From Publishers Weekly
Fjermedal, author of Magic Bullets, here offers a richly human picture of the lives and work of the brilliant, sometimes eccentric or self-amusedly arrogant robotics researchers at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon and elsewhere with whom he spent countless hours in preparing his book. This will be heady reading for science fiction buffs and readers interested in what futurists are up to in their labs and institutes. These "tomorrow makers" are not designing merely our future on this planet, but perhapsby unimaginable evolutionary processes beginning with the "terraforming" of Marsthat of the universe itself. Visionary stuff, to be sure. But from Fjermedal's description, a future (a near-future?) of robots so marvelously "downloaded" with the mechanism and motivations of the human braineven molecule-sized robotsseems staggeringly real. Promise or threat? Either way, the book's overtones take the breath away. First serial to Omni.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Macmillan. 1987. c.256p. ISBN 0-02-538560-7. $16.95. tech Fjermedal researched this book by spending hundreds of hours talking with the leading players in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence at MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and research centers in Japan. He uses the person a l journalism style, similar to that of Tracy Kidder in The Soul of a New Machine. The result is a fascinating, nontechnical account of the state of the art in machine intelligence. Recommended for public library and academic collections.Mary Greene Havener, MIT Lincoln Lab, Lexington, Mass.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
