The Coming Robot Revolution: Expectations and Fears About Emerging Intelligent, Humanlike Machines (repost)

Product Description:

This book discusses the emergence of humanlike robots into our everyday world. It covers the trends, possibilities, and concerns we will all feel with their emergence. Robots will walk, talk, and look ever more like people, and with the speed at which new technologies develop, this may happen very soon. Robots will be in homes, in space, in workplaces, in hospitals–everywhere. Their capabilities will soon surpass what has been usually considered science fiction. In what directions will the technology be taking us, and how will the presence of these robots challenge our identity? This book explores the fascinating implications of robot technology while alerting of its possibly disturbing flipside.



Summary: accessible to a general audience
Rating: 4

For several years, Springer has been publishing a well regarded set of books on robotics, including recently the massive Springer Handbook of Robotics. But these books were often monographs, intelligible only to researchers in the field. In contrast this current book is accessible to a lay audience.

Like the monographs, each chapter has a considerable list of references and websites. But there is no maths. No equations about control systems theory, about stabilising a dynamical system, for instance. Plus no low level hardware descriptions of actuator mechanics, as another example.

Instead the narrative is kept quite general. It gives a global survey of efforts to develop often humanoid looking robots. Which is another difference from the above mentioned handbook, which went into considerable details about some thoroughly non-humanoid specimens. Bar-Cohen and Hanson stuck to the former, which may be an appeal of this book to some readers.

The book reveals that we have a long way to go before reaching anything like an "intelligent" robot. There are photos in the book of apparently lifelike robots. But these are superficial short cuts, where the robots' exteriors were essentially mannikins. When it comes to actual behaviour and an underlying intelligence, these are early days.

In passing, the book also shows that Japan is making a strong push in this field of humanoid robots. Which reflects in part the aging demographics of their society and the need for ever increasing automation, as well as for companions for humans.