Almost Human: Making Robots Think [Hardcover]

Lee Gutkind (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 17, 2007

A remarkable, intense portrait of the robotic subculture and the challenging quest for robot autonomy.

The high bay at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University is alive and hyper night and day with the likes of Hyperion, which traversed the Antarctic, and Zoe, the world’s first robot scientist, now back home. Robot Segways learn to play soccer, while other robots go on treasure hunts or are destined for hospitals and museums. Dozens of cavorting mechanical creatures, along with tangles of wire, tools, and computer innards are scattered haphazardly. All of these zipping and zooming gizmos are controlled by disheveled young men sitting on the floor, folding chairs, or tool cases, or huddled over laptops squinting into displays with manic intensity. Award-winning author Lee Gutkind immersed himself in this frenzied subculture, following these young roboticists and their bold conceptual machines from Pittsburgh to NASA and to the most barren and arid desert on earth. He makes intelligible their discoveries and stumbling points in this lively behind-the-scenes work.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Gutkind (In Fact) spent six years as a self-described "fly on the wall" at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, watching a group of scientists—mostly grad students—try to develop human movement and decision-making capabilities. The machines he encountered came in a variety of shapes and sizes, from dog-shaped toys programmed to play soccer to a Hummer equipped with sensors that enable it to drive itself. As that Hummer indicates, the institute's research isn't confined to the lab: Gutkind follows his roboticists to abandoned mine shafts and the northern edges of Chile, where they use the world's driest desert to test machines developed to find signs of life on the surface of Mars. Gutkind's reporting captures the individual quirks of the scientists—like one researcher who only shaves on Sundays to save time during the week for his research—but his low-key tone can mute the excitement of their successes, especially given the fail-fix-try-again nature of most of their projects. Yet even though his story lacks the drive of books like Soul of a New Machine or Hackers, it gives a solid sense of what's going on in the field. 15 illus. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Creative nonfiction guru and seasoned immersion journalist Gutkind observes that just as computers changed the world in the 1990s, robots will "transform technology" in the future. To find out who is behind the growing robotic surge, Gutkind spent six years observing life at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, a "hypertechnological pressure cooker," where work is frenzied, frustrating, "inspiring, compelling," and addictive. Gutkind presents vivid profiles of roboticists, including graduate students, the "strong and vital force" behind the group's innovations. Audacious pranksters, shy geeks, and wry wits, they fall into rivalrous groups, the engineers versus the "code monkeys." Scenes at the institute alternate with entertaining reports on RoboCup competitions (soccer is an excellent mode for robot testing) and dramatic accounts of an ambitious project in Chile's Atacama Desert, a stand-in for Mars. Creating autonomous robots is a daunting task that arouses renewed appreciation for the fact that "a human being is the most sophisticated system in the universe." Gutkind's incisive and provocative dispatches from the robotic front will help prepare us for the next machine wave. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (March 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393058670
• ISBN-13: 978-0393058673
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,198,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lee Gutkind is the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and prize-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, the most recent of which, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As founder of the creative nonfiction movement, according to Harper's Magazine, and the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" (Vanity Fair), Gutkind travels widely throughout the world giving workshops and readings, explaining the craft and the mission of the genre.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Almost Science, May 3, 2007

By 

E. Vershum - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Almost Human: Making Robots Think (Hardcover)

An example of what goes wrong when an author without any expertise in a field attempts to write a "popular" science book. This is about the robotics program at CMU. It follows the "popular" format - focus on the personalities as a framework for the science. But the spark and drive of the people doesn't come across at all, because the author has no feel for the subject. There is no larger context, since the author was only at CMU to observe, and knows nothing about any other robotics work besides what the people there may have said. There is no bibliography or index.

An egregious error 1/2 way through the book was nearly a showstopper for me ("Linux is the language in which some of the robotics programs are written. The reason Apple computers are not used extensively here is because Apple's can't interface with Linux."), but I plodded through the rest.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Decent overall, June 8, 2007

By 

Vahagn Karapetyan "The King" (Burbank, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Almost Human: Making Robots Think (Hardcover)

The book might be a bit misleading with its title because you don't really get the impression how the robots described in the book are even remotely close to being human but it does an excellent job when it comes to describing the world that roboticists live in. It portrays their struggles and frustrations and then their celebration at even the slightest hint of success.

However, if you are someone that expects a book that mainly focuses on the concept of artificial intelligence and discusses all the abstract theories associated with the concept then you might be looking for the wrong book. There are little bits of info on the aforementioned topic throughout the book but the main focus of the book is about the experiences of the roboticists, not the theories behind the kind of work they do.

Overall, it is a great way to get a good picture of the robotics culture in the United States and get to know some famous individuals and institutions in the field.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a very good read, September 19, 2009

By 

Steve M. Myers - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Almost Human: Making Robots Think (Paperback)

It seems poorly written, and it is not what I expected. The author talks far too much about people rather than "making robots think". There is not all that much on actual robots and a lot of filler. There has to be a better book on this subject.