From: Publishers Weekly, October 5, 1998
p65
ROBOT: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
Hans Moravec. Oxford Univ., $25
(240 pp.) ISBN: 0-19-511630-5
Here come the free-roaming robot robot vacuum cleaners, self-driving
cars, robot chess champions, robots that fly and swim. If these
machine intelligences--already tooling around or on the drawing
boards--leave you blasé, consider this: Robotics pioneer
Moravec predicts that if the present exponential growth of computing
power continues, super-robots that perceive, intuit, adapt, think and
even simulate feelings much like human beings will be buildable before
2050. Mixing broad speculations and practical suggestions for speeding
up robotics research and development, Moravec, a founder of Carnegie
Mellon University's Robotics Institute, picks up where he left off in
Mind Children (in which he suggested the uploading of human
minds into software). In this new mind-bending futurist scenario, he
predicts that advanced robots will perform all essential manufacturing
and food production, pushing humanity into greater leisure and the
sharing of wealth. Moravec's hypothetical robots also launch into the
cosmos as colonizers, transferring whole industries into outer
space. Yet, as these super-minds repeatedly restructure themselves,
physical activity will increasingly give way to pure thought:
cyberspace will become the inhabited universe and, in a science
fiction-like twist, our robotic progeny may turn away from us in
behavior and motive. Moravec dares to dream of a trillion-fingered
medical robot whose molecular interventions allow it to act as
diagnostic instrument, surgeon and medicine, and of quantum computers
that make time travel conceivable. In this remarkable report, Moravec
may have looked deeper into some aspects of the future than anyone
else.
Illustrated. (Nov.)
-- Copyright ©1998, Publishers Weekly.