Back in the 1980s, DARPA as part of the Strategic Computing Initiative had funded an autonomous land vehicle, dubbed the “smart truck,” which the historian Alex Roland described as a “large ungainly, box-shaped monster.” Instead of a windshield, the front of the vehicle sported a “large Cyclopean eye” that housed the robot’s sensors. It looked more 1950s camp science fiction than Terminator, but the exterior was not important. What mattered were the rows of computers stacked inside the fiberglass shell of the truck and the algorithms that were supposed to make sense of the outside world. Those
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