From: Booklist, November 1, 1998
Moravec, Hans
ROBOT: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
Oxford Univ. (240 pp.)
$25.00
Nov. 1998
ISBN: 0-19-511630-5
Moravec is a pioneer designer of robots, and here extrapolates how
their future--and humanity's--may evolve over the next century. With
computer power increasing exponentially, Moravec regards the
emergence of machine intelligence as inevitable, and, quite sanguine
about the prospect, he clearly explains the software ideas that
would allow it. Moravec opens with Alan Turing's seminal theories of
computing and then describes the difficulties the first robot
engineers encountered in getting simple robots to cross a
room. Computers lacked common sense (and still do), but Moravec
believes the monumental capacity of the future computer will allow
it to create an ever more accurate, real-time simulation of its
world. After outlining four possible generations of robots,
culminating in "Exes" (ex-humans) that design and build themselves,
Moravec releases his imagination and has them trooping off Earth,
preserved as a nature refuge, and colonizing space in a Darwinian
process. Moravec's vision, a bewildering but amazingly
interconnected set of ideas, is enthusiastically presented and
reasonably argued, and will captivate futurists.
-- Gilbert Taylor
Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved.