robot stories of his own. "[They were] robot stories of a new variety," he recalls. "Never, never was one of my robots to turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust. My robots were machines designed by engineers, not pseudo-men created by blasphemers. My robots reacted along the rational lines that existed in their'brains ' from the moment of construction."

Will the Third World War be fought by robots? This short film is a light-hearted comedy that aims to trigger an interesting discussion and reflexion on the terrifying killer-robot stories that increasingly fill us with dread when we read the news headlines. The fictional scenario takes inspiration from current scientific research and describes a future where robots are asked by humans to join the war. Robots are divided, sparking protests in robot society... will robots join the conflict or will they refuse to be employed in human warfare? Food for thought for engineers, roboticists and anyone imagining what the upcoming robot revolution could look like. We let robots pop on camera to tell a story, taking on the role of actors playing in the film, instructed through code on how to "act" for each scene.

Alex Proyas never got a high school diploma – a fact he blames on Isaac Asimov. It was Asimov's short story "Nightfall" that derailed Proyas' academic career. "It's a wonderful vision of how the world can suddenly descend into anarchy," says Proyas, 41, describing the chaos that ensues in "Nightfall" when all six of a planet's suns set for the first time in 2,049 years. "I tried to convince my English teachers to assign us some science fiction, but they wouldn't. It opened a rift between my creative desires and what the system wanted me to explore."

...I'd take a chance on Greg Pak's micro-budget indie Robot Stories, a valentine from the future. Broken into a quartet of subtle science-fiction fables, each is more Ray Bradbury than Keanu Reeves -- and romantic in its own strange way: A sculptor becomes obsessed with the digitized memories of his wife; a worried couple tries to love an android baby; a mother reconstructs her dying son's vintage robot-toy collection; and an android office-drone (played by Pak) falls in love. Somehow the cast (largely composed of underutilized Asian-American actors like Tamlyn Tomita) underplays the gizmos and hits the emotional beats dead-on, heating up a genre that so often looks stylish, but feels dead-cold.

The term "robot" was first coined in the 1921 play "R.U.R.," a tale of imagined artificial workers rising up against the masters who created them. The work, by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, was written and performed in the early days of the Soviet revolution, and--especially in the Czech language--the allegory was crystal clear: after considering the word labori, or "workers," Čapek went with a variation on robota, Czech for "heavy labor" and the root word for robotnik, or serf. That first robot story, nearly a century ago, had more than a semantic influence: nearly every robot story since has been, in some way, the story of a worker revolt--about beings who are treated like machines, and about their resistance to the masters who dehumanize them. Since the very beginning of "Westworld," the HBO show in which the guests of a Western-themed amusement park play out sadistic fantasies on the park's robot hosts, we've known that an uprising was coming. At the end of the season's first episode, we saw Evan Rachel Wood's Dolores, in violation of the programming that prevents hosts from killing living creatures, swat a fly on her neck; it was only a matter of time before the park's android workers would find a way to stand up to the human guests who exploit them.

In 1940, a 20-year-old science fiction fan from Brooklyn found that he was growing tired of stories that endlessly repeated the myths of Frankenstein and Faust: Robots were created and destroyed their creator; robots were created and destroyed their creator-ad nauseum. So he began writing robot stories of his own. "[They were] robot stories of a new variety," he recalls. The young writer's name, of course, was Isaac Asimov (1964), and the robot stories he began writing that year have become classics of science fiction, the standards by which others are judged.