(FORTUNE Magazine) – It sure is tough to be a hero to your spouse. Take Yoshihiro Fujiwara, the director of Matsushita's intelligent electronics laboratory. He has put the principles of fuzzy logic -- a form of artificial intelligence that can deal with nonquantifiable concepts such as beauty and comfort -- to work in Matsushita's consumer products. Examples: washing machines that adjust the amount of soap to the degree of dirt in your laundry and hand-held video cameras that compensate for your shaky digits and produce a sharp, focused picture. Fujiwara didn't invent fuzzy logic -- the credit for that goes to Berkeley professor Lotfi Zadeh. But Fujiwara helped his employer become the first manufacturer to leap from mathematical theory to machines that know their own minds. Says he: ''It's a mistake to tell scientists to ignore the outside world.'' Now he is busy with the next step: ''neural networks'' that permit machines to learn about their environment and adjust to their operators. Possible products include a word processor that corrects its owner's common spelling errors and a vacuum cleaner that memorizes the layout of the house. The technology-obsessed Japanese love Fujiwara's appliances, but some housewives are skeptical -- including Mrs. F. She keeps using her ten-year-old Matsushita washing machine. Fujiwara stands by her kind of logic: ''The machine hasn't broken down yet.''