Customer Reviews

Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Its a decent book about Robots and AI written in a friendly and honest manner. The first 2 sections of the book are interesting but the third section dealing with the future seems very uncertain.
Rodney Brooks seems to have lost his faith in Robots slightly and instead of getting Ray Kurzweils' ranting hyper future we get crappy robot lawnmowers and robots that can open the fridge and maybe get you a beer if you install a speciak fridge. Hmmmm runs out of steam a bit.
Still though he has been at it for 20 years and anybody thats been at anything for 20 years is worth having a listen to. And thats what its like, a gentle chat!

While parts of this book are interesting (the early discussions of individual robotics projects are interesting) the latter half devolves into what are largely stream of consciousness-type musings that veer between the quasi-interesting and somewhat muddled. This is a book that is not likely to satisfy those who are already savvy in the area, and intelligent lay people may feel (like I did) that they plopped down good money for a relatively undisciplined piece of work.

Having read this book it's plain to see how cutthroat the world of AI research and development is. For author and certified 'AI authority' Rodney Brooks, it seems like the odds are stacked against him in his quest to bring true AI to life. He kicks things off with a mini history lesson, briefly covering everything from the 18th century automotans to early 20th century computing. His most interesting and relevant example is W. Grey Walter's 'mock turtle' toybots. He illustrates how a simple design with on-the-fly decision processing could fool people into believing that a machine could in fact possess intelligence. Running under the creedo "fast, cheap and out of control" Brooks has presented a view of AI which flies in the face of academic models. One of the more fascinating aspects of the book is how people in this field obtain funding. It seems that practicality is often overlooked in order to secure bigger budgets extending research. Brooks spends considerable time pointing out the faults of this system while patting himself on the back for trying something different. That's all fine and well - until we hit the juice.

At some point in this book the focus shifts from practical applications to the prospect of "conscious robots". After rambling on about the philisophical implications this might entail he takes a few shots at contemporaries like Ray Kurzweil and John Searle. And this is where we first learn of "the juice"; the new "stuff" that we haven't yet discovered which contains the meaning of life, the universe, everything. Considering this explanation comes on the heels of a rant against people who "think they're special" it's a little bewildering. At least someone like Kurzweil has a sliver of theory to base his wild ideas off of. Brooks on the other hand goes off the deep end with his juice theory without even the slightest argument.

It would be nice to read a book of this nature which actually addresses how an AI might actually approach something subjectively. How might an AI develop tastes, emotions, desires and impulses? With the juice? You've got to be kidding me.

A short, rambling discourse on the author's work on robots at MIT and his vision of the future. The book has no consistent theme but covers a number of interesting topics: the history of robotics, the author's work at MIT, the perceived inferiorities of other researchers, the physiological basis of conciousness, and, finally, our glorious cybernetic future.

The sections on the author's own work are fascinating. His familiarity with biological concepts of self-organization lead him to use a completely different methodology than most other researchers in the field; anyone who has seen the PBS specials about his work or Errol Morris' "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" know what I am talking about. This methodology seems to have distinct advantages compared with the heavy math/CS bias that most experimenters display.

Also interesting are his hypotheses regarding the physiological basis of conciousness (aka the "mind/body problem".) In the chapter "We Are Not Special", he argues for a coming "third wave" of disillusionment: following the Galilean discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe, and the Darwinian discovery the humans were simply the latest product of evolution, the author argues that in the coming years robotic/computer conciousness will demonstrate that there is nothing "special" about the human brain. A great chapter for those interested in AI/cognitive science issues.

So overall, worth a read for your average nerd. I would give it five stars but for the author's arrogant and condescending tone and his tendency to unfairly disparage the work of other researchers.

This is a rather strangely constructed book. The beginning describes the evolution of thinking in robotics. His primary argument is that complex behavior comes from the interaction of sensors and simple rules, both in animals and machines. I thought the discussion of this was fascinating, and the examples eye-opening (literally).

Then he goes off in another direction and spends 2 chapters plus arguing that humans are no different from machines, and that anyone who believes in God is fooling themselves. I have no idea why this is necessary for his argument, and found it rather offensive personally, as well as a waste of time.

But he brought me back at the end with a too-brief discussion of how robotics will increasingly be used to suplement or replace our human capabilities such as sight, hearing, and walking. The discussions of using mouse muscles in robots, and programming e. coli were quite engaging.

I can't say this book hangs together as a piece, but overall I was certainly entertained and gathered a lot of good cocktail chatter.

I was disappointed by Flesh and Machines, Rodney Brooks' rambling discourse on robotics. Unlike Ray Kurzweil's thought-provoking The Age of Spiritual Machines or even Hans Moravec's mind-bending Robot, Brooks seems to have no purpose in this book, except to write one. The material is familiar and has been covered better elsewhere.

Not that it wasn't interesting in spots. Once you get past his drawn-out autobiography, Brooks provides a good overview of the problems researchers face trying to provide robots with the capabilities humans find second-nature. Vision is a good example; while computer vision is capable of detecting and recognizing human faces from the front, it falls down when confronted by side views or when people wear a hat, shave, even as they age.

Brooks is also interesting when he discusses whether humans are special or just a biomolecular machine. As you might expect, he sees us as machines interacting with the objects of the world in accordance with physics, but he comes at it in a gentle, considerate manner. Eventually, he asserts, mankind will accept robots as emotional machines. Much as we have begun to overcome racial and gender discrimination, we will begin to accept our robots, both emotionally and legally.

Flesh and Machines is a cut below Kurzweil's and Moravec's works so start with one of these. If you enjoy the subject, pick up Flesh and Machines for a pleasant weekend read.

Ghenhis was the name of a robot that could walk over anything in its path as it followed a person. Ghenhis had six legs, bumper antennas, and infrared sensors for following the heat of the person signature it is following. The software for Genghis was not organized as a single program but fifty-one parallel programs and Brooks called these programs Augmented finite-state machines (AFSMs). AFSMs can send numbers to components on fixed wires. The first forty eight AFSMs allow Genghis to scramble around rough terrain. The walk machine uses six outputs that sequence the six legs to take steps. Ghenhis allow the robot too be out of balance as it walked and the beta balance machine corrected The Infrared Sensors machine receives input from six pyroelectronic sensors and each one has an on or off state that feed into the prowl or steer machine. These sensors are motion detectors and are tuned to the radiation band emitted by mammals. The prowl machine is connected to inhibit the outputs of the walk finite-state machine. If the robot detected some infrared activity, it walked toward it. If the sensors had been rotated to the back of the robot, it would walk away. Ghenhis had no sense of the directions backward, or forward, or away; it only had interaction embedded in it according to sensor input. Steer machine had left and right IR sensors and if the left sensor fired then the machine sent out a message to the left legs to take smaller steps, and if the right sensor fired then make the right legs take smaller steps. The insectlike Ghenhis was a turning point for robotics. The Ghenhis followed an emergent trajectory that was a product of both of its actions and its situation in the terrain of the world.

Brooks robots response to situation with conditional reactions and Cynthia Breazeal set out too write AFSMs in a higher-level language called the Behavior language. Colin Angle and Cynthia Breazeal built twin robots Attila and Hannibal each with 19 motors, 11 onboard computers, and hundreds of sensors. Eventual Breazeal produced over 1,500 AFSMs with her Behavior language code and through a model of pain through inconsistent sensor readings, they were able to ignore bad sensors and reintegrate them once they started to operate again. The legs of the robot were able to cooperate when the robots encountered rough terrain, lifting the body together, holding things up while a leg search for a difficult foot holding, and backing up and going around obstacles when needed. These robots were built from layered control systems without a central cognition box and coupled sensors to actuators.

The philosophers George Lakoff and Mark John argued that higher-level representation of language and thought are based on metaphors for our bodily interactions with the world. Metaphors develop from childhood from physical and social experiences, for example affection uses warmeth because the child is exposed to the warmeth of the parents body. High level concepts are built on metaphors and rely on bodily experience in the world. Our language reflects these metaphors.

Metaphors make it worth exploring the building of a robot with a human form and seeing what metaphors can be derived from the experience. Robots are not people. However, people will know how to interact with robots in human form by making eye contact, nods, and other sublinguistic murmurs and other social clues. The robot will know when to talk and when to listen dependant on the social clues and Cog would pave the way in this research.

One way to build a robot that can interact with people is a natural way is to build it with a vision system and with eyes that saccade and verge, and that look like human eyes. Each of Cog's eyes has two cameras. One has a wide angle lens so Cog can see peripheral view and the other has a narrow-angle lens to give Cog a fovea. Each of Cog's camera eyes are mounted on gimbals that can pan and tilt and its head and neck give it more freedom of motion of exploring. When Cog looks off in a direction, its head also turns in the direction. Cog vestibular-occular reflex allows its eye motions to successfully saccade and Cog is able to smooth flow someone walking in front of it. Cog's head has a gyroscope too play the role of an inner ear.

Cynthia Breazeals robot Kismet paid attention to three sorts of things: moving things, things with saturated colors, and things with skin colors. Kismet has internal drives that get larger and larger unless they are satiated. As these drives get larger they release certain behaviors. If Kismet bored drive get large, it might start deliberately looking around, saccading from place to place looking for something. The weighting on its attention system on saturated colors will direct the eyes while saccading to bright colors in the periphery view. The overall behaviors emerge from the interactions of the simplier behaviors.

Kismet has an auditory system and analyzes four pitch types known as prosody. Human infants recognize approval, prohibition, attention-getting, and soothing through prosodic patterns. Kismet has three emotional states: its valence, it arousal, and its stance. Valence is a measure of its happiness, and its arousal is how tired versus how stimulated Kismet is, and stance is how open it is too stimuli. It displays its emotional states with a set of eyebrows, its lips, and its ears and can put prosody in its voice.

Ritchie says to Kismet, "I want to show you this watch my girlfriend gave me." Kismet dutifully looks at the watch. Kismet was picking up on the social clues and the directions of attention. When Ritchie brought the watch into Kismets center of view, a few inches below his face where Kismet was foveated and when he brought his index finger up and tapped the watch the motion actived Kismets attention system and Kismet maintained eye contact with the watch. Eventually, Kismets attention system decided Ritchie's face was more interesting and looked back at the eyes of Ritchie. There is nothing qualitatively different from the mechanism in Ghenhis.