George Jetson did not want his family to adopt a dog. For the patriarch of the futuristic family in the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons, apartment living in the age of flying cars and cities in the sky was incompatible with an animal in need of regular walking and grooming, so he instead purchased an electronic dog called'Lectronimo, which required no feeding and even attacked burglars. In a contest between Astro--basically future Scooby-Doo--and the robot dog, 'Lectronimo performed all classic dog tasks better, but with zero personality. The machine ended up a farcical hunk of equipment, a laugh line for both the Jetsons and the audience. That's how we have imagined the robot dog, and animaloids in general, for much of the 20th century, according to Jay Telotte, professor emeritus of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.

Shortly before Prime Day in June, Amazon announced it was developing two robots for its infamously demanding distribution centers. Named "Bert" and "Ernie" after the Sesame Street Muppets, the robots, Amazon claimed, would help relieve the physical burden of its jobs by autonomously carting materials through distribution center floors and lifting heavy totes off shelves. They were not, the company stressed, intended to increase speed or replace workers, but to improve safety and free workers for tasks "that require…critical thinking skills." According to the company, the robots weren't some nefarious plot; instead, they embodied its empathy for workers and commitment to innovations that would help consumers and employees alike. The announcement's timing was convenient.

Penn Jillette, as a magazine columnist, strikes an interesting pose. Clearly, it was never a top line item on his resume, and it took place when being a prominent tech journalist tended to have a smaller profile than it does today. But he still did well enough in the role that, for a time, he became one of the best-known editorial voices on technology in the country, one that only occasionally mentioned his day job. Now, tech writing of this era doesn't have the pedigree of, say, good music journalism in the 1970s. Certainly, there were good tech writers during this time, particularly free-wheeling voices like fellow moonlighter Jerry Pournelle of Byte, hard-nosed insiders like journeyman scribe John C. Dvorak and the long-anonymous Robert X. Cringely, and well-considered newspaper voices of reason like syndicated columnist Kim Komando and the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg.

A collective eyebrow was raised by the AI and robotics community when the robot Sophia was given Saudia citizenship in 2017 The AI sharks were already circling as Sophia's fame spread with worldwide media attention. Were they just jealous buzz-kills or is something deeper going on? Sophia is not the first show robot to attain celebrity status. Yet accusations of hype and deception have proliferated about the misrepresentation of AI to public and policymakers alike. In an AI-hungry world where decisions about the application of the technologies will impact significantly on our lives, Sophia's creators may have crossed a line.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be very glad to tell my story. I am a smart fellow as I have a very fine brain of 48 electrical relays." This is how Elektro the robot introduced itself to crowds at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Standing 2.1 meters tall and weighing 118 kilograms, Elektro performed 26 different tricks, including walking, talking, counting, and singing. It had a vocabulary of approximately 700 words, although its responses were all prerecorded and played back from 33⅓-rpm records.

MUELHEIM-KAERLICH, GERMANY – As head of the Muelheim-Kaerlich nuclear reactor, Thomas Volmar spends his days plotting how to tear down his workplace. The best way to do that, he says, is to cut out humans. About 200 nuclear reactors around the world will be shut down over the next quarter century, mostly in Europe, according to the International Energy Agency. That means a lot of work for the half a dozen companies that specialize in the massively complex and dangerous job of dismantling plants. Those firms -- including Areva, Rosatom's Nukem Technologies Engineering Services, and Toshiba's Westinghouse -- are increasingly turning away from humans to do this work and instead deploying robots and other new technologies.