For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

Each new generation builds on the work of the previous one, gaining new perspective. New verbs are introduced. We Google strange and dangerous places. We tweet mindlessly to the cosmos. We Facebook our own grandmothers. I, for one, don't want to be left behind.

For people who have been raised on text-based interactions, just speaking on the telephone can be high bandwidth to the point of anxiety.

Johannes Cabal would kill me for saying this, but he's my favorite Zeppelin-hopping detective. The fellow has got all the charm of Bond and the smarts of Holmes--without the pesky morality.

Robots should stand up for themselves and not try to be humans. They should either utterly destroy us or protect us from aliens. And vampires. And pirates.

It's hard to guess how smart the machines are, but a good rule of thumb is that they're always smarter than you think.

Looking ahead, future generations may learn their social skills from robots in the first place. The cute yellow Keepon robot from Carnegie Mellon University has shown the ability to facilitate social interactions with autistic children. Morphy at the University of Washington happily teaches gestures to children by demonstration.