Everyone in Japan knows the exact date on which the Age of Robots began: April 7, 2003, Astro Boy's birthday. Astro Boy was the cartoon robot created by legendary Japanese animator Osamu Tezuka in 1951. Featured in a hit TV series in Japan and the United States in the 1960s, Astro Boy had rockets in his legs, searchlights in his eyes, and machine guns in his shorts. He inspired a generation of roboticists. Tezuka set his birthday in 2003, because he was sure that by then autonomous humanoid machines would be everywhere. Tezuka wasn't that far off―in Japan, anyway. The most visible example is a herd of toys ("entertainment robots," in the jargon) jamming upscale-Tokyo-store shelves, among them Sony's well-known Aibo robot dog, Sega Toys' Poo-chi (a big-headed, blue-eared pooch), and scheduled for spring, a robot cat from toymaker Bandai.
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