1988 MindChildrenTheFutureofRobotand

(Moravec, 1988) ⇒ Hans Moravec. (1988). “Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence.” Harvard University Press. ISBN:9780674576186

Subject Headings: Moravec's Paradox.

Notes

Google Books Page: google.com/books?id=56mb7XuSx3QC
It is a seminal book on Post-Human predictions.
It is famous for introducing Moravec's Paradox.

Cited By

Quotes

Book Overview

Imagine attending a lecture at the turn of the twentieth century in which Orville Wright speculates about the future of transportation, or one in which Alexander Graham Bell envisages satellite communications and global data banks. Mind Children, written by an internationally renowned roboticist, offers a comparable experience - a mind-boggling glimpse of a world we may soon share with our artificial progeny. Filled with fresh ideas and insights, this book is one of the most engaging and controversial visions of the future ever written by a serious scholar.

Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of life - a time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.

In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.

But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.

Prologue

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Mind in Motion

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Unfortunately for humanlike robots, computers are at their worst trying to do the things most natural to humans, such as seeing, hearing, manipulating objects, learning languages, and commonsense reasoning. This dichotomy - machines doing well things human find hard, while doing poorly what is easy for us - is a giant clue to the problem of how to construct an intelligent machine.

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Powering Up

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Symbiosis

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Grandfather Clause

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Wildlife

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Breakout

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Appendix 1: Retinas and Computers

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Appendix 2: Measuring Computer Power

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Appendix 3: The Outer Limits of Computation

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References

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	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
1988 MindChildrenTheFutureofRobotand	Hans Moravec			Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence						1988