Title: Flesh and Machines – How Robots Will Change Us
Authors: Rodney A. Brooks
Edition: Hardcover
Publisher: Pantheon Books / Random House (New York)
Copyright: 2002
Printing: 2002
Dimensions in inches: 9.5 x 6.25 x 1.0 (260 pages)
ISBN: 0-375-42079-7
Flesh and Machines explores the startling reciprocal connection between humans and their technological brethren, and explains how this relationship is being defines as humans develop increasingly complex machines. The impetus to build machines that exhibit lifelike behaviors stretches back centuries, but for the last fifteen years much of this work has been done in Rodney Brooks’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. His goal is not simply to build machines that are like humans but to alter our perception of the potential capabilities of robots. Our current attitude toward intelligent robots, he asserts, is simply a reflection of our own view of ourselves.
In Flesh and Machines, Brooks challenges that view by suggesting that human nature can be seen to possess the essential characteristics of a machine. Our instinctive rejection of that idea, he believes, is itself a conditioned response: we have programmed ourselves to believe in our “tribal specialness” as proof of our uniqueness.
Provocative, persuasive, compelling, and unprecedented, Flesh and Machines presents a vision of our future and our future selves.
Contents
- Dances with Machines
- The Quest for an Artificial Creature
- Planetary Ambassadors
- It’s 2001 Already
- Machines to Live With
- Where Am I?
- We Are Special
- We Are Not Special
- Them and Us
- Us as Them
CONDITION: NEW
Hardcover edition with dust-jacket in FINE condition, with strong binding, bright boards, sharp corners, and small remainder mark at the top edge (see photo). All pages are free from any writings, markings, tears, or pastedowns. Text block and pages are tight and clean, with no soiling, creasing, dog-ears or markings.
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