Rating: 
Summary: Automation and quality of life
Review: The best book on the future of robotics and automation! However, Hans believes robots are our wonderful mind children and should grow into powerful machines that evolve quickly past us. He is then horrified that some humans may transform themselves into machines and become very dangerous. Why won't his mind children be just as dangerous or more dangerous? At least a mind-transferred human might seek pleasure and fun. While Hans' logical AI robots make their galactic invasion plans!
Why not engineer automation to its pleasure giving limits? Instead of giving robots a high quality of life, design automation to increase EVERYONE quality of life and wealth on Earth???
Rating: 
Summary: Speculation big time
Review: This is an undeniably fascinating book, which presents highly imaginative vistas of a relatively short-term future. Now although the book is anchored on Hans Moravec's solid knowledge of things computational, most of the text comes across as little more than wild speculation a la Frank Tipler. Moravec's assumes the resolution of so many and so complex social, technological and scientific problems that it is difficult to follow the last two thirds of the book with a different frame of mind than that one would adopt when watching Star Wars. In particular, the pervasive idea of correlating raw computing power with intelligence, with complete disregard to the structure imposed on that computing power, results irksome. In summary, a very entertaining book that should be read with more skepticism than most books.
Rating:
Summary: All your base are belong to us
Review: You have no chance to survive make your time. You have no chance to survive make your time. You have no chance to survive make your time.
Rating:
Summary: A truly first-rate book of speculative science.
Review: ____________________________________________
Robot begins quietly enough, with a pithy reprise of the history of
robotics and artificial intelligence, and some nifty short-term
projections: robot cooks and houseboys, coming soon! Then it turns
to a strange, cool, unblinking vision of a future where ordinary
biologic humans are confined to a reservation/retirement home on
cozy old Earth, while their "mind children", advanced machine
intelligences, go out to conquer the Universe in a "bubble of Mind
expanding at near-lightspeed."Moravec's mind-bubble will absorb and digest every physical entity in
its path, from ancient Voyager spacecraft to entire alien biospheres.
("I am vast. I contain multitudes.") These absorbed entities, he says,
"may continue to live and grow as if nothing had happened, oblivious
to their new status as simulations in cyberspace." Data-storage
capacity won't be a problem -- the atoms that make up your body,
Moravec tells us, "could contain the efficiently encoded biospheres of
a thousand galaxies." With the entire cosmos transformed into cyberspace, it would be
possible for not just our "original versions," but every variation on
them, to "live" as massively-parallel simulations, playing out all of
the possibilities of Alternate History, perhaps as entertainment for
the vast, cool Intellects that have supplanted us. As Moravec notes,
we could already be living as simulations: We might well wonder
whether we're the "true" original, or just one of many reruns. "There
is no way to tell for sure," he writes, and since we can never know,
"the suspicion that we are someone else's thought does not free us
from the burdens of life." And Moravec's not done. Now things gets *really* weird, as he
moves into a"what is reality?" windup that invokes Frank Tipler's
Omega Point, anthropic cosmology, parallel universes, and life after
death. He does get a little flaky here [note 2], but what a grand
Stapledonian blowoff! Science fiction readers will recognize concepts from many of the
finest hard-SF novels of the past few decades: Gregory Benford's
universe-conquering machine intelligences, Greg Egan's lives-as-
simulations, Vernor Vinge's Singularity, Robert Forward's fractal-
bush robots. Robert Charles Wilson's current Darwinia
could almost be a novelization of Robots. Moravec's book is an
excellent guide to the science behind a lot of recent SF -- and an
exciting (if disturbing) preview of what's next. These connections to SF are no accident: Moravec, who co-founded
the robotics program at Carnegie-Mellon University, grew up reading
science fiction, built two robots for high-school science-fair projects,
and first published his robot/AI speculations in an Analog essay in
1978, while a student at Stanford. He expanded that piece into a
popular-science book, Mind Children (1988, also excellent), which the present book extends and updates. (He promises the next update in
2008.) Moravec has also written Omni articles with Robert Forward
on space elevators (1981), and with Frederik Pohl on uploading
people to computers (1993). Plus he's been a Hollywood consultant
for science-fiction movie-makers. Reading through his CV, I wonder,
does the man ever sleep? Robot is among the few truly first-rate books of speculative science --
books in which respected scientists extrapolate their ideas into
the future with some rigor. Other such books include K. Eric
Drexler's Engines of Creation (1986), and Freeman Dyson's
Disturbing the Universe (1979), Infinite in All Directions (1989), and
From Eros to Gaia (1992). Books such as these provide a sense of awe
and wonder equal to the very best of science fiction -- perhaps the
more wondrous for being, quite possibly, true. Interested readers can find much more information at Moravec's
excellent website: [google] __________
1) -- if for no other reason than to supply empathetic characters for
hard-SF set in the far future -- a challenge that's tough enough
without using a Moravecian ultimate-AI for a protagonist... 2) To his credit, Moravec recognizes that this chapter has problems.
He's promised (and has started) a rewrite on his website. review copyright 1999 Peter D. Tillman
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