Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind

Author: Hans P. Moravec List Price: $17.95 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0195136306 Publisher: Oxford University Press (May, 2000) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 95,229 Average Customer Rating: 3.63 out of 5

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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

Many cringe at the thought of using computers to do anything but send e-mail or surf the net. However, after reading this, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that computers won't continue to bleed closer and closer into our personal lives until one day there may actually be some kind of union between the two.

And that brings me to my principal beef with this book. Perhaps H. Moravec has been working at arms length building robots for too long, because to me (a younger tech-savvy reader), if there ever is a "union" between man and machine, it won't be so much a union, but an "augmentation" of humanity. I will never become "part computer", but may use a computer to augment my life (enhanced bio-capability, enhanced intelligence, perhaps even immortality). The "us AND them" contrast Robot seems to paint never sat well with me.

Anyway, an informative and entertaining read.

Enjoy.

Robot begins with a good overview of robotics, outlining the work of cyber-pioneers such as Alan Turing, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky; then progressing into the late nineties. Moravec is a first-class robotics scientist and engineer, explaining technical issues and solutions in a concise, interesting manner. Good stuff, if you're interested in understanding robotics (why else would you be reading this book?).

Moravec then projects the growth of robotics and artificial intelligence employing a model similar to that of Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines. Both men base this growth on the exponentially increasing power of inexpensive computers, which they believe will match the computing power of the human mind by approximately 2020. They both present strong arguments that the human mind is fundamentally a complex machine; therefore, it's not a stretch to believe an equally complex mind can be developed in silicon. Moravec then provides his assessment of robot capabilities for each decade of the twenty-first century. It's fascinating and not unreasonable.

Okay, we all know the future is not going to look like Star Trek, but Moravec's vision for the coming centuries is just too unbelievable: robot corporations in outer space, some planet-sized, virtually all of humanity living on a dole provided by taxing robot corporations, "execs" with almost supernatural powers ... you get the idea. Who knows - maybe he will be right - but these speculations don't fit well with the practical, science-based tone of the bulk of the material.

Nevertheless, this is an excellent work if you enjoy thinking about the near-future. Read Kurzweil and Moravec back to back - throw in Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks - and you'll have a persuasive picture of what the next few decades may hold.

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