NYC

While we're still awaiting pneumatic tubes that can whisk us to our destinations, elevators have been gaining a few IQ points. For example, they can be voice-activated or recognize an ID badge and route riders to their floors, meaning fewer seconds staring uncomfortably until the doors open. But they can also track workers' comings and goings, and bosses at Philadelphia's Curtis Center can program elevators to deliver specific employees directly to them. Not coincidentally, intelligent lifts can also ensure executives rarely have to ride alongside the  hoi polloi  -- a feature Bank of America, for one, paid for but says it doesn't use.  The Wall Street Journal  seems to worry this is the end of elevator democracy, but we support anything that reduces our time trapped in small metal boxes. The Wall Street Journal

Although we usually prefer our computers to be perfect, logical, and psychologically fit, sometimes there's more to be learned from a schizophrenic one. A University of Texas experiment has doomed a computer with dementia praecox, saddling the silicon soul with symptoms that normally only afflict humans. By telling the machine's neural network to treat everything it learned as extremely important, the team hopes to aid clinical research in understanding the schizophrenic brain -- following a popular theory that suggests afflicted patients lose the ability to forget or ignore frivolous information, causing them to make illogical connections and paranoid jumps in reason. Sure enough, the machine lost it, and started spinning wild, delusional stories, eventually claiming responsibility for a terrorist attack. Yikes. We aren't hastening the robot apocalypse if we're programming machines to go mad  intentionally , right? Forbes University of Texas

We've been told time and time again to fear our mechanical friends, so imagine our relief when we heard that some Swiss scientists had a batch of bots that displayed altruism. What's more, these little two-wheeled foragers weren't programmed to share, they  evolved  the trait. Researchers at EPFL infused Alice microbots with digital "genes" that mutated over time as well as color sensors that allow them to navigate their environment. The robots were tasked with collecting "food" and given the option to keep it for themselves or split it amongst their silicon-brained relatives. The more they decided to give to others with similar genetic makeup the more those virtual genes were passed on to future generations -- including the one for altruism. The experiment is an example of Hamilton's Rule, an evolutionary model for how the seemingly counter-intuitive trait of selflessness could arise through natural selection. Don't let your guard down just...