In moments of hopeful fantasy, they imagine this wonderful machine serving Europe as the strong arm of a perfectly co-ordinated common foreign and security policy.

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"I can't imagine that a machine is going to tell a story and present it in a way that other human beings are going to accept it, " he said.

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He was, we liked to imagine, a simple machine in our hands.

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Imagine a tennis player practicing with a ball machine that is adjusted three notches above the pace the player is expected to handle.

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One mistake that the early researchers made was to imagine that nothing less than flawless, fully automated machine translation would suffice.

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Imagine, if you could be hooked up to a machine and it could scan your whole body in one short visit?

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Imagine a kid holding their teddy bear in front of the machine, and it comes to life on the screen.

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"Imagine a bank teller who's working with cash-counting machine in the basement of the bank, " Negrusz said.

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At Vassar College, in the 1980s, the argument was usually framed with a thought-experiment: Imagine that you wake up in a hospital bed, hooked up to a machine and soon realize that if you disconnect yourself from the machine, the person in the next bed will die.

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