Books
In his 1988 book Mind Children (ISBN 0674576187), Moravec outlines Moore's law and predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard, in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030-2040.
In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (ISBN 0195136306), published in 1998, Moravec further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence, generalizing Moore's law to technologies predating the integrated circuit, and extrapolating it to predict a coming "mind fire" of rapidly expanding superintelligence.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote about this book: "Robot is the most awesome work of controlled imagination I have ever encountered: Hans Moravec stretched my mind until it hit the stops." David Brin also praised the book: "Moravec blends hard scientific practicality with a prophet's far-seeing vision." On the other hand, the book was reviewed less favorably by Colin McGinn for the New York Times. McGinn wrote, "Moravec … writes bizarre, confused, incomprehensible things about consciousness as an abstraction, like number, and as a mere "interpretation" of brain activity. He also loses his grip on the distinction between virtual and real reality as his speculations spiral majestically into incoherence."
Read more about this topic: Hans Moravec
Famous quotes containing the word books:
“Like dreaming, reading performs the prodigious task of carrying us off to other worlds. But reading is not dreaming because books, unlike dreams, are subject to our will: they envelop us in alternative realities only because we give them explicit permission to do so. Books are the dreams we would most like to have, and, like dreams, they have the power to change consciousness, turning sadness to laughter and anxious introspection to the relaxed contemplation of some other time and place.”
—Victor Null, South African educator, psychologist. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, introduction, Yale University Press (1988)
“Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)