Bots: The Origin of a New Species [Paperback]

Andrew Leonard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

Bots is the story of cyberspace's first indigenous species. Strings of code, bots are a software version of a mechanical robot. Originally meant to do our bidding, when unleashed by computer hackers bots can disable computing systems and engage in personal attacks, and are capable of causing nuisance and chaos all over the Internet. Bots have great potential for either organizing our lives or sabotaging them.

In telling the tale of the development of software robots, Andrew Leonard constructs a playful, fascinating, anecdote-rich history of the Internet, tracking it from the free-form ASCII-text playground of chipheads, researchers, and scientists to the sprawling, advertising-laden, cultural entity it has become. In an expert and entertaining book, Leonard makes a sophisticated subject understandable, and explores the psychology and anthropology of popular technology.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cyberspace is now heavily populated with non-human residents known as bots. Bots are software robots that facilitate e-mail, entertain visitors, fight for control of IRC chat rooms or flood your e- mail box with spam. Andrew Leonard is the Charles Darwin of bots, chronicling their rise from the primordial cyber-ooze to their becoming major players as both drudge workers and nuisances of the computerized world.

The world of bots and their creators is filled with serious issues pertaining to online freedom, and is sometimes downright disturbing, but it is also often hilariously funny. The author takes us from the problems of recognizing artificial intelligence to the almost slapstick comedy of programming bungles. Leonard deftly reveals it all in a book that's extremely hard to put down. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

They can be chatterbots, spellbots, mailbots, or gamebots, but most of all they're just plain bots, or software robots (like Spellcheck) that serve as benign tools to increase productivity. But there are bad, self-mutating bots, too, roaming the roads of virtual societies everywhere?the fascinating (and scary) theme of this first book by Leonard, a writer for Wired magazine. Provocative musings abound: What happens when a competitor's bot becomes clever enough to raid your database? What does bot evolution say about our desire to attribute personalities to programs, our relentless need for companionship? Leonard doesn't have all the answers, but while his broad, artful look at humankind's mischievous electronic creation is laden with techojargon, it is uncomfortably right on the money: Do we not, as the creators of bots, bear ultimate responsibility for the electronic-sociological mire we have wrought? For all libraries where books on artificial intelligence are popular.?Geoff Rotunno, "Tri-Mix Magazine," Goleta, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140275665
• ISBN-13: 978-0140275667
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,042,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect for airplane trips, June 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bots: The Origin of New Species (Hardwired) (Hardcover)

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".

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars general readers only, January 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bots: The Origin of a New Species (Paperback)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best non -too- technical overview of software Agents, yet, January 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bots: The Origin of a New Species (Paperback)

<<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.