Rating: 
Summary: domo arigato, mr. roboto
Review: A short, rambling discourse on the author's work on robots at MIT and his vision of the future. The book has no consistent theme but covers a number of interesting topics: the history of robotics, the author's work at MIT, the perceived inferiorities of other researchers, the physiological basis of conciousness, and, finally, our glorious cybernetic future.The sections on the author's own work are fascinating. His familiarity with biological concepts of self-organization lead him to use a completely different methodology than most other researchers in the field; anyone who has seen the PBS specials about his work or Errol Morris' "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" know what I am talking about. This methodology seems to have distinct advantages compared with the heavy math/CS bias that most experimenters display. Also interesting are his hypotheses regarding the physiological basis of conciousness (aka the "mind/body problem".) In the chapter "We Are Not Special", he argues for a coming "third wave" of disillusionment: following the Galilean discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and the Darwinian discovery the humans were simply the latest product of evolution, the author argues that in the coming years robotic/computer conciousness will demonstrate that there is nothing "special" about the human brain. A great chapter for those interested in AI/cognitive science issues. So overall, worth a read for your average nerd. I would give it five stars but for the author's arrogant and condescending tone and his tendency to unfairly disparage the work of other researchers.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating
Review: Fascinating predictions on the possible course of human and machine evolution by one of the world's foremost experts in the field. Whether or not one agrees with Brooks and shares (or does not share) his optimism is beside the point. He definitely sparks discussion!
Rating: 
Summary: Humans Are Machines, says Rodney Brooks
Review: Flesh and Machines by Rodney A. Brooks Brooks has been working with robots most of his life, and his knowledge of the subject is impressive. He provides a look into his own work in the field as head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT and an officer of iRobot company. His insight into the problems of getting robots to walk like humans and see like humans are especially valuable. I learned that my eyes are badly designed and do not let me see the world as clearly as I had thought. Machines could certainly do better, but then they would not interact socially with humans in the correct way. It turns out that the ways our eyes follow people and actions are important in the way we perceive each other. For a robot to seem human, its eyes must make contact with humans and gaze at whatever is attracting human eyes at the moment. However, I was somewhat disappointed in this book because I was most interested in whether the author felt robots could become sentient. Are they a new life-form? Although Brooks clearly knows his stuff when it comes to building robots, he seems to have very shallow thoughts about the nature of being alive. Is acting alive the same as being alive? He tells us about Kismet, the human-like head that engages humans in conversations (although Kismet speaks only nonsense), understanding when to look at the human and when to talk and when to "listen." Most of the robots Brooks has worked with are not very humanoid. Some are just tiny bug-like machines that ramble about a room and some, like Kismet, were built to prove out some aspect of making a humanoid robot. There are no robots in existence that can pass for a human. But Brooks seems to believe that much of the work involved in making a human-like robot is making it act human, regardless of the processing going on inside. This is an interesting concept, and makes sense because people will not respond to a machine that looks and acts like a machine, no matter how intelligent it is. In the classic Arthur C. Clarke 2001, the computer Hal (which Brooks says influenced him to go into his current career) could not match the emotions of humans. He was not "embodied" in the world as are humans. The way we see reality is influenced by the fact that we have bodies. We experience the world through our bodies. We are not computers. A computer is not human. But machine intelligence in a body that looks human would be "embodied" and could be make to experience the world the way we do. So, would it be "alive" or would it only appear to be 'alive?" Brooks sidesteps these issues by declaring that humans are machines. He says the very worldview that postulates the possibility of artificially-created life comes with an assumption that the machine is all there is -- there is no soul or spiritual body. This is taking the machine as the model and then saying machines have no soul, humans are machines and therefore humans have no soul. This makes no sense to me. Brooks presents no proof that humans are machines and that the visible human body is all there is to any of us. For that matter, he presents no proof that a machine could not develop to the point where it could have a soul. Admittedly, we are in murky territory here, but it seems to me that humanoid robots could indeed become a life form and progress, like the delightful artificial entity in the movie Bicentennial Man. Would a spirit not want to inhabit such a creature? Brooks says we'll all have robots of some sort in our homes in the future and points out that humans are becoming cyborgs through the use of artificial limbs and organs. He does not agree with Hans Moravic's idea that we'll all be downloading our brains into robots, but he thinks we'll become part-robot through medical implants and there is the possibility of biological material being used in machines. So humans and robots will become more alike. An interesting vision of the future, but it feels somewhat flawed. Robots were a big deal for a while in the 1980s and such luminaries as Nolan Bushnell (who Brooks does not even mention) predicted we'd all have personal robots "by the year 2000." He was wrong, and I think Brooks probably doesn't have it right either. But if you're into robots, the insights Brooks provides into what's happening in robotics make this book a worthwhile read.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfull AI book
Review: I found this book very easy to read. It was informative and entertaining. I also liked it because I now see Rodney Brooks on many shows and I know what he is thinking (well, sort of). I believe that this man would be a pretty fun person to hang out with in the lab. Definitley a good book to understand the current standing on robots and the future of robots.
Rating:
Summary: Not Profound But A Fun Read
Review: I picked up Rodney Brooks' FLESH & MACHINES with a bit of
uncertainty. I had known about Brooks, an MIT artificial
intelligence / robotics researcher of Australian origin,
for over a decade, having found his work on insectlike
robots very interesting. The uncertainty arose because
AI researchers tend to write materials that are either
completely opaque (Marvin Minsky comes to mind) or full
of grand arm-waving (and there's Hans Moravec for you). However, FLESH & MACHINES actually turned out to be a
generally fun read. Brooks is a surprisingly good writer
who can explain things clearly and can be entertaining.
He explains the evolution of his AI-robotics thinking, which
is oriented towards the idea of building up complicated
behaviors through hierarchical layers of simple "reflex"
functions (as opposed to constructing a computation-intensive
virtual model of the world and rules for interacting with
that model), and then speculates on the future of his field. The end result is less a treatise than a little bubbling potful
of ideas, which is fine by me because I find that a good
deal of fun, as well as mostly unpretentious. Although
Brooks is famously opinionated even that wasn't
off-putting, since he comes across much less than as a
beady-eyed zealot than as a advocate in a debate where
it never really gets personal. There's a lot of amusing tidbits in this book. I hadn't
heard much about what Brooks was up to in the later 1990s
and was a bit surprised to find out he and his people
went into the toy business as a sideline, creating the
interactive "My Real Baby" doll. Incidentally, he discusses the Furby doll in the context
of interactive toys and I was a little distressed to find
out that its "learning" capabilities for which so much
fuss was made were a fraud -- it simply had a program that
became more sophisticated in its operation over a
schedule, making it seem to become "smarter". Apparently
the marketing literature didn't exactly lie about this so
much as it misled. Alas, I swallowed it.
I am shamed. The later chapters of FLESH & MACHINES do get into some
arm-waving, but some of it remains interesting, though
as far as I am concerned Brooks might have cut it down
a bit. For example, he critcizes in detail folks like
Roger Penrose who fabricate a case that machine
consciousness is impossible, which seems like paying
too a bit too much attention to obvious sophistries.
If we can't even *define* consciousness in a scientific
way it hardly holds much water to say that a machine
will never be conscious -- no matter how many words
Penrose throws at the reader. A lot of the speculations in the final chapters aren't
much more stimulating than I might get in some good bit
of science-fiction, for example comic-book writer Adam
Warren's "Human Diaspora" stories, but Brooks does make
a few good points. For example, he suggests that the
only way of telling when a machine has become self-aware
is to ask it. Now if you think that sounds silly, then how would you
know *I* was self-aware except by asking me? And if I
told you I was, what could you say to persuade me
otherwise? In sum, FLESH & MACHINES may not be profound, but it does
have a lot of fun ideas in a compact package that doesn't
take too long to read. I think that I would find skimming
through it again in the future stimulating.
Rating:
Summary: A fantastic insight into the world of Robotics & AI
Review: I picked up this book after hearing Rodney Brooks speak and am very glad I did. The book is an exceptionally well written history, explanation and fore telling of the world of Robotics. Told with the expertise of a ongoing participant Rodney Brooks is clear and especially well informed well beyond his clear knowledge of activity on MITs campus. He describes activity from Standford and CMU to Cornell and, of course, his own AI Lab at MIT. He also discusses succinctly the Japanese robotic effort and recent products by Sony. For anyone wondering about emerging trends, the potential of robotics, or the potential of artifical intelligence (AI) this book is a treasure. Each chapter includes a rich bibliography. My only issue
with the book is that it could have benefited from more illustrations and photos.
Rating:
Summary: Part autobiography/ Part robot building philosophy
Review: I really liked this book, Brooks writes in a very conversational style, he explains some theory mixed in with the here and now of his life--good if your like me and enjoy listening to tales about how robots are created, but to some it might be boring. For me, the most interesting part was in the appendix about how Genghis worked.
Rating:
Summary: Second tier
Review: I was disappointed by Flesh and Machines, Rodney Brooks' rambling discourse on robotics. Unlike Ray Kurzweil's thought-provoking The Age of Spiritual Machines or even Hans Moravec's mind-bending Robot, Brooks seems to have no purpose in this book, except to write one. The material is familiar and has been covered better elsewhere. Not that it wasn't interesting in spots. Once you get past his drawn-out autobiography, Brooks provides a good overview of the problems researchers face trying to provide robots with the capabilities humans find second-nature. Vision is a good example; while computer vision is capable of detecting and recognizing human faces from the front, it falls down when confronted by side views or when people wear a hat, shave, even as they age. Brooks is also interesting when he discusses whether humans are special or just a biomolecular machine. As you might expect, he sees us as machines interacting with the objects of the world in accordance with physics, but he comes at it in a gentle, considerate manner. Eventually, he asserts, mankind will accept robots as emotional machines. Much as we have begun to overcome racial and gender discrimination, we will begin to accept our robots, both emotionally and legally. Flesh and Machines is a cut below Kurzweil's and Moravec's works so start with one of these. If you enjoy the subject, pick up Flesh and Machines for a pleasant weekend read.
Rating:
Summary: Second tier
Review: I was disappointed by Flesh and Machines, Rodney Brooks' rambling discourse on robotics. Unlike Ray Kurzweil's thought-provoking The Age of Spiritual Machines or even Hans Moravec's mind-bending Robot, Brooks seems to have no purpose in this book, except to write one. The material is familiar and has been covered better elsewhere. Not that it wasn't interesting in spots. Once you get past his drawn-out autobiography, Brooks provides a good overview of the problems researchers face trying to provide robots with the capabilities humans find second-nature. Vision is a good example; while computer vision is capable of detecting and recognizing human faces from the front, it falls down when confronted by side views or when people wear a hat, shave, even as they age. Brooks is also interesting when he discusses whether humans are special or just a biomolecular machine. As you might expect, he sees us as machines interacting with the objects of the world in accordance with physics, but he comes at it in a gentle, considerate manner. Eventually, he asserts, mankind will accept robots as emotional machines. Much as we have begun to overcome racial and gender discrimination, we will begin to accept our robots, both emotionally and legally. Flesh and Machines is a cut below Kurzweil's and Moravec's works so start with one of these. If you enjoy the subject, pick up Flesh and Machines for a pleasant weekend read.
Rating:
Summary: I had hoped for more
Review: I was excited to get my hands on this book. I respect Brook's work and have followed it closely since the mid 80s. Perhaps that in itself invalidates me as this book's target demographic, which certainly seems to be those with little acquaintance of AI or robotics, or even science, for that matter. I would wager that most who have followed the philosophical and technical debates surrounding both topics, even if only in the popular trades, will find themselves let down. There's just too much philosophical fluff and religious rehash in this treatment to make it a consistently riveting read. While inconsistent, there are points in the book that are quite satisfying. After a slow start tracking through ancient history, once Brooks begins telling his own stories and those of his contemporaries, he catches his stride and is captivating. It was late at night, but I couldn't put the book down as he described his laboratory's robots from Allen through Cog and the delightful Kismet (and Cynthia Breazeal! Never miss an opportunity to hear her speak, she can compress ten hours worth of speech into an hour and make it utterly digestible and entertaining.) Brooks lays out his insights regarding his design choices in clear and polished prose, and summarizes a variety of the motivating research without losing the reader in details. Would there were more, though, and more regarding the work of other researchers in robotics. This probably should have been subtitled _How MIT AI Lab Robots Will Change Us_. There is enough in the book - say between pages 16 and 147 for me to justify the purchase, but after that point, I think it went downhill fast. My views regarding religion are very close to Brooks', but I still found his steamroll through the flower-fields of the almighty rather dull and repetitive. It's a lot like the five-cent tour given by every other pop-sci religion-drubber in the past half-century, and really, it's kind of tired now. If you're a pop-sci writer and you feel obligated to go over it again, please bring up a couple of new arguments or at least an invigorating take on an old one. Maybe you're not preaching to the choir, but we're the ones buying these books. On the whole, I suppose Brooks did what he set out to do with this book, but I found the poorer writing in Moravec's _Robot_ and Kurzweil's _The Age of Spiritual Machines_ more interesting futurism, Menzel and D'aluisio's _Robo Sapiens_ more interesting and well rounded regarding robotics, and George Dyson's _Darwin Among the Machines_ more thought-provoking history. I can't help but think that Brooks could have written a much deeper treatment of his own research while leaving out his naïve and mild philosophical ramblings and produced a much stronger book. Maybe next time.
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