Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff

Robots are poised to transform today's society as completely as the Internet did twenty years ago. Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff argues that we must decide to design ourselves into our future, or risk being excluded from it altogether.

In the past decade, Google introduced us to driverless cars; Apple debuted Siri, a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets; and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the Web. Robots have become an integral part of society on the battlefield and the road; in business, education, and health care. Cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that in the coming years, these robots will act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immensely powerful machines, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, when the intelligent machine was born. Will we control these systems, or will they control us?

In Machines of Loving Grace, John Markoff offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. In recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, posing an ethical quandary. If humans delegate decisions to machines, who will be responsible for the consequences? As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s and 1960s, to the modern-day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding robotics economy around Boston, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work. We are on the brink of the next stage of the computer revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform modern life. Yet it remains for us to determine whether this new world will be a utopia. Moreover, it is now incumbent upon the designers of these robots to draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine.

After nearly forty years covering the tech industry, Markoff offers an unmatched perspective on the most drastic technology-driven societal shifts since the introduction of the Internet. Machines of Loving Grace draws on an extensive array of research and interviews to present an eye-opening history of one of the most pressing questions of our time, and urges us to remember that we still have the opportunity to design ourselves into the future—before it's too late.

Genres: Nonfiction, Artificial Intelligence, Science, Technology, History, Philosophy, Business

400 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2015

About the author

John Gregory Markoff is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.

Reviews

[Will Byrnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
What’s the problem?
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
What are you talking about HAL?
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.- from 2001 A Space Odyssey

Smile for the camera, HAL

This is probably the #1 image most of us of a certain age have concerning the dangers of AI. Whether it is a HAL-9000, or a T-70, T-800, T-888, or T-900 Terminator, a Cylon, a science officer on the Nostromo, a dark version, Lore, of a benign android like STNG’s Commander Data, killer robots on the contemporary TV series Extant, or another of only a gazillion other examples in written word, TV and cinema, there has, for some time now, been a concern, expressed through our entertainment media, that in seeking to rely more and more on computers for everything we do, we are making a Mephistophelian deal and our machines might become our masters. It is as if we, a world of Geppettos, have decided to make our Pinocchios into real boys, without knowing if they will be content to help out in the shop or turn out more like some other artificial being. Maybe we should find a way to include in all AI software some version of the Blue Fairy to keep the souls of the machines on a righteous path.



Cylons

John Markoff, an Oakland, CA native, has been covering the digital revolution for his entire career. He began writing for InfoWorld in 1981, was later an editor at Byte magazine for about eight bits, then wrote about Silicon Valley for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1988 he began writing for the Business Section of the New York Times, where he remains to this day. He has been covering most of the folks mentioned in this book for a long time. He knows them and has insight into what makes them tick.

For the past half century an underlying tension between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation—AI vs IA—has been at the heart of progress in computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world. It is easy to argue that AI and IA are simply two sides of the same coin. There is a fundamental distinction, however, between approaches to designing technology to benefit humans and designing technology as an end in itself. Today, that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.

Markoff follows the parallel tracks of AI vs IA from their beginnings to their latest implementation in the 21st century, noting the steps along the way, and pointing out some of the tropes and debates that have tagged along. For example, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, San Diego State University professor of Mathematics and Hugo-award-winning sci-fi author argued, in The Coming Technological Singularity, that by no later than 2030 computer scientists would have the ability to create a superhuman artificial intelligence and “the human era would be ended.” VI Lenin once said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” I suppose the AI equivalent would be that “In pursuit of the almighty dollar, capitalists will give artificial intelligence the abilities it will use to make itself our almighty ruler.” And just in case you thought the chains on these things were firmly in place, I regret to inform you that the great state of North Dakota now allows drones to fire tasers and tear gas. The drones are still controlled by cops from a remote location, but there is plenty to be concerned about from military killer drones that may have the capacity to make kill-no-kill decisions within the next few years without the benefit of human input. Enough concern that Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers, signed by luminaries like Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and tens of thousands of others, raises an alarm and demands that limits be taken so that human decision-making will remain in the loop on issues of mortality.


The other Mister “T”

Being “in the loop” is one of the major elements in looking at AI vs IA. Are people part of the process or what computerization seeks to replace? The notion of the driverless car comes in for a considerable look. This would probably not be a great time to begin a career as truck driver, cab driver, or delivery person. On the other hand, much design is intended to help folks, without taking over. A classic example of this is Siri, the voice interface available in Apple products. AI in tech interfaces, particularly voice-intelligent tech, speaks to a bright future. That said, as a Macolyte, I have had considerable interaction with Siri as of this update, in August 2023. The interface is ambitious, but still has so far to go that I am not at all concerned about bots replacing me any time soon.


B9 from Lost in Space and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet

Markoff looks at the history of funding, research, and rationales. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which has funded so much AI research, began in the 1950s in response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik. Drones is an obvious use for military AI tech, but, on a lower level, there are robot mules designed to tote gear alongside grunts, with enough native smarts to follow their assigned GI without having to be constantly told what to do. I am including links in the EXTRA STUFF section below for some of these. They are both fascinating and creepy to behold. The developers at Boston Dynamics seem to take inordinate glee in trying and failing to knock these critters over with a well placed foot to the midsection. It does not take a lot of imagination to envision these metal pooches hounding escaped prisoners or detainees across any kind of terrain.


Darryl Hannah, as the replicant Pris in Blade Runner, would prefer not to be “retired”

As with most things, tech designed with AI capacity can be used for diverse applications. Search and Rescue can easily become Search and Destroy. Driverless cars that allow folks to relax while on the road, can just as easily be driverless tanks.

Universities have been prime in putting the intel into AI. Private companies have also been heavily involved. Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) did, probably, more than any other organization to define the look and feel of computer interfaces since PCs and Apples first appeared. Much of the tech in the world, and working its way there, originates with researchers taking university research work into the proprietary market.


John Markoff - from TechfestNW

If you are not already a tech nerd (You, with the Spock ears, down, I said tech nerd, not Trek nerd. Sheesh!) and you try to keep up with all the names and acronyms that spin past like a stock market ticker on meth, it might be just a teensy bit overwhelming. I suggest not worrying about those and take in, instead, the general stream of the divergence between computerization that helps augment human capabilities, and computerization that replaces people. There is also a wealth of acronyms in the book. The copy I read was an ARE, so I was on my own to keep track. You will be reading copies that have an actual index, which should help. That said, I am including a list of acronyms, and their close relations, in the EXTRA STUFF section below.

While there are too many names to comfortably keep track of in Machines of Loving Grace, unless of course, you were made operational at that special plant in Urbana, Illinois, it is a very informative and interesting book. It never hurts when trying to understand where we are and struggling to foresee where we might be going, to have a better grasp on where we began and what the forces and decisions have been that led us from then to now. Markoff has offered a fascinating history of the augment-vs-replace struggle, and you need only an actual, biological, un-augmented intelligence to get the full benefit.

My instructor was Mister Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it I can sing it for you.

Review first Posted – 8/28/15

Publication date - 8/25/2015

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s Twitter and FB pages

Interviews with the author
----Geekwire
----Edge

A link to his overall index of NY Times work

Articles by Markoff
----9/21/15 - Software Is Smart Enough for SAT, but Still Far From Intelligent
-----12/4/15 - As Aging Population Grows, So Do Robotic Health Aides
----12/11/15 - on the establishment of a billion dollar AI think tank by Elon Musk, among other large players - Artificial-Intelligence Research Center Is Founded by Silicon Valley Investors
----3/25/16 - Markoff and Steve Lohr look at corporate competition to lead a burgeoning industry segment - The Race Is On to Control Artificial Intelligence, and Tech’s Future
----4/11/16 - Folks are saying Uh-oh to AI - on a move to rein in killer robots - Arms Control Groups Urge Human Control of Robot Weaponry
----10/23/16 - As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential - cybercrime is becoming automated and it is scaling exponentially
----10/25/16 – with Matthew Rosenberg - The Pentagon’s ‘Terminator Conundrum’: Robots That Could Kill on Their Own \
----5/21/20 - A Case for Cooperation Between Machines and Humans - more on AI vs IA


See Comment 2 for more EXTRA STUFF


BUT, as of August 2021, as GR has banned external links from comments, I will be adding additional items of interest here

-----9/13/21 - AP - Israeli firm unveils armed robot to patrol volatile borders By Alon Bernstein and Jack Jeffery
-----2/16/22 - The Guardian - Dystopian robot dogs are the latest in a long history of US-Mexico border surveillance by Sidney Fussell


The US Department of Homeland Security announced it was training robot dogs to help with security at the US-Mexico border. Photograph: Shannon Moorehead/US Air Force/AFP/Getty Images
Image and text accompanied the above article

----8/18/23 - Lifelike robots and android dogs wow visitors at Beijing robotics fair - This is primarily a photo piece with many fabulous images


Image from the above article

[H (trying to keep up with GR friends) Balikov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Machines of Loving Grace straddles the realms of a history of robotics and a klaxon warning about where we might be heading.

Markoff starts off when all the computing power contained in a 40x40 foot room wasn’t sufficient to help a machine roll from one wall to the door on the opposite side. We learn that early on there was a dichotomy in how our deep/creative thinkers were considering the role of machines in humankind’s future. According to Markoff, one group (IA) was interested in augmenting our abilities by the use of electronic and mechanical equipment such as the personal computer, and now, the smart phone. The other group (AI) was interested in how machines (robots, etc.) can replace humans in the various tasks and activities that make up our lives. The latter has garnered the bulk of interest from those who created our movies and speculative fiction. Concepts such as “SkyNet” (from the Terminator series) and HAL (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) have achieved iconic status in the chronicle of the unintended consequences of scientific investigation .

This was a slow read because there was so much going on and Markoff spares few details. He is strongest when he has personal contact with various innovators and can share with us their failures and triumphs and how they got from Point A to Point Z. You may be more prepared to delve into this material than I was. Each section of each chapter challenged me with conflicting ideas, strategies and tactics. I am not criticizing Markoff for his failure to simplify, because simplification would have rendered this read much less valuable. I am only cautioning that you should be prepared to take some time getting from page 1 to page 300+

An early disappointment is Markoff's generalizations. He conflates the middle class (economic) with "the middle of the job structure" (organizational). His points apply much better to the latter rather than the former. Further, Markoff isn’t completely successful in knitting together the facts and anecdotes about a wide variety of researchers and milestones over the past eighty years. Yet, if the reader perseveres, there is a lot to be gleaned from what the author has gathered together. And, the list of source materials included is a rich trove for those interested in arriving at their own conclusions.

2021 Here's a recent article on Machines' Ability to Listen to Your Emotions https://www.marketplace.org/shows/mar...

[Miles · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Markoff’s Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots is another addition to the growing stack of books designed to help us think about the relationship between humanity and emerging technologies. Markoff offers a detailed history of artificial intelligence and robotics, and attempts to show how past trends are relevant (or not) to the modern moment. Although the book touches on some important themes, it’s significantly inferior to other texts I’ve read in this field (e.g. recent works by Martin Ford, Nick Bostrom, James Barrat, and Ted Chu).

The focal point of Markoff’s project is the paradox of automation: “The same technologies that extend the intellectual power of humans can displace them as well” (xii). He draws a sharp distinction between artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligence augmentation (IA), claiming that advances in AI tend to replace human labor, whereas IA usually amplifies the abilities of human workers. The usefulness of this dichotomy is dubious because there’s no reason why AI must necessarily displace human labor while IA doesn’t (e.g. a breakthrough in AI could create an entirely new job market for humans, and a breakthrough in IA could make it possible for one human to do the work of ten). Markoff comes down firmly on the side of IA, and he’s not alone: many top minds in AI research have forsaken it for the IA camp in recent years.

Complementing Markoff’s thesis are a host of worthy topics, including the backgrounds and values of technology designers, growing worries about technological unemployment, the financial relationship between technology companies and the US military, and reformulations of human identity that will take place in an age of increasingly autonomous machines. In general, Markoff looks back more than he looks ahead; Machines of Loving Grace is heavy on facts and proper nouns, but light on ideas and insights that might prove useful moving forward.

The strongest and freshest argument here is that building a human element into new technologies is primarily a design choice, and not just a matter of efficiency or convenience. The views of designers, then, matter a great deal:

"Despite the growing debate over the consequences of the next generation of automation, there has been very little discussion about the designers and their values. When pressed, the computer scientists, roboticists, and technologists offer conflicting views. Some want to replace humans with machines; some are resigned to the inevitability…and some of them just as passionately want to build machines to extend the reach of humans." (26)

Since discussions of technological “progress” have a tendency to reach absurd levels of abstraction, Markoff’s determination to put a human face on our technological vanguard is welcome. He outlines the early influences and careers of a long list of technologists, demonstrating an impressive breadth of research. The reader gains a concrete sense of the human stories and motivations behind some of our most ubiquitous tools.

This approach, however, has some significant downsides. Markoff seems to have fallen down the Silicon Valley rabbit hole, at least partially buying into the cults of personality for which it has become so notorious. In addition to highlighting the values and formative experiences of technologists, Markoff also wastes many pages describing obscure projects that went nowhere and inane details about who worked for what company or knew the right people in the right moment. Here’s a typical example:

"In 1999, [Andy] Rubin started Palo Alto-based Danger, Inc., a smartphone handset maker, with two close friends who had also been Apple engineers. The company name reflected Rubin’s early obsession with robots. (In the 1960s science fiction television series Lost in Space, a robot guardian for a young boy would say “Danger, Will Robinson!” whenever trouble loomed.) Danger created an early smartphone called the Sidekick, which was released in 2002. It attracted a diverse cult following with its switchblade-style slide-out keyboard, downloadable software, email, and backups of personal information in “the cloud.” While most businesspeople were still chained to their BlackBerrys, the Sidekick found popularity among young people and hipsters, many of whom switched from PalmPilots." (240-1)

Ugh. Who gives a shit? There’s a reason the Sidekick isn’t a household name. This “inside” information is irrelevant for anyone who is not a technology entrepreneur or historian, and contributes nothing to Markoff’s ostensible goals. This summary of Rubin’s career could easily have been condensed down to a sentence or two, or excised entirely. The odd paragraph like this wouldn’t be so bad, but the majority of the book is padded with details that trump perspective. Markoff’s “one damn thing after another” style is stifling––even the sections on topics that interested me were boring to read.

If surfeits of superfluous detail and lifeless prose were my biggest gripes, I’d give this book a higher rating. But there are much more troubling issues, the first of which goes back to Markoff’s fuzzy distinction between AI and IA. These labels are useful to an extent, and there are definitely important differences between the goals and practices of AI and IA researchers. Markoff points out that the two fields don’t overlap as much as one might expect (282). Even so, I’m not convinced the dichotomy cashes out the way Markoff wants it to. His final characterization of the situation is telling:

"Whether computing technologies are deployed to extend human capabilities or to replace them is more a consequence of the particular economic system in which they are created and used than anything inherent in the technologies themselves. In a capitalist economy, if artificial intelligence technologies improve to the point that they can replace new kinds of white-collar and professional workers, they will inevitably be used in that way. That lesson carries forward in the differing approaches of the software engineers, AI researchers, roboticists, and hackers who are the designers of these future systems. It should be obvious that Bill Joy’s warning that ‘the future doesn’t need us’ is just one possible outcome. It is equally apparent that the world transformed by these technologies doesn’t have to play out catastrophically." (342-3)

This is an adequate summary of the current technological moment, and I appreciate Markoff’s attempt to point out the possible ways the AI/IA revolution might pan out. But this perspective also contradicts the dichotomy put forth in the rest of the text. Markoff consistently draws a bright line between a future where machines replace human labor entirely and one where they make us better at our jobs. But it should be clear to anyone paying attention that both of these scenarios are inevitable. AI and IA will both have critical roles in the economies of the future. Furthermore, a future that “doesn’t need us” isn’t necessarily a catastrophe. Humanity might give up its status as Earth’s apex intelligence, but that doesn’t mean doom in all cases. Beyond many possible positive outcomes for humans, this might also mean a reprieve for our long-abused natural environments. A future that runs more like a self-driving car than a human-operated one could be better in countless ways.

By far the weakest aspect of Machines of Loving Grace is its sanguine attitude about technological unemployment. Markoff seems content to think that the IA camp will save us by extending the capabilities of human workers, but fails to realize that that process is a hallmark of the “do more with less” outsourcing culture non-elite workers have been battling for decades. The prevailing order demonstrates that when one human can do more, fewer humans are necessary. CEOs and shareholders cheer, jobs evaporate, and remaining workers have to work harder, which they do without complaint for fear that they too will become dispensable. So regardless of whether we decide to favor AI or IA, technological unemployment will still be a major problem. (For an up-to-date look at wages and employment statistics, I recommend this recent podcast. And here’s an interview with someone who takes technological unemployment seriously and wants to find workable solutions.)

I suspect Markoff’s blind spot has to do with his reluctance to address the modern concept of “work.” He brushes off the arguments of Martin Ford and Jeremy Rifkin, who warn that we need to shake up our ideas about labor and what it means to “make a living” if we want a future that’s better for everyone, not just for the elites with whom Markoff is so smitten. It doesn’t help that almost all his interview subjects are wealthy workaholics who have nothing in common with people who have to work menial, mindless jobs just to get by.

Markoff is so caught up in the history of technology that he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not very useful for forecasting the future––especially not in a time when technological progress is advancing at an unprecedented pace. Think of it this way: how useful would a book about the history of computers that was published before the advent of the Internet be for people in the post-Internet world? It probably wouldn’t amount to more than a historical curiosity, and its predictive power would be extremely limited, if not entirely worthless. We don’t know exactly where the next automation breakthrough(s) will come from, but it’s a good bet that the world will look very different shortly thereafter. If the perspectives put forth in Machines of Loving Grace are already questionable, how useful will they be then?

The sad irony is that we should be excited about technological unemployment. Why not focus on how AI and IA can positively affect human experience and communities, rather than obsess about how they can supercharge our overly-consumptive capitalist economies? We should welcome these developments as a chance to allow people to work less, have more time for their families and hobbies, and use technology to discover new realms of entertainment and pleasure. But to do this, we’ll have to decouple healthcare from employment, and also find ways to subsidize the living costs of people who can only find part-time work or whose jobs are gone for good. Markoff has nothing to say about these pressing matters, nor does he mention the role of government in this process (positive or otherwise).

All this indicates that Machines of Loving Grace doesn’t offer any practical answers to the problems it purports to address. It’s more of a historical overview peppered with Silicon Valley puff pieces. “This is about us,” Markoff concludes, “about humans and the kind of world we will create. It’s not about the machines” (344). Another trite dichotomy. The truth is that the future will be a joint product of the commerce and competition between humanity and our machines. It’s not only about us, nor is it only about the machines. The reality is far more complex.

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.

[Ross · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was not a fit for me at all. It is a big stretch to give it 2 stars. Although I did finish it I skimmed virtually the whole book.
This is one of a number of books published recently about artificial intelligence and robots, a subject I am extremely interested in.
However, I am purely interested in the technology and although the title of the book says it about the machines, 90% was about the people working on the technology and 10% on the technology.
The author is a journalist and his obvious interest is in the people whom he interviewed. He clearly had little or no interest in the actual technology. For the little he did talk about the technology, he included no detail about how the technology worked.
I really cannot recommend this book for anyone.

[Lauren · Rating 2 out of 5]

An exhaustive history of robotics and AI from the 1960s to development of Siri in the 2000s. The author is a journalist and digs deep into personal stories of everyone in early Silicon Valley and not enough into the technology itself.

I started this one last year, took a very long break, and pushed myself to finish.

It could have been so much better. The title made me think it would be.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

"One intriguing shift that suggests there are limits to automation was the recent decision by Toyota to systematically put working humans back into the manufacturing process. In quality and manufacturing on a mass scale, Toyota has been a global leader in automation technologies based on the corporate philosophy of Kaizen (Japanese for 'good change") or continuous improvement. After pushing for lights-out manufacturing, the company realized that automated factories do not improve themselves. Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama , or "gods" who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda. The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred "manual-intensive" workspaces.

The restoration of the Toyota gods is evocative of Stewart Brand's opening line to the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog : "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." Brand later acknowledged that he had borrowed the concept from British anthropologist Edmund Leach, who wrote, also in 1968: "Men have become like gods. Isn't it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid. Why should this be? How might these fears be resolved?"


~~An artist's rendering of what a humanoid robot, powered by AI, might look like in the near future.

My two cents: I didn't get what I was expecting out of Markoff's offering. I had thought that his book would go into more technical discussion of where we are at currently with AI, and where we are headed. Instead, he spends almost the entire book giving a history of Silicon Valley, and the various scientists/engineers who have brought us to the point we are at now. Although, to be honest, most of the book doesn't even dwell on current technology...most time is spent on the 1950's-1970's, when computer tech was really taking off. And don't get me wrong, I was interested, at first. As a child of the 1980's, who graduated high school in 1999, I road the cresting wave of technological advances. I had no idea that universities had access to a quasi internet in the late 1960's. Nor did I realize how advanced computing was becoming in the 1970's. It was just extremely expensive, and out of the reach of 98% of Americans.

Markoff also spends a large chunk of the book splitting hairs between AI and IA (augmentation of humans). But really, for most of us, will it really matter whether a computer takes over our job, or a human, augmented, can now do the job 10-20 humans previously did? There is still worry that many, many working class and middle class (even upper middle class) humans will find themselves jobless.

Which brings me back to the bolded quote that I started my review with. Why are we afraid when we are gods? Because the vast majority of us are at the mercy of the few advanced scientists who are pushing this new technology. We aren't gods. Those few brilliant Silicon Valley super-stars are. Our future is in their hands, and unfortunately, Markoff shone very little light on what that future may look like. Given 2.5 stars or a rating of "Above Average". Worth a library check out if you are interested in the topic.

Another quote: "Will robots ever approximate the care of a human stranger? There are many horror stories about elder-care treatment in modern nursing homes and care facilities. Tufekci argues that every elder deserves the attention of an educated, skilled, and compassionate Dr. Aronson. However, fi that doesn't happen, will increasingly low-cost robots make life for elders better or worse? The vision of an aging population locked away and "watched over by machines of loving grace" is potentially disturbing. Machines may eventually look, act, and feel as if they are human, but they are decidedly not."

Further Reading: Elon Musk's concern about AI in general, and Deep Mind in particular. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/elon-...
~~Wikipedia's page on AI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artific...
~~Business Insider's article about where we are at with AI. https://www.businessinsider.com/artif...
~~And finally, an article on potential applications for human augmentation. https://www.freshconsulting.com/examp...

[Rod Van Meter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is ambitious: it covers much of AI and robotics history (despite the fact that those are two different, if related, fields), going back to the work of Feigenbaum, Winograd, even Weiner. No, I take that back, it's not strictly a history, and that dichotomy isn't the way Markoff describes it. He sets up Engelbart and McCarthy (both at Stanford for much of their careers) as mortal enemies: the former wants to make tools that extend human capabilities (Intelligence Augmentation, or IA, in Markoff's vernacular), while the latter wants to make a true artificial intelligence, made out of bits instead of blood, algorithms rather than acids, neural networks rather than neurons. (Okay, that's maybe a bit over the top.) So Markoff tells the story of these two camps, starting primarily in the 1960s, and working forward to very much the present day -- the book was published in August 25, and I began reading it the day it came out. He even covers the early rounds of the DARPA Grand Challenge for humanoid robots, though not the finals, by which time the book was in press. It is up to date enough to cover Google's recent spending spree, as well as its work on self-driving vehicles. Europe and Japan make only cameo appearances; all of the action is in the U.S. and Canada, it seems.
The book's breadth, apparent completeness, up-to-date-ness, and the direct access to key players that Markoff's calling card gained him are the book's strengths. Despite the IA-AI rivalry used as a theme throughout the book, there is actually little philosophizing about whether or not robots or AIs will actually replace us (edit: I originally wrote, "whether or not humans will replace us," blowing my own cover! Please ignore that, and rest assured that I meant, "whether or not robots or AIs will replace us."), and what the moral and even religious implications of the creation of a true, thinking machine. Oxford's Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and head of Oxford's Institute for the Future of Humanity) doesn't appear at all, and Kurzweil makes only cameos as he is (rightfully, in my opinion) dismissed as a nut. This book, then, makes a good companion to Bostrom's. For something in between the two, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future has a little more of the paranoia, and more analysis of the social and economic impact of automation, so the three books (all of which I've read this year) actually provide a reasonably complementary set. If I could have a fourth book, I'd ask for a semi-technical one giving the general idea of how the technologies work, without bothering with pseudocode and deep technical details and analysis, but not totally dumbed-down. Finding one that's up to date, as deep learning has revolutionized the field in the last three years, is the hard part.
Markoff writes well (as befits someone of his stature and experience), but the book needed an editor. The first several chapters feel redundant; we're often reminded who someone is, when they were introduced not so many pages ago. There are also times when it's hard to match the timeline, as Markoff follows people or themes rather than a strictly chronology. The book feels like it parts of it, at least, were either written with large time gaps in between, or that it was bolted together from prior works. An editing pass by someone who sat down and read the whole thing, end to end, would have caught many of these. This impression fades later in the book.
If you're interested in AI or robotics, I would say this is a good place to start. However, I have never heard about the Engelbart-McCarthy feud, so I can't vouch for it independently.

[Frank · Rating 2 out of 5]

Markoff's history of Artificial Intelligence [AI] research presents detailed and intersecting stories of the field's influential people and their projects. Most of these people worked at, or between, the twin poles of Stanford and MIT.

As this reader spent many years involved in an IT career, lots of the names and places in this book were familiar to me. [Albeit not personally!]

Besides the east and west cultural differences alluded to above, Markoff presents a philosophical dichotomy which he terms AI vs IA: Artificial Intelligence designed as a replacement for human intelligence, vs Intelligence Augmentation, designed to augment and assist human intelligence. In other words, AI tech would replace humans with autonomous machines whereas IA keeps humans in the loop.

The cons are, there's a lot of repetition in this book, and the author is using the hook of fears of a robot takeover to hawk what is at base a history tome about AI researchers.

Be that as it may, I did end up finishing this book. I wasn't sure that was going to happen.

[Fred Pierre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author John Markoff has done his research. He covers the history of robotics with a thorough approach, focusing on the people who pushed the science forward, as well as looking at the corporations who buy and promote robotics and their corporate culture.

Sadly, he doesn't bring excitement to the project. We are left with a lot of names and a general feeling of being disconnected. The pace only gets exciting when he talks about the philosophical issues brought out by robotics. You get the idea that the author wanted that to be the central theme, but lost the dynamics along the way.

What you do get out of the book is that robotics were consistently funded by the military, and proposed for military applications. Companies like Google and Tesla may have invested in robotics as a way to manage the production to put controls on military applications - but that's not proven by any interviews. Really, this book could have benifited a lot from some meaningful interviews.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look into the history of artificial intelligence and robots. Writing is clear and made accessible for non-techies, while not glossing over too much. I love the connections made between the important figures in tech history. The book makes an effort to list out every important person involved in a project, which I appreciate. It has allowed me to make plenty of connections outside the book when a person is mentioned and I know them from the book.

[Sakthi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book with lot of information dump. I had given it a 4 instead of 5 because somewhere in the middle john had succumbed to a conflict on what he was writing about. If it's going to be a treatise about AI vs IA, or any the history of robotics or about the philosophical question on finding a balance between men and machines

[Gagan Garg]

this is a best book of AI

[Kina C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book! Very informative and shared info I never knew robots, AI and IA.

[Lars · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the premise of this book. There is a truly compelling, memetic core in the idea of AI vs. IA and the implications these two schools of software design hold for our future as a society. Unfortunately, the narration in Machines of Loving Grace is much too weak to do the premise justice. The premise almost seems to have been added on after the fact, to justify hours and dollars spent to interview a parade of white, male subjects whose personal stories are, to be frank, not that interesting.

Having dipped my toes into machine learning, I feel I can say with some certainty that these are incredibly talented and intelligent people. I do not intend the above to demean them in any way. But ultimately, it is the synthesis of their contributions – not their minor tribulations through gifted programs, elite schools and VC funding rounds – that interests me. The author is not able to weed out what's important from what's not, and ends up wasting his ink on trivial details in a book that is supposedly about the big issues.

Funnily enough, these are issues that Machines shares with another recent book, Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else by Steve Lohr. Like Markoff, Lohr is also a science writer at the New York Times. The two share a shallow understanding of technology. Something else they share is a sycophantic reverence for their subjects. So strongly does this come through, at times, that it is at the expense of almost all narrative and thematic strength in their writing. Judging by these two books, one has to wonder whether the Old Gray Lady really has the best people onboard to tackle critical issues like data science and artificial intelligence, and if the torch were not better passed to some hungry young writers instead.

Clearly, the book demonstrates a more than passable level of journalistic craftmanship. Effort went into fact-checking, archive research and conducting interviews. But this craftmanship ultimately ends up in service of nothing. The book largely goes nowhere with its big themes aside from some token efforts at the end. Not recommended.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

REFLECTIONS ON THE FUTURE OF ROBOTS/COMPUTERS

John Gregory Markoff worked at the New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016.

He wrote in the Preface to this 2015 book, “Robots are pervading our daily lives. Cheap sensors, powerful computers, and artificial intelligence software will ensure they will, increasingly, be autonomous. They will assist us and they will replace us… Yet… we are ill-prepared for this new world now in the making… In this book, I have attempted to capture the ways in which scientists, engineers, and hackers have grappled with questions about the deepening relationship between human and machine. In some cases I discovered that the designers resist thinking deeply about the paradoxical relationship between artificial intelligence [AI] and intelligence augmentation [IA]… There are also many instances where the researchers think deeply about the paradox… The central topic of this book is the dichotomy and the paradox inherent in the work of the designers who alternatively augment and replace humans in the systems they build.” (Pg. xi-xiii) He adds, “In the pages that follow I portray a diverse set of computer scientists, hackers, roboticists, and neuroscientists. They share a growing sense that we are approaching an inflection point where humans will live in a world of machines that mimic, and even surpass, human capabilities.” (Pg. xviii-xix)

He observes, “The new anxiety about AI-based automation and the resulting job loss may eventually prove well-founded, but it is just as likely that those who are alarmed have… just latched onto … backward-facing snapshots. If the equation is framed in terms of artificial intelligence-oriented technologies versus those oriented toward augmenting humans, there is hope that humans still retain an unbounded ability to both entertain and employ themselves dong something marketable and useful. If the humans are wrong, however, 2045 could be a rough year for the human race. Or it could mark the arrival of a technological paradise. Or both. The year 2045 is when Ray Kurzweil predicts human will transcend biology…” (Pg. 84)

He notes, “It is undeniable that AI and machine-learning algorithms have already had world-transforming application in areas as diverse as science, manufacturing, and entertainment… The optimists hope that potential abuses will be minimized if the applications remain human-focused rather than algorithm-centric. The reality is that, until now, Silicon Valley has not had a track record that is morally superior to any earlier industries. It will be truly remarkable if any Silicon Valley company actually rejects a profitable technology for ethical reasons.” (Pg. 91)

He suggests that there is a “cultural chasm that resulted in a computing world with two separate research communities---those who worked with two separate research communities---those who worked to replace the human and those who wanted to use the same technologies to augment the human mind… an underlying tension between …. AI versus IA---has been at the heart of progress by computing science as the field has produced a series of ever more powerful technologies that are transforming the world… that distinction is expressed in whether increasingly capable computers, software, and robots are designed to assist human users or to replace them.” (Pg. 115)

He reports, “Whether or not Google is on the trail of a genuine artificial ‘brain’ has become increasingly controversial. There is certainly no question that the deep learning techniques are paying off in a wealth of increasingly powerful AI achievements in vision and speech. And there remains in Silicon Valley a growing group of engineers and scientists who believe they are once again closing in on ‘Strong AI’---the creation of a self-aware machine with human or greater intelligence.” (Pg. 153-154)

Of philosopher John Searle’s ‘Chinese Room’ argument against Strong AI, he says, “At the time Searle thought … the discussion wouldn’t last a week, let alone decades. But it has… Three decades later, the debate is anything but settled… there are several hundred published attacks on his idea. And Searle is still alive and busy defending his position.” (Pg. 181-182)

He wonders, “companies are… faced with an aging workforce and the reality of a labor scarcity… The deeper and as yet unanswered question remains whether our society will commit to helping its human workers across the new automation divide.” (Pg. 244)

He explains, “In augmented reality world, the ‘Web’ will become the space that surrounds you… Augmented reality is also a profoundly human-centered version of computing… It will be a world which computers ‘disappear’ and everyday objects acquire ‘magical’ powers… Augmented reality would also make the idea of telepresence far more compelling. Two people separated by great distance would be a radical improvement on today’s videoconferencing…” (Pg. 274-275)

He asks, “will robots ever approximate the care of a human stranger? There are many horror stories about elder-care treatment in modern nursing homes and care facilities… will increasingly low-cost robots make life for elders better or worse? The vision of an aging population locked away and ‘watched over by machines of loving grace’ is potentially disturbing. Machines may eventually look, act, and feel as if they are human, but they decidedly are not. However, robots do not need to entirely replace human caregivers in order to help the elderly…. The possibility of virtual caregivers is a compelling idea for those who are physically infirm.” (Pg. 329)

He concludes, “Will these AI avatars be our slaves, our assistants, our colleagues, or some mixture of all three? Or more ominously, will they become our masters?... given that we tend to anthropomorphize our machines, we will undoubtedly develop social relationships with them as they become increasingly autonomous. Indeed, it is not much different to reflect on human-robot relations than it is to consider traditional human relations with slaves… That hints at a second great problem: the risk of ceding individual control over everyday decisions to a cluster of ever more sophisticated algorithms.” (Pg. 340-341)

This book will be of great interest to those studying AI, IA, robots, and similar topics.

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most histories are interesting because they embody chance events--oddities that had a low probability, but just happened to change the course of events. Markoff’s book has plenty of these intriguing events. But it remains a diverse collection of many stories, failing to cohere into a single history because there are so many people, companies, labs, and projects involved, tied together in the book loosely and not at all seamlessly. Markoff’s attempt to thread a single theme throughout--the clash between creating machines to replace people and machines to help people (augmentation)--becomes tedious, and offers a thin layer of philosophy without deepening our insight into the potential and implementation of the technologies. It’s page 293 before Markoff unveils a key insight: that augmentation takes into account the community and a network of individuals.
However, the dichotomy leads to an interesting final chapter--which could be read on its own--culminating in a statement regarding the responsibility of society, and particularly the engineers within it, to consider basic humanistic values.

[Jim Nail · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not what I had hoped for. I’ve been reading a lot of books about the benefits and dangers of an increasingly cybernetic society- most notably, You are not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together. While John Markoff pays brief homage to both these authors, Machines of Loving Grace is mostly a dry, detailed history of the advent of the electronic age with an emphasis on the distinction between those who envision a future where technology will replace humans (Ray Kurtzweil, Marvin Minsky) and those who want to develop technology that will enhance human capabilities (Steve Jobs, Doug Engelbart). Markoff is clearly on the side of the enhancers, but his book is by no means a manifesto, mostly just a lot of information. I’m glad I read it, though. There were some interesting parts and it’s going to help me be a little smarter when I talk with my techie friends.

[Lindsay]

I started off liking the book, but had a really hard time with the way the author jumped through time, genres, and people. Within pages he'd discuss an invention from the 1990s, then throw it back to the 1960s, then reference Blade Runner, and then go back to a technologist's name-- by which point I couldn't remember which decade that person belonged to. I wish the author had either kept each chapter as a thematic vignette or arranged the entire book chronologically. I thought about charting out who people were and where I was in time, but that seemed like more work than it should have been for this book.

(See Fred P.'s review on this book. I agree with his assessment).

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book covering the 60s-2015 or so in robotics, AI, and IA (intelligence amplification). Does a great job on the "historical" parts, covering various academic groups and what they did, but at some point it just seemed like a lot of academic people doing a lot of stuff with academic politics and technology. However, individual stories were great -- it was just lacking a strong overarching message (maybe more journalistic vs. a real message?).

Got weaker toward the present day, with coverage of google/etc. I'd probably just skip the final 25% or so of the book.

Great topic, but could have been a lot better.

[Shani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting history and context on technologies like autonomous vehicles, robots, Siri etc, but could have easily been half the length. Really hard to get through, so I skimmed a bunch, which is a shame because the book contains extremely relevant content to me here and there. Unnecessary to have so much backstory on each person. I would have liked the author to have dived more deeply into the philosophical issues of AI/IA instead of just ending with a few paragraphs about it in the final chapter. Still worth a read for any designers with a conscience in Silicon Valley :)

[Chris Esposo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Markoff has written a concise "academic-lite" history of AI, that jumps topics between the fields of classical AI (logic-based agents), classical and some modern machine learning, robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), or Man-Machine Interface. This variety of disciplines reflects the changes that AI itself has gone through over the past 60 years, with the well-worn joke being that the difference between AI and Machine Learning is that AI is anything that has not yet been mastered by Machine Learning.

This book intersects somewhat, and complements George Zarkadakis' "In Our Own Image", also an academic-y history of AI, though that book includes commentary of AI in pop-culture, which this book does not, and has a more detailed discussion of influence the foundations of mathematics had in the incipient stages of AI with respect to the work of Turing and Von Neumann. This book also follows a large cast of academics, but much more decidedly within the realm of one field, computing, but across many different sub-disciplines and movements across 60 years. From the historic first meeting at Dartmouth in 1956 on computing and intelligence, which is to computer science, as the 1926 Solvay Conference is to Physics, that included luminaries like Minsky (Marvin), McCollough & Pitts, Weiner, McCarthy, Shannon etc, to the titanic debates of Englebart, Licklider, and McCarthy, in the late 60s and 70s, puzzling through multiple different topics, including the foundations of machine networking, the debate between AI and IA (intelligence augmentation), which birthed HCI, and would eventually found the personal computing revolution of the 80s and 90s. Then moving forward to first AI winter, which was presaged by the scepticism of neural networks and knowledge engineering (caused by the failure of "expert systems" in business applications) was developed by Hinton, LeCunn, Sejnowski, and others, who would later revise neural networks with massively parallel architectures several decades later to great effect that would spurn the current AI boom. Finally concluding with the recent trends of autonomous vehicles, robotics, and intelligent assistant platforms, specifically the building of Siri, later acquired by Apple.

The book does a good job of weaving between the academic and business contributions to AI. With, the key firms and agencies leading the development in different eras, ARPA/DARPA in the 60s and 70s, with large firms like IBM providing time and resources for researchers, to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), that would inspire work on man-machine interfaces that Xerox would work on, later leveraged by Apple for its Macintosh, and Google in the web era, especially its focus on improving search, and pushing the frontiers of information retrieval, which would form a critical part of classical machine learning, and then again DARPA and SRI which helped start the Autonomous vehicle work, pioneered by Sebastian Thrun.

If there's one complaint with the book, it's that it's more a collection of events and occurrences where the main narrative of how machine will integrate with man being mostly obscured in the narrative. However, if you're either interested in AI as a student, hobbyist, or a developing researcher, this book will help fill the gaps and add context to the technology and idea stack you've inherited. For this class of people, the book is a clear recommendation. For those who wanted to learn more on how automation will impact the economy/jobs, where robots will rise up etc., these droids are not what you're looking for.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Our Final Invention ('robots are going to kill us') and the more sober Rise of the Robots ('robots are going to take our jobs'), I was hoping this book would offer up some less pessimistic insights on how the future might play out, or how we ought to try to make it play out. Unfortunately this book is entirely history, and any prognostications are just brief quotes from different people involved in the history- the author doesn't offer anything up of his own or even critically examine any scenarios put forth by others.

The closest the book came to what I really wanted to read is where it deals with future autonomous systems as slaves- but the only moral problem mentioned here lies solely in the potential negative effects this has on the owners of those slaves, not that owning near-human level artificially intelligent systems itself is wrong. The development process required is even worse because it must necessarily involve a great deal of trial and error and deletion and alteration on test subjects, but the book gets nowhere near that territory.

The other book I'd like to read would be how much more vulnerable creative professions are to automation than manual labor- creativity is often held as the last redoubt of humanity against robots. But actuators and sensors and mobile power sources and so on are expensive, their costs may decrease with time but not nearly as fast as raw computing power. It follows that at some point in the future high paying jobs that mainly involve sitting in front of a computer screen and thinking can be de-skilled and automated, or at least there will be a huge downward pressure on those wages, while lower paying positions involving a bit of cognition with physical activity will persist.

The story of Gary Bradski working on OpenCV semi-surreptitiously while employed at Intel was the most entertaining part of the book. Other than that the story of the demise of Willow Garage I hadn't heard before- so in both cases hearing about the people behind the software I use was worthwhile. Some of the older history was interesting but not as novel, I've read about it elsewhere.

[Roger Marc Bond Choquette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am now three books into my stint of AI reading and Markoff has by far provided the most intelligent and reasonable perspective.

The book tracks the history of AI, and its competitor IA (intelligent augmentation or, really, standard computer and Internet development). At a moment when there is such excessive emotion surrounding AI, and especially prophets of future heavens and hells, it was nice to read a human history of how the industry has moved along in fits and starts. It was nice also to read something that felt grounded in fact, not conjecture.

I think that is in part why I had trouble with McAfee and Brynjolfsson--they were not grounded in fact, though they skillfully made use of many. They were grounded in status and conjecture. Whereas McAfee and Brynjolfsson were excited to discredit AI's critics, and thus establish themselves as allies to innovators, Markoff isn't looking to be anyone's ally or enemy. Markoff is just exploring the concepts and history. That exploration leads to several poignant insights.

Three stars seems a little unfair--this is a quality book. For me personally, at least, it was difficult to follow the individuals of the book's many stories precisely and so I felt a little distant from the action. That's why I don't provide a higher rating, which really might be more about me than the book.

The book is a little dated, and so it would be interesting to read Markoff's views on ChatGPT, both as a replacement and augmentation of humans.

[Lauren Schnoebelen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like the author knew what he was talking about but at the same time he wasn't sure about anything. It seems like he identified the main topics that he wanted to discuss but after that he wasn't really sure where to go. There was no overarching story or even a time line to follow. The time periods kept jumping around all throughout the book and the closest to publishing date in this book came up in the middle of the second half (maybe sooner) and then jumped right back to somewhere in the 1980s. He also repeated himself a lot throughout the book as he transitoned from one topic to the next which made me feel like he didn't fully understand how the current sections connected with the others throughout the book.

I feel like I did learn something from this book but due to how it was written and formatted, it was too hard for me to properly follow along with all the major actors jumping from one coproration to another. It seemed almost like 20-25 mini biographes shoved into one book. Becasue of that, I don't think I gained as much from it as I could have. This was a major reason why I couldn't give this more than 3 stars.

[Nick Doty · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting history of late Silicon Valley, the thread of artificial intelligence and some more recent HCI. Like many journalists, Markoff is excellent at finding the stories and anecdotes that illustrate these characters. I was drawn to it for the title, from an interesting poem of the time, but it makes only a passing appearance.

Disappointing was how forced every step or anecdote had to be into the same AI vs IA (intelligent augmentation?) framework. Not everything was actually that straightforward and it would be fine to admit that. Some really interesting stuff about "handoff" and humans "in the loop" that are likely to be relevant to ongoing research (values in design, technological delegation, etc.) for some time.

How sad it is to imagine that Google Now and Siri and somewhat witty intelligent assistants/question-answerers might be, as Markoff extolls, the ultimate outcome of decades of research into both AI, HCI and computing in general. We can do better than these, I hope.

[Scott Lerch · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Markoff's detailed vignettes of AI/IA research over the past 50 years but honestly I have no idea what the book was really about. There is AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelligence Augmented)? It's interesting and changing the world but you must choose one side or the other? Not sure... I mean I guess I never considered the dichotomy between AI and IA so clearly. It's an attractive symmetry but I think in reality the line blurs quickly. When does an auto-correct response turn into an automatic response? When does an ingeniously machine crafted personal ad of a product become an assault on my free will and autonomy? I'd like to pretend humans can stay in control, carefully choosing the right level of AI that augments our own intelligence, but that seems impossible given the rate of change. This book seems to sympathizes with the IA side but provides no prescriptive actions on how to keep the AI in check. So I guess overall I wasn't impressed but like I said, some of the stories are interesting and it fills in some details about the development of AI/IA that I didn't know about.

[Carlos · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I found the book interesting, I also found it longer than it needed to be. Markoff seeks to trace the development of the robotics/AI field of research from its beginnings to its latest developments. However, in the reasonable aim to give everyone their due credit he makes the mistake of tracing the career path from college through the multiple companies they worked for. This creates a lot of repetition since each generation had several brilliant technologists and the reader is forced to trace back to the contribution of each. I would have preferred a much more slimmed down approach tracing the developing technologies themselves. Overall, however, Markoff does end up displaying the great advances made by this field while not shying away from discussing the reasonable concerns regarding what its continuing advancement might mean for human labor and civilization itself.

[Ed Terrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Machines of Loving Grace is a foray into the future as well as a retrospection of our past, to posit answers to how we (with our AI machines) got to now and where the hell are we going. With a clump-clump-clump we ditch our Sony Walkmans and feast on fictional worlds of Gibson's "Neuromancer". Self-driving cars in the Arizona desert are but baby steps towards a brave new world. Markoff has something here for everyone: education becomes transformed with massive online open courses (MOOCs), machine vision diagnoses brain scans more accurately than the average doctor and the future of what work is becomes more a practical choice than a philosophical decision. Great read with lots of good references from the cybernetics of Norbert Weiner and Thomas Rid to the Deep Neural Networks that define the cutting edge of AI today.

[Fred Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is deeply reported, the depth of back story of the people described is pretty impressive. I lived/worked in Silicon Valley during some of these times and have met some of the people, and the descriptions seem spot on of the mindset. But having said that, the back stories took up too much of the book, I would rather have had more time on the effects of some of this automation and less on the battle between intelligence and augmentation. To me as an engineer, augmentation is always the natural evolutionary step. But it does raise these important points so worth including in my courses.

[John Bryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book had some interesting strategic direction for the technology and industry of robotics and AI but was primarily just a history of those industries. I was looking for more insight into societal implications or future trends. The book had a bit of both scattered throughout but since it was structured with so much historical content, the strategic ideas were lost in the chaff of timelines and introductions of the industry actors. 4 stars for its content but loses one for the cumbersome messaging.