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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...
Post a Comment
Read more