Customer Reviews

Bots: The Origin of New Species (Hardwired)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

It's well-written and treats the subject with respect, even if at times it is a bit lacking in technical details. A good overview of "computer programs which can travel".

a bit padded - if only there were no word 'journalism', and no such style - but an easily readable introduction to the phenomenon of bots in MUDs and Usenet & such, suitable (only) for the uninitiated. it would have to be more complex to be of serious intellectual interest, and much has happened since that is not in this 1997 book. still, there are many uninitiated out there, and it serves a purpose for those who think the computer age is defined by the replacement of the typewriter by the word processor, and calculation, calculation.

<<I will never forget that particular incendiary moment when Kevin Kelly told me over the phone to "let myself go" and strive to be the "Darwin of bots.">>

BOTS The Origin of a New Species by Andrew Leonard

A while back, am not sure why, I was bitten by an unsatisfying wish, need and desire to know what a software robot was. I looked here and there, specially Internet, trying to find the information I was seeking, but without good results. Then, I decided that a book would be a better choice. Things weren't going much better, till, finally, I found a few books on the subject. BOTS: The origin of a New Species was the newest of the group and had a title that ringed nicely to my ears, probably because I am an advocate of AI and its related branches.

Once the books arrived, BOTS was, I had decided, the one to be read first since the others were more technical -oriented to the how, why, where and what. That decision ended up being not just the right order of reading, but the only one.

BOTS is a simple book, written with an easy to understand and follow language. It's part a book of facts, part a sci-fi novel and part the story of an evolution.

BOTS showed, in a new bright way, how had software robots came to be, their pains, their stakes, the things that got lost, and the ones that were found.

In this book, told in beautiful full color are their past, their present, and a future that spreads wide open into a 3D universe.

BOTS is not a hard-core technical manual on software robots, nor is it a step by step guide on the how to, or a deep psychological analysis of the why -although it includes them in a restricted manner. It is, rather, a story told by a storyteller, on a quiet night, of how they became, and how their future might be like.

As the future comes along, and today goes into the past, BOTS might not be remembered as a bible on software robots, but it will indeed have a -deserved- special place, and could en up being considered a relic of/for Bots. Just like the Neuromancer (by William Gibson) is in the Cyberspace arena.

Leonard shows us the world of the -software- daemon kind, and in doing so, the future will tell, he himself became a daemon, but not of the human kind, but that of BOTS.

Bots screams of WIRED styling...cool formatting, bright colors on the cover, the "hip" topic of computing, but lacking sufficient technical depth or visionary musing to truly excite the reader. While it has an easily approachable writing style, Leonard lacks precision in his definitions. Is a bot autonomous, an agent, an idea, or just, as it appears in the book any software with a name ending in `bot' (SpiderBot, ChatterBot, CancelBot...). Ultimately the book ends up warning us about something we cannot quite identify. It can be seen as a series of cautionary tales warning of how automation and anthropomorphizing computers can wreak havoc. Yet, because he is unwilling to either give details of how `bots' work, or sufficient vision to see a larger picture, the book comes off as a study of chat rooms and IRC tantrums. Easily read, but easily dismissed as teenage boys with too much time. I didn't feel challenged. If you know the net, you know this book. If you don't know the net, you won't learn anything too scary.

Agents on the Internet are not quite powerful enough yet to really be called lifeforms. Andrew Leonard does make the case that it may only be a matter of time until we who define ourselves as 'alive' have to change our definition.

The book is _fun_ to read. The story of the multiplying Barneys in a virtual Texas town, the Mark V. Shaney Usenet posts, the evolving IRC channel protection bots .. all are wonderful stories of how the Internet is moving toward a plethora of artificial life.

Highly recommended.

I believed that this book was about robotics. Although not in-depth enough for this techie, this is one of the only general introductions to Software Bots or Agents that I have seen. If you want a fair introduction to the genesis of Bots this book will serve you, however you will not find pseudo code; math; or even modern coverage of bot technology. Overall the book leaves me ambivalent.

A really boring, hipper-than-thou book. Recommended for insomniacs.

This is another book review from Wolfie and Kansas, the boonie dogs from Toto, Guam. We approached Andrew Leonard's "Bots" The Origin of New Species" with trepidation. We dogs have a lot of trouble with scientific and technical matters. As Gary Larson noted in "The Far Side", the greatest dog scientists in the world have yet to unravel the mysterious workings of the doorknob. Before we read "Bots", the only computer or internet book we had been able to understand was "Dave Barry in Cyberspace". We were relieved to discover that Andrew Leonard is one of those rare writers, like Ed Regis, who makes technical and scientific matters comprehensible, and often interesting, even to a boonie dog.

There are parallels between "Bots" and another recent book, Mark Derr's "Dog's Best Friend". Both Leonard and Derr divide their books largely into chapters that are based upon different tasks or functions performed by the species at issue. Both emphasize that they are discussing a species in which evolution is often guided by humans. For bots and dogs, survival of the fittest is often determined by utitility or appeal to humans. Both Leonard and Derr note that humans are not always successful at playing god, having produced both spambots and vicious pitbulls.

Andrew Leonard indirectly raises another issue of great concern to dogs. He discusses PF Magic's bot cyberpets, Catz and Dogz. Leonard states that bot writer Profesor Ken Schweller speaks of bots "with a gentle affection, as if they were golden retrievers." One might think that we real dogs would worry that humans would replace us with bots. That need not be the case if writers like Mr. Leonard continue to explain things to us so well that we dogs can understand and interact with bots. After all, in Clifford Simak's classic science fiction novel "City", it was the dogs and the robots who ultimately got together and decided that the humans were expendable

Very verbose and full of worthless information. Not at all what I expected. More a lesson in sociology than computer science, I advise the technically minded to AVOID this book.

Well, the book IS an interesting text from the simple aspect of documenting a few select net societies and the effects that bots have had there. Unfortunately it's only use is like a documentary photograph of the civil war....a blurry record of the past that you can't learn much from it itself and because of angle you can't even accurately use to number the dead. The book does not talk about programming, use, etc. of bots, nor do I feel the book really hits the true potential of the story: the real and future impact of bots on the internet (and beyond). What is reported is only reported; simple cause and effect that probably should have been tucked in some net-archive and forgotten.