Tales from a Robotic World - Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo *****

There have been a lot of books on artificial intelligence and robotics of late, and I was entirely prepared for this book to be a case of ‘same old, same old’, but in reality it was delightfully different. Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo set out to explore the future of robotics (typically in the 2040s/2050s) in a series of scenarios which involve telling a short science fiction story, but interlacing it with sections on where the technology is now and how it can be developed.

Some of the scenarios are very familiar, such as disaster recovery or sexbots, but others are distinctly intriguing in their own right. Two examples that jumped out at me were the idea of using swarms of aquatic robots to monitor and protect the Venice lagoon and of seeding Mars with robotic plants that can be used to prepare the ground and raw materials for incoming humans.

After a while, taking this approach presents the reader with a danger of the sections on different applications getting samey, so Floreano and Nosengo change tack towards the end of the book with chapters on how to compete with robots (when they might be coming for your jobs), how the robotics industry might develop as a business and the ethics of robotics. They point out in the section on the industry that robots are often the product of mega-corporations in fiction, but suggest this might be modelled too much on the car industry of the period the stories were written. (To be fair, though, IT is arguably dominated by mega-corporations today.) There are some interesting thoughts on how the industry might develop here.

The dangers of taking the partially science fiction approach are two-fold: it requires at least some writing talent from the authors to avoid presenting us with dull, worthy tales and it’s easy to get excited by the possibilities of the future and over-promise on what the technology will be capable of. On the writing side, while I don’t think Floreano and Nosengo will trouble the likes of Adam Roberts and Alastair Reynolds, their prose is fine. (I did wonder if they made a mistake in their intro, when they described this as a genre mastered by ‘Isaac Asimov… and Ian McEwan’ - no problems with Asimov, but were they thinking of Iain M. Banks, as McEwan’s SF career has hardly been stellar?)

There is an element of over-promising, as it’s not always obvious if it’s going to be possible to get from where we are now to where the authors are promising for the future. As Floreano and Nosengo themselves point out, being able to do something in a lab and being able to perform well out in the wild are very different things. Autonomous cars have regularly underperformed on real roads so far - and that's typically on big, grid-based US roads as opposed to the narrow winding roads of Europe. Similarly, robots are rarely properly tested in the real world before claims are made for the future capabilities - but given the steps forward that have been made, it’s entirely possible that at least some of the timescales suggested here will be feasible.

A couple of other small moans - the only illustrations were drawings accompanying the SF stories - I would loved to have seen photographs of the actual robots described in the present day sections. And (admittedly trivial, but the editor should have spotted this) - we read 'the sky outside her window was all but silent' which means that it was almost silent, not anything but silent, which is what the authors intended it to mean.

It’s so refreshing when a book you don’t expect to amount to much proves to be genuinely enjoyable and intriguing - and that was the case here. Great stuff.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here