There are a growing number of examples of social technology making a real impact in all areas of business including marketing, customer support and even human resources.
It is also grappling with a big cost overrun on another of its top priorities - the James Webb Space Telescope - and for which the shortfall will have to be picked up by programmes across the agency, perhaps even human spaceflight.
But adaptable in what way, and how does the human body and even the human brain adapt to this very, very different environment?
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Gratified, because the idea of inclusive fitness has enormous explanatory power, even for human behaviour.
Lately, big pharma has been known to pledge hundreds of millions of dollars on medicines that haven't even entered human testing.
Even as human resources policies work to push women up the ladder, many reports today confirm that the gender gap remains: Men earn more and rise faster across countries and industries.
Even so, human creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit can produce useful products that people are willing to buy.
Such knowledge will be medically useful even when the human genome is completed.
Even seemingly innocuous human actions can have devastating repercussions for the marine ecosystem.
Some believe it could even lengthen the human lifespan, by a decade or more and make old age more active and enjoyable.
This machine, known as the Turk because of its exotic costume, could play chess, moving the pieces with a mechanical arm and defeating even the best human players.
Even if the human brain were significantly different in structure and function the basics of behavior, action, social living were all evolved and inherited from all other living things.
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There are also core conservatives who believe destroying human life in any way, even if it means potentially helping another human being, is immoral.
Sham insurers can take many forms, including phony associations (think the Scuba Divers Association of Nebraska) or even third-party human-resource administrators.
But this is not the only, or even most important, human responsibility.
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But even setting aside that human-based cheating aside, the challenge of building a CAPTCHA that can't be understood by automated software has become far more complex.
Where we get to the point, that the machines are so good at doing everything, we will no longer want a human to even attempt to do the work for us.
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Of all the recent comic-book transplants to the big screen, Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker has been the most likable, quirky and reliably human, even when he's squirting web-juice from his hands as the semi-superhuman Spider-Man.
In Click, his fast-selling book released earlier this month, he argues that the ISP's massive data dump can tell us what consumers want, predict the economic future and maybe even offer insight into human nature.
So respect must be paid to someone like Thor Hanson, who, well past childhood, seems to have lost none of his enchantment with the natural world, including how feathers evolved and even their role in human commerce.
Engineers can calculate the most efficient route for a spray-painting robot to take around a car body, work out how quickly parts must be supplied, look for bottlenecks or even tell if a human worker's task is likely to give him backache.
Even in business school, there were only a handful of men in my human capital classes, and even fewer who chose to focus in HR.
Even back office work like human resources and accounting, is now handled by part-time or contract labor.
Or would you rather we stay as we are, primal as we are, even at ventures that showcase human ingenuity?
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But even the landlines need less human attention because Verizon is rapidly replacing old-fashioned copper lines with lower-maintenance, fiber-optic cables.
It is also worth remembering that gesture is still a crucial part of human language, even for those with normal hearing.
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Time can be cruel toward even the most enduring of human creations.
But to see the clip of the "Oprah" performance is--he does things with the human spine that even Dr. Detroit could not manipulate.
Now that enterprise machines can fix their own deficiencies and be even more productive than their human counterparts, we have come full circle.
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