Exactly what is wanted of a machine? Is it supposed to be as close as possible to a human being, or to improve on that, and become superhuman? In the quest for mechanical perfection, does perfection mean infallibility (as in the computer), or innocence (as in the child)?

All these questions, about memory and consciousness and emotions, about what makes us human, are "fuzzy." Maybe we don't yet know how to state the questions, in the same way that questions about the cosmos didn't make much sense before astronomy.

So we can play around with these questions, but they don't make sense. When you push on the questions, they all break, in some funny way. Maybe we're just too ignorant. We're sitting here on this flat earth, contemplating the heavens above us - if we think we're on a flat earth, we're just not asking the right questions.

Edison's doll, now barely a footnote in biographies of the inventor, was in 1890 no small affair. He built a separate building, 40 X 210 feet, to be devoted exclusively to production of his talking doll. Two hundred and fifty people were involved in the production of each doll.

The factory had a capacity to make 500 dolls a day - that is, over 100,000 dolls a year. The dolls were 22 inches long and weighed 4 pounds: they cost $10, more than the average worker's weekly wage.

The Edison Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company turned out to be a failure. Though it is not known how many dolls sold, there are orders in the files for very few, perhaps 300. An inventory of the doll factory building at the end of 1890 showed 7,557 on hand. No more than a few exist today.