Skip to main content

Hallo Robot - Bennie Mols and Nieske Vergunst ***

From that title with the strangely archaic 'hallo' spelling to the subtitle 'meet your new friend and workmate' the cover of this book promises either quirkiness or cringeworthiness. When it comes to the contents, thankfully it's more the former than the latter in this survey of the world of robotics. (It could also be because the book has been translated from Dutch.)

Starting with historical automata (strangely never called this) and bringing in humanoid robots, industrial robots and the whole science of robotics (plus quite a lot of artificial intelligence), the format gives us a series of chapters dealing with specific challenges such as sight, cognition and speech, each ending with a case study. The whole thing is finished off with a rather nice fiction/fact timeline on robotics through the ages, though it is rather unfortunate that the authors thought that Daleks were robots.

On the whole the coverage is good, though the level is perhaps a little superficial even for a reader with very limited knowledge of the topic. Outside the case studies there is relatively little narrative - more a collection of facts - but the book is rarely dull, helped by the glossy full colour illustrations throughout (the downside of this is the text is all on glossy paper, which makes it feel less like a real book).

There are a few small issues. The tone, as the cover suggests, is mostly positive to the extent of being sunny, and as such tends to avoid being clear about limitations. While we often hear something of what isn't possible now, it's almost always accompanied by a 'but it will get better' some time in the fuzzy future. Claims for existing robots can make them sound better than they are - we're told, for example, that Asimo could walk up stairs, which is true, but omits to point out this wasn't a universal ability, but rather the robot had to be given specific guidance for a particular flight of stairs. Also the occasional historical detail wasn't quite right. We're told SHRDLU is ‘a nonsense word Winograd made up’ - but it isn't, any more than QWERTYUIOP is a ‘nonsense word.’

Perhaps the weakest part is when dealing with self-driving cars. Much is made of them being potentially safer than human cars, and an interviewee is quoted as saying that he thinks the 'turning point will be when self-driving cars are ten times safer than human drivers.' But there is no attempt to unpack the implications. This would mean around 4,000 people a year killed in the US alone each year by self-driving cars - admittedly with 36,000 fewer expected deaths, but the 4,000 would be actual people with relatives to sue the manufacturers. There's a really interesting contrast with a section talking about self-flying planes where it says we still won't fly in planes without a human pilot 'And that's entirely justified...'

While the book could do with a bit more depth, it is attractive and covers a fair amount of ground. Perhaps best for teenagers with an interest in the topic.
Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more