Moravec predicts that machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040. By 2050 they will have surpassed us. He also suggests that before long an army of robots will eventually displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. Far from railing against a future in which machines rule the world, Moravec embraces it, taking the startling view that intelligent robots will actually be our evolutionary heirs.
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This is science fiction without the fiction--and more mind- bending than anything you ever saw on Star Trek. Moravec, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, envisions a not-too-distant future in which robots of superhuman intelligence have picked up the evolutionary baton from their human creators and headed out into space to colonise the universe.
This isn't anything that a million sci-fi paperbacks haven't already envisioned. The difference lies in Moravec's practical-minded mapping of the technological, economic, and social steps that could lead to that vision. Starting with the modest accomplishments of contemporary robotics research, he projects a likely course for the next 40 years of robot development, predicting the rise of superintelligent, creative, emotionally complex cyberbeings and the end of human labour by the middle of the next century.
After Moravec makes this point, his projections start to get really wild: robot corporations will take up residence in outer space with rogue cyborgs; planet-size robots will cruise the solar system looking for smaller bots to assimilate, and eventually every atom in the entire galaxy will be transformed into data-storage space, with a full-scale simulation of human civilisation running as a subroutine somewhere.
His last chapter, which mingles the latest in avant-garde physics with hints of Borges's most intoxicating metaphysical conceits, is a breathtaking piece of hallucinatory eschatology. Moravec concludes by reminding us that even the wildest long-range predictions about the technological future never turn out to be as unhinged as they should have been. -- Julian Dibbell, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Hans Moravec, one of the leaders of robotics research, was a founder of the world's largest robotics program, at Carnegie Mellon University. The author of Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, Moravec lives in Pittsburgh.
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Progressive change sculpted our universe and our societies, but only very recently has human culture seen beyond the short cycles of day and night, summer and winter, birth and death, to recognize it. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Progressive change sculpted our universe and our societies, but only very recently has human culture seen beyond the short cycles of day and night, summer and winter, birth and death, to recognize it. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Ok this book isn't especially well written, but in my view it deserves 5 stars because of the strength of the ideas. A year ago now I met Morovec at a symposium in Stanford on this subject. Very interesting. His presentation was almost embarassingly poorly delivered compared with most of the other speakers - a variety of leaders in this field, however once the Q/As got going it soon became apparent that this was at least partly because Morovec was significantly brighter than even that distinguished line up. To me the core idea of this book - that humanity is pretty close to the end of the line in that we will soon pass the batton of evolutionary development over to our mechanical creations is very likely to prove correct. I think it remains an open question as to whether the hand over will happen quite as quickly as imagined by Morovec, though the argument that Robotics earlier failures were in retrospect only to be expected because of lack of computer power is certainly interesting. However I think this is just a timing question.
On some other issues I dont find Morovec so convincing. His theme is that Robotic life will carry the batton of intellectual endeavour gloriously into the future. I think this needs more careful thought, in particuar a more careful analysis of the way in which an evolutionary process can drive this development. My suspicion is that the success that humans have had in this regard is mostly due to the assistance iintellectual endeavour has given to military dominance. I also think that Morovec's vision of human concerns being given a long tern home within our cyber progeny is misplaced, I think that if the takeover happens, the human perspective will quickly become of little more than historical interest.
So all in all, it is very unlikely to pan out as Morovec speculates, but he may nevertheless be seeing the future more clearly than almost all of the rest of us.
By Owen Gard
Format:Paperback
This is a book of two halves. The first half is historical, and the second speculative. Most people will be buying this book for the second half (which predicts the rise of the robots) but I found the first hundred pages more worth-while. In the first four chapters Hans Moravec discusses how far machine intelligence has come since the 50s. I never knew that to overcome human telepathic powers the Turing tests had to be conducted in "Telepathy Proof Rooms". Is that still part of the official specification?
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
Like danny hillis once said, if you gave me the chance to upload my brain into a robot, i'd do it in a minute. This book takes a while to get going. It takes you on a tour of the authors trevails with primitive robots. but when it hits the future, and lays our the next one hundred years, you can't help but feel excited and giddy with anticipation. I wish he spent more time on nanotechnology, but what there was was excellent. I thought I had just about read it all, but he turned many of my notions about the future inside out. a powerful vision of the future.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting Speculations On Mankind's Future
Fascinating predictions on the possible course of human and machine evolution by one of the world's foremost experts in the field. Read more
Published on 13 July 1999
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well speculative and thought provoking insight
I feel this book gives a very well view of one of the many possibilities computer can give to our future. Read more
Published on 17 Jun 1999
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well speculative and thought provoking insight
I feel this book gives a very well view of one of the many possibilities computer can give to our future. Read more
Published on 17 Jun 1999
1.0 out of 5 stars
fantasy run amok
I used to enjoy Morvac, good sci-fi, downloading human minds to machines, instant immortality...cool! Read more
Published on 18 Feb 1999
2.0 out of 5 stars
Robots: 1 Humans: 0
Are you concerned that the robots of the near future will become so astoundingly hyperintelligent that they will be driven to consume humanity and the Earth like so many... Read more
Published on 28 Dec 1998
4.0 out of 5 stars
Highly speculative but thought-provoking.
In his latest book, Hans Moravec predicts that robots will take over Earth sometime in the next century. Read more
Published on 24 Dec 1998
2.0 out of 5 stars
Speculation big time
This is an undeniably fascinating book, which presents highly imaginative vistas of a relatively short-term future. Read more
Published on 18 Nov 1998
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not yet written but foreseeably funny
So Hans Moravec has finally found a publisher! After having written a book some years ago and having announced another ('Mind Age', for those who can't remember the title) for... Read more
Published on 18 Jan 1998
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