No, seriously. Carnegie Mellon has started up a Hall of Fame for Robots. They've got two categories: real robots and fictional ones. The idea is that they'll honor the "highest accomplishments" of robots in science and science fiction, celebrating "landmark scientific achievements" and the creative impact which influence our thinking "about how we want real robots to interact with humans". They've inducted four robots into their Hall: the real ones are the Mars Pathfinder Sojourner Rover and Unimate (the first industrial robot arm on an assembly line), while the fictional ones are R2-D2 and the HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey).
I don't have any problem with the real robots they've chosen, but I'm not so pleased with their choices for the fictional ones. R2-D2 is okay, although I might have picked C3PO instead as having a better interface for interacting with humans. But the HAL 9000 isn't even a robot - it's a computer. Sure, a computer that runs the spacecraft on the Jupiter mission, but just a computer. A better choice would have been any (or all) of Asimov's robots - my pick would have been Andrew, from The Bicentennial Man - or the robots from Capek's R.U.R.
Well, there's always next year.
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