Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us [Hardcover]

Rodney Brooks (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 12, 2002

Flesh and Machines explores the startlingly reciprocal connection between humans and their technological brethren, and explains how this relationship is being redefined as humans develop increasingly complex machines. The impetus to build machines that exhibit lifelike behaviors stretches back centuries, but for the last fifteen years much of this work has been done in Rodney Brooks’s laboratory at MIT. His goal is not simply to build machines that are like humans but to alter our perception of the potential capabilities of robots. Our current attitude toward intelligent robots, he asserts, is simply a reflection of our own view of ourselves.

In Flesh and Machines, Brooks challenges that view by suggesting that human nature can be seen to possess the essential characteristics of a machine. Our instinctive rejection of that idea, he believes, is itself a conditioned response: we have programmed ourselves to believe in our “tribal specialness” as proof of our uniqueness.

Provocative, persuasive, compelling, and unprecedented, Flesh and Machines presents a vision of our future and our future selves.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The world of HAL and Data, of sentient machines, is fast approaching. Indeed, in some ways it has already arrived, as humans incorporate bionic technology and as humanlike machines increasingly take on the work of humans.

Rodney Brooks, a professor of engineering at MIT, has been involved in this transformation for decades. He has helped design robots that reason, at least after a fashion. The machines are as yet primitive, but, Brooks writes, in five years the boundary between what is now fantasy and fact will be breached, and intelligent machines will come into their own. With them will come a host of ethical problems, as we wrestle with the implications of Asimov's laws of robotics and with the very real possibility that we have created a new kind of slave. There's no way of getting around this future, it would seem, and, adds Brooks, our species will change in the bargain: "With all these trends we will become a merger between flesh and machines."

Antitechnologists may shudder at the story line, but readers interested in the gee-whiz possibilities of the digital age will be fascinated by Brooks's vision of what is and what will be. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Brooks, a leading "roboticist" and computer science professor at MIT, believes that robots in the future will probably be nothing like such all-knowing brain machines as 2001's HAL, nor will they resemble the sleek cyborgs of other Hollywood nightmares. Rather, they will be simple, ubiquitous, curious little machines that will have more in common with humans than one might think. Brooks, and his fellow researchers, suggest that the focus of much AI and robot research has been to develop superhuman devices that operate at the highest intellectual levels. Much better, he says, to make a lot of simple, cheap robots that can perform only a few tasks, but do them well. Brooks begins with a brief but comprehensive overview of the field of research into AI and robotics, then dives quickly into his and his fellow enthusiasts' work as they engineer one strange, insect-looking (and weirdly human-acting) metallic creature after another. Occasionally, Brooks's involvement with iRobots (he is chairman and chief technical officer of the robot company) shifts the book into an advertisement for upcoming products. Brooks points the way toward a future where humans work in tandem with and even begin to resemble a host of his fast, cheap creations not a science fiction utopia, but a future where people have a lot more and better tools to work with.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1 edition (February 12, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375420797
• ISBN-13: 978-0375420795
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #211,852 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #11 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Cybernetics
  • #17 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Computer Mathematics
  • #58 in Books > Computers & Technology > Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence > Robotics

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I had hoped for more, May 23, 2002

By 

Jonathan Teets (Scottsdale, AZ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Hardcover)

I was excited to get my hands on this book. I respect Brook's work and have followed it closely since the mid 80s. Perhaps that in itself invalidates me as this book's target demographic, which certainly seems to be those with little acquaintance of AI or robotics, or even science, for that matter. I would wager that most who have followed the philosophical and technical debates surrounding both topics, even if only in the popular trades, will find themselves let down. There's just too much philosophical fluff and religious rehash in this treatment to make it a consistently riveting read.

While inconsistent, there are points in the book that are quite satisfying. After a slow start tracking through ancient history, once Brooks begins telling his own stories and those of his contemporaries, he catches his stride and is captivating. It was late at night, but I couldn't put the book down as he described his laboratory's robots from Allen through Cog and the delightful Kismet (and Cynthia Breazeal! Never miss an opportunity to hear her speak, she can compress ten hours worth of speech into an hour and make it utterly digestible and entertaining.) Brooks lays out his insights regarding his design choices in clear and polished prose, and summarizes a variety of the motivating research without losing the reader in details. Would there were more, though, and more regarding the work of other researchers in robotics. This probably should have been subtitled _How MIT AI Lab Robots Will Change Us_.

There is enough in the book - say between pages 16 and 147 for me to justify the purchase, but after that point, I think it went downhill fast. My views regarding religion are very close to Brooks', but I still found his steamroll through the flower-fields of the almighty rather dull and repetitive. It's a lot like the five-cent tour given by every other pop-sci religion-drubber in the past half-century, and really, it's kind of tired now. If you're a pop-sci writer and you feel obligated to go over it again, please bring up a couple of new arguments or at least an invigorating take on an old one. Maybe you're not preaching to the choir, but we're the ones buying these books.

On the whole, I suppose Brooks did what he set out to do with this book, but I found the poorer writing in Moravec's _Robot_ and Kurzweil's _The Age of Spiritual Machines_ more interesting futurism, Menzel and D'aluisio's _Robo Sapiens_ more interesting and well rounded regarding robotics, and George Dyson's _Darwin Among the Machines_ more thought-provoking history. I can't help but think that Brooks could have written a much deeper treatment of his own research while leaving out his naïve and mild philosophical ramblings and produced a much stronger book. Maybe next time.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Something for Everyone and Something to Skip for Everyone, November 10, 2003

By 

Jonathan Goldstein "jonny goldstein" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Paperback)

Some people may recognize Rodney Brooks as the insect obsessed robot maker featured in the documentary film "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control." He seems decidedly in control as he lays out his version of the past, present, and future relationship of people and their technology in "Flesh and Machines". This control is one of the greatest virtues of the book. While other authors practically froth at the mouth as they prophesy the coming technorapture when they predict we will become immortal by downloading our minds into robots, Brooks comes to similar conclusions, but in a calm, only occasionally boring, manner. This makes me take him more seriously.

As a reader only casually versed in the science and history of robotics, I found the book informative and approachable. The first third of the book held my interest best. In this part, he recounts the early history of robotics with particular focus on a simple robot built in the 1940s nicknamed the tortoise, which combined simple electronics and sensors to create a machine with complex behavior. Brooks then goes on to use the ideas embodied in the tortoise to turn the modern world of robotics on its head. From 1950's though the eighties, robot developers tried to build robots that developed detailed world models, and thus could navigate through them with ease. That was the theory, but it did not work. Robots spent so much time building up these models that they moved slowly and gracelessly. After years of working on robot vision, Brooks wondered what would happen if a robot did not even try to create a mental model of it's environment. What if sensors linked to simple actions, a la tortoise? And what if the actions were guided by simple instructions, layered on top of each other, much the way evolution probably layered behaviors on top of each other? The results were surprisingly agile, frisky, insect shaped robots. I got a little lost with his technical description of how these robots worked, but I got most of it, and best of all I got a good understanding of his creative process. I found this first third of the book the most engaging.

.After that he bounces around between various topics, from his studies of visual perception, to Kismet (a humanoid robot designed to respond to physical and vocal cues), to his adventures in the toy industry. By the time I got to his description of household robots of the future, I was snoozing. Gadget freaks may have a different reaction.

In the final third of the book, he weighs in on the possibility of truly intelligent human made machines. While he offers little hope for people who want to cling to our specialness as human beings, he is cautious about the prognostications of futurists who think we will download our midns into machines in the near future. Brooks says there are a lot of hurdles to jump before we create emotional, conscious machines, or before we are able to port our selves into robots. and we might not have it in us to jump those hurdles ever. But in the meantime, he asserts that we will, through machine implantation and augmentation, and through bioengineering, merge with our technology to the point that we will become robot-people, so that if the machines ever catch up with us, they will find we are already them. All this is put forth in a calm, thoughtful, carefully weighed manner, which made me trust him more than the more entertaining, but frothier, Raymond Kurzweil.

I would recommend the book to a wide audience as long as they are prepared to skip around. There is something for most intelligent, curious people here: a portrait of a brilliant scientist, the basics of robotics, and a vision of the future. And for people who care about vacuum cleaner robots, that is there too. I just skimmed that part.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars good stories, shallow arguments, April 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Hardcover)

The book is full of interesting tales of the robotics revolution and Brooks raises all the good questions concerning the future of robots and their integration into our lives and persons. Unfortunately, Brooks also offers "arguments" about everything from the (in)significance of consciousness to the nature of humanity. The arguments aren't worthy of a bright undergraduate philosophy major, much less a distinguished scientist, and in fact his positions could have been supported with references of many other authors whose arguments are less facile. With a bit more effort this could have been a very good book.