The truth about robots: two experts look beyond the hype, offering a lively and accessible guide to what robots can (and can't) do.
The robots are coming, and they're going to take our jobs! Or, on second thought, perhaps they will be our friends! In case you haven't noticed, there's a lot of hype about robots; some of it is scary and some of it utopian. In this book, two robotics experts look beyond the fearmongering and the cheerleading to offer an engaging, accessible guide to robots: what they can (and can't) do, how they work, and what we can reasonably expect their future capabilities to be.
The authors discuss the history of our fascination with the creation of artificial humans and why we find it so frightening. They outline the basic capabilities of robots--movement, navigation, and grasping and touching--and unpack the language we use to talk about robots, investigating the terms intelligence (perhaps a misnomer in the context of robotics) and learning (explaining the varieties of machine learning). They describe cooperating robots, used in applications ranging from robot football to search and rescue; ask if robots can feel emotions; and consider interactive robots as pets, butlers, and companions. Finally, they look at robots that raise ethical and social issues: killer robots, sexbots, and robots that might be gunning for your job. The Robots Are Coming equips readers to look at robots concretely--as human-made artifacts rather than placeholders for our anxieties. Ruth Aylett is Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. A robotics researcher for thirty years, she is the author of Robots: Bringing Intelligent Machines to Life. Patricia A. Vargas is Founder-Director of the Robotics Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University, where she is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Robotics. She is coeditor of The Horizons of Evolutionary Robotics (MIT Press).
