Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind - Hardcover

Moravec, Hans

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195116305 ISBN 13: 9780195116304

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1998

Synopsis

Machines will attain human levels of intelligence by the year 2040, predicts robotics expert Hans Moravec. And by 2050, they will have far surpassed us.
In this mind-bending new book, Hans Moravec takes the reader on a roller coaster ride packed with such startling predictions. He tells us, for instance, that in the not-too-distant future, an army of robots will displace workers, causing massive, unprecedented unemployment. But then, says Moravec, a period of very comfortable existence will follow, as humans benefit from a fully automated economy. And eventually, as machines evolve far beyond humanity, robots will supplant us. But if Moravec predicts the end of the domination by human beings, his is not a bleak vision. 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. "Intelligent machines, which will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values, can be viewed as children of our minds." And since they are our children, we will want them to outdistance us. In fact, in a bid for immortality, many of our descendants will choose to transform into "ex humans," as they upload themselves into advanced computers. We will become our children and live forever.
In his provocative new book, the highly anticipated follow-up to his bestselling volume Mind Children, Moravec charts the trajectory of robotics in breathtaking detail. A must read for artificial intelligence, technology, and computer enthusiasts, Moravec's freewheeling but informed speculations present a future far different than we ever dared imagine.

About 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.

Reviews

Moravec, founder of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, foresees big things for robots. "Barring cataclysms, I consider the development of intelligent machines a near-term inevitability." First- generation universal robots, with lizard-scale intelligence, will be at hand by 2010, he says. No more than 30 years later, fourth-generation robots will have human-scale processing power. "The fourth robot generation ... will have human perceptual and motor abilities and superior reasoning powers. They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle, operate our society increasingly well without us." Indeed, they should be able to carry human capabilities into the rest of the universe. And what will people do when the robots take over? They will all be able to lead the kind of life now enjoyed only by the idle rich.

Here come the free-roaming robot vacuum cleaners, self-driving cars, robot chess champions, robots that fly and swim. If these machine intelligencesAalready tooling around or on the drawing boardsAleave you blas?, consider this: Robotics pioneer Moravec predicts that if the present exponential growth rate of computing power continues, super-robots that perceive, intuit, adapt, think and even simulate feelings much like human beings will be buildable before 2050. Mixing broad speculations and practical suggestions for speeding up robotics research and development, Moravec, a founder of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, picks up where he left off in Mind Children (in which he suggested the uploading of human minds to software). In this new mind-bending futurist scenario, he predicts that advanced robots will perform all essential manufacturing and food production, pushing humanity into greater leisure and the sharing of wealth. Moravec's hypothetical robots also launch into the cosmos as colonizers, transferring whole industries to outer space. Yet, as these super-minds repeatedly restructure themselves, physical activity will increasingly give way to pure thought; cyberspace will become the inhabited universe and, in a science fiction-like twist, our robotic progeny may turn away from us in behavior and motive. Moravec dares to dream of a trillion-fingered medical robot whose molecular interventions allow it to act as diagnostic instrument, surgeon and medicine, and of quantum computers that make time travel conceivable. In this remarkable report, Moravec may have looked deeper into some aspects of the future than anyone else. Illustrated.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

Given the ever-increasing speed and memory size available to computer scientists, Moravec, who founded Carnegie Mellon's major robotics program, predicts that artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence by 2050. He argues further that it is only a matter of time before we have computer simulations that will substitute for human functionality. (Yes, robots will take over the work force, but ultimately humans will benefit from a fully automated economy.) Moravec considers the various arguments, philosophical and otherwise, that have been made regarding whether computers can "think" and devotes a fair amount of coverage to questions Turing raised 50 years ago. His comparison of libraries to knowledge bases is simplistic?apparently, Moravec doesn't see any intellectual component to cataloging?but overall his interpretations are imaginative and his arguments interesting if not always convincing. There will probably be a fairly broad audience for this work.?Hilary Burton, Lawrence Livermore National Lab., CA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195116305
• ISBN 13: 9780195116304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240