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Robot: Mere Machine
to Transcendent Mind, Hans Moravec, PhD ’80, Oxford
University Press, 1998; $25 (artificial intelligence). |
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 Imagine a world in which artificial
intelligence has surpassed human intelligence, factories have no people
working in them and robots leave humanity behind as they venture out to
colonize space. Moravec, the founder of the Robotics Institute at
Carnegie Mellon University, envisions such a reality by the middle of
the next century. In this often disturbing book, he chronicles the
accelerating pace of technological change and points out that
integrated circuits, the brains of electronics, are already designed by
computers. In other words, intelligent machines are now creating their
own offspring. Although Moravec predicts unprecedented social upheaval,
he still embraces this robotic future. "Intelligent machines, which
will grow from us, learn our skills, and share our goals and values,"
he writes, "can be viewed as children of our minds." |
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Her husband, John Adams, was
the second U.S. president. Her son, John Quincy Adams, was the sixth.
Abigail Adams had a unique perch from which to survey and influence
postcolonial America–and was a prodigious writer of letters whose
words now fill 608 reels of microfilm. Gelles treats this
correspondence as both biography and literature, using Adams’s
observations to illuminate events in the half-century from 1765 to
1815. A noted Adams expert, Gelles adopts a thematic approach, offering
chapters on the confidential letter, the travel letter and the historic
letter. She highlights Adams’s support for revolution and
women’s education. And she reveals Adams’s reaction toany
suggestion her missives be preserved: "pray, burn this letter." Luckily
for historians, those instructions were not followed.
Like a chef whipping up new dishes
from ingredients close at hand, Deverell uses her former State
Department career to concoct a thriller. Casey Collins is a U.S.
foreign service officer whose lover is a Polish operative working for
Danish intelligence. When he disappears, presumably killed in an air
disaster dubbed Lockerbie Two, Collins finds herself up against
international terrorists, secret agents and the FBI as she tries to
unravel the case. The author’s experience, including a stint at
the U.S. embassy in 1980s Warsaw, was far tamer than her
heroine’s. But life behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold
War–and her husband’s work in Danish army
intelligence–inspired Deverell’s bent for fictional espionage
and terrorism. A second Casey Collins novel is due in 1999.
After publication of his first book,
The Content of Our Character, Steele toured the country,
visiting universities and giving readings. Wherever he went, he writes
in this new collection of essays, black students sought to embarrass
him by denouncing his controversial argument–that black leaders
stifle racial progress by pushing AfricanAmericans into the role of
victim. "It is never fun to be called ‘an opportunist,’
‘a house slave,’ " he observes. In these four essays, Steele
develops and deepens his thinking about racial politics, liberal guilt
and civil rights. His overarching point: the liberalism that grew out
of the ’60s "was the expiation of American shame rather than the
careful and true development of equality between the races." Real
equality, he argues, can only come by separating race from public
entitlement.