Skip to main content

Almost Human: Making Robots Think – Lee Gutkind ****

 In my youth I was very fond of business biographies, particularly the ones about the early personal computing world – Apple, Microsoft and the like. I was really inspired by the stories of all those young people, prepared to sleep under their desk so they could get back to the code, or to get the hardware right, burning to make something exciting. I had been a programmer, and I understood this feeling.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m older, or because the world has changed, but I find it difficult now not to be slightly cynical when Lee Gutkind gives us a similar heroic presentation of the all-in working of the young postgrads building robots at Carnegie Mellon University, the focus of his book on the state of robotics. It’s a kind of fly-on-the-wall documentary book – Gutkind spent a lot of time with them – and he’s obviously a bit of a fan. Perhaps part of the reason for the cynicism is that in those early days of Apple, Microsoft etc. the bosses were the same as the workers, while in the university context there’s inevitably a feeling of the older professor throwing the troops to the lions (if you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor), using cheap student labour (making up courses to fit round the things they want to build) because they can’t run to proper research grants.
The other thing that is frustrating to a reader with a business background is the shambolic nature of the operation. People moan about commercial software, but on the whole it works because it’s well planned and well tested – this stuff seems to be neither. There’s too much of an “invented here” syndrome. When I worked for a large company we tried to do a project in cooperation with a university computer science department. We needed some dumb terminals (this was before PCs were common) for the job. Their attitude was “first task is to build the terminal.” Ours was “we’ll buy a terminal off the shelf.” Brought up on one-offs and specials, they couldn’t understand the need to use standard technology – or the benefits in terms of reliability and time saving of using something off the shelf. While there is some off the shelf work in Almost Human, there is still that “build it from scratch” mentality.
The only sense this is a criticism of the book is that Gutkind could be more critical of his subjects – otherwise, it’s a great read. It’s often a page turner as you wait to discover what happened next (though on the whole the answer is the same: the robot broke), and Gutkind gives a great insight into the work of the roboticists, the state of robotics, the interface between the roboticists and scientists, and also the self feeding nature of academia, with two different groups spending all their time on a study of how the others do their work.
It’s certainly an eye-opener if you think the sort of indistinguishable-from-human robots we see on TV and in the movies are anywhere near possible. Just getting a vehicle to go for a drive across open desert on its own is fraught with problems. It’s fascinating and frustrating in equal measures, giving an excellent insight into the state of robot research Carnegie Mellon style.

Paperback 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

The Naked Sun (SF) - Isaac Asimov ****

In my read through of all six of Isaac Asimov's robot books, I'm on the fourth, from 1956 - the second novel featuring New York detective Elijah Baley. Again I'm struck by how much better his book writing is than that in the early robot stories. Here, Baley, who has spent his life in the confines of the walled-in city is sent to the Spacer planet of Solaria to deal with a murder, on a mission with political overtones. Asimov gives us a really interesting alternative future society where a whole planet is divided between just 20,000 people, living in vast palace-like structures, supported by hundreds of robots each.  The only in-person contact between them is with a spouse (and only to get the distasteful matter of children out of the way) or a doctor. Otherwise all contact is by remote viewing. This society is nicely thought through - while in practice it's hard to imagine humans getting to the stage of finding personal contact with others disgusting, it's an intere

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur