My review of Gutkind's Almost Human: Making Robots Think


I recently read Lee Gutkind's book Almost Human: Making Robots Think, published by W. W. Norton in 2006. It is about the place where I've spent most of my working life, so I was curious to see if he told the truth about the people I know. The rapid manufacturing project I work on is not mentioned in this book.

Almost Human is a book about a few of the mobile robot projects in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  Gutkind primarily focuses on Zoë, a mobile robot designed for autonomous scientific investigations to find signs of life in the Atacama Desert of Chile, Groundhog, a mobile robot designed to map mines, RoboCup, a international robot soccer competition, and the DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition to design an automated vehicle to travel autonomously across the desert.

Gutkind spends a lot of time describing the people involved in the projects he studied.  He talks about their personalities, their histories, their professional goals, how they work and aspects of their personal lives.  He tries to give the reader an image of what it's like being a robotics researcher working on these projects.  The image he presents is one that most people will not find attractive.  It is an image of overly demanding project leaders coercing people, mostly graduate students, to work themselves to exhaustion over long periods of time, often to the detriment of the projects they are working on.  It is also an image of highly motivated and intelligent people creating new things that others might have imagined to be impossible.  But the reader can't help but wonder if all that creativity couldn't have been accomplished at a somewhat more sane pace, perhaps with more success.

Gutkind is not always fair to the people he describes.  I was particularly annoyed by his characterization of Hans Moravec, whom he characterizes as representing the "dark side of robotics movement."  Moravec believes that it might be possible to transfer all the information in a person's brain to a computer in the body of a robot and thus to make a person virtually immortal.  He imagines a future where intelligent robots have become the dominant form of (non-biological) life, powerful enough to leave the confines of Earth and travel into space, possibly creating robot civilizations on other worlds.  This future frightens Gutkind for reasons he never states.  He calls Moravec's image of robots becoming more and more like humans "petrifying."  He responds by writing absurd characterizations of Moravec as a person.  He says Moravec "seems somewhat robotic" and "talks as if he has been activated by voice recognition software."  Sheer nonsense!  Moravec is a typically eccentric academic who walks around usually lost in thought, but otherwise he's quite normal and one of the most gentle souls I've ever met.  As for Moravec's image of the future, at this point it is still science fiction, but Moravec is far from alone in believing that robots will become increasingly like us.  They will become like us because we want them to be intelligent enough to help us do complex tasks, and our model of creatures capable of doing those best is ourselves.

At the end of the book, Gutkind writes, "Even the robots that are here today are far away—decades at least—from becoming a contributing element in our society."  He must have been talking about the few research-oriented mobile robots that he focused his attention on, because in general that is not true.  For example, iRobot Corporation sells a variety of practical mobile robots that are used every day in people's homes to vacuum their carpets, wash their floors, and clean their pools and garages, entirely automatically.  (They don't sell a robot to empty the dirt out of the cleaning robots; you have to do that occasionally yourself.) Moreover, robots have been used for many years in a variety of manufacturing applications. For example, robots help humans construct automobiles on the assembly line and they automatically insert chips onto circuit boards for computers. Robots contribute enormously to society already, even if most people don't usually see them at work.

Posted: Saturday - July 07, 2007 at 11:26 AM          

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