In fact, the Byzantine Empire and the medieval Islamic world were in love with technology. He finds robotlike machines in antiquity and the Renaissance, but denies there was any technology in the Middle Ages. He cites his ''darling wife, Janet Sonenberg,'' in the acknowledgments, then says later that a human is ''a big bag of skin full of biomolecules.'' Good luck, Ms. He is a persuasive writer, but I worry about his marriage. He says consciousness may be ''the result of simple mindless activities coupled together.'' Our senses and muscles are part of who we are.īrooks predicts that we will soon see an explosion of humanoid robots (first, probably, as house servants) and that we will award them human rights. Given Genghis's illusory stalking and Brooks's now famous statement that we ''overanthropomorphize humans,'' I assumed he was galloping toward the conclusion that consciousness does not exist. Brooks's robots do it as soon as they are switched on. He realized that a robot did not need an ability to avoid obstacles, but could be programmed ''to seek paths through empty space.'' Zen Buddhist monks spend several lifetimes learning to grasp the void. One of his brainstorms was figuring out how to make his robots negotiate a crowded room. He believes that so-called higher functions derive from the ability ''to see, walk, navigate and judge.''īrooks gives us a tour of the marvels of the human vision system and the difficulties in building them into a robot. From a robotics point of view, he suspects that playing chess and solving algebra problems might be easier to fabricate than visually distinguishing ''between a coffee cup and a chair'' or walking around obstacles, things that a 4-year-old child can do. Genghis has no internal notion of forward or backward.īrooks takes issue with the robotics pioneer Marvin Minsky, who has concentrated on cognition and has belittled the problem of seeing, since ''even stupid people could do it well,'' in Brooks's words. When Brooks pointed the sensors backward, Genghis walked away from mammals. But stalking implies intent, and Genghis has none. To observers, it appears Genghis is stalking prey. If a mammal, say a human, passes in front of Genghis, it moves toward the infrared radiation. In Genghis, the sensors are tuned to the infrared band emitted by the warm bodies of all mammals, and connected to the robot's motors. It is outfitted with six pyroelectric sensors, identical to motion sensors that turn on the lights in your driveway. The key, he writes, is to get the robot to react to its sensors quickly. As it turned out, Brooks's robots didn't need a brain to exhibit intimations of consciousness. This was radical thought, if not outright heresy. Brooks appears to have gained a boundless appreciation for human beings by attempting to copy them. It also offers surprisingly deep glimpses into what it is to be human. ''Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us'' is a short, stimulating book written by one of the major players in the field - perhaps the major player - about the state of robotics and its short-term future. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, tells me that in 20 more years we will have robots with feelings and consciousness, I'm not going to argue with him. Twenty years later, cloning human embryos is almost routine, though it remains unethical to apply the technology to magazine publishers. I crossed out ''Grundy,'' wrote in ''Bob.'' ''I want you to clone Bob.'' Bob was her husband and the owner of the magazine. The biologist had just recovered from this interruption when the publisher burst in again. By way of compliance, I wrote ''Clone Grundy'' on my desk calendar. ''I want you to clone Grundy,'' she said, indicating the Rhodesian Ridgeback. IN 1982 I was sitting in my office trying to convince a British biologist of the sobriety of the science magazine I edited when my publisher, a woman wearing a sheer silk scarf in lieu of a blouse, burst in with a large, flatulent dog on a leash.
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