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Robots: From Science Fiction to Technological Revolution
A visual survey of the scientific developments and cultural significance of robots documents the history of automatons, androids, and other forms of artificial intelligence, both of the fictional and real-world arenas, in a volume that features interviews with scientists, doctors, toy creators, science-fiction writers, and more. 15,000 first printing.
540 pages, Paperback
First published February 21, 2012
10 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Ichbiah
144 books3 followersDaniel Ichbiah is a French author of several books on musical and technical topics. He has written a biography of Bill Gates which was published in some fifteen countries and also a big book about robots, which appeared in the US and Germany as well as in France. He has also written biographies of Madonna, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Coldplay and also various French artists.
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July 7, 2020
Robots is a book written by Daniel Ichbiah. It was written in 2005 which makes it slightly dated. I am not sure how much more advanced robots have become in the interim, but it stands to reason that they wouldn’t be sitting on their collective laurels.
So the book presents the story of how robots came to be and how they became popular. It discusses the popular opinion of robots being evil or being servants that don’t need pay raises. In a telling section, Will Wright discusses his childhood of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and people doubting that a computer could beat a human at chess. They thought conversation would be easy and that chess would be hard, which we found to be the opposite case.
The book opens centuries before that though, when different civilizations made automatons of simple scenes or animals that only did one or two things. As time went on the scenes became more elaborate. Eventually, the word ‘Robot’ was coined by a Czech writer back in 1922 in a book called R.U.R.
Popular culture led to many different robots but they always fell into one of two categories: evil or not evil. Thankfully Isaac Asimov came along with his three laws of robotics and added some fuel to the creative fires. So then we got Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, B9 from Lost in Space, C3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars and many others. However, the place where robots took off was the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. Through comics called Manga and Cartoons called Anime, robots were presented along with the gamut of their behaviors in Japan to both children and adults.
The first industrial robot was the Unimate which was a contraction of two words. Japan led the world in robotics since Honda and other places invested so much money in the technology. Over the years, scientists and engineers have discovered things that robots can do and things that they can’t do. For example, children generally take their first steps around the first year of their lives. (I am assuming here since I don’t have kids and I am not an expert in childhood development.) Robots struggle to maintain their balance on two legs, making a bipedal robot an element purely in the imagination for right now. This is why robots generally employ wheels or multiple legs.
So this book was pretty good. It documents a lot of different robots and interviews with different people that have jobs in animatronics or making robots for movies and other things. It was originally printed in French and translated to English by Ken Kincaid. There are a lot of images showing different robots which makes it interesting and colorful.
So the book presents the story of how robots came to be and how they became popular. It discusses the popular opinion of robots being evil or being servants that don’t need pay raises. In a telling section, Will Wright discusses his childhood of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and people doubting that a computer could beat a human at chess. They thought conversation would be easy and that chess would be hard, which we found to be the opposite case.
The book opens centuries before that though, when different civilizations made automatons of simple scenes or animals that only did one or two things. As time went on the scenes became more elaborate. Eventually, the word ‘Robot’ was coined by a Czech writer back in 1922 in a book called R.U.R.
Popular culture led to many different robots but they always fell into one of two categories: evil or not evil. Thankfully Isaac Asimov came along with his three laws of robotics and added some fuel to the creative fires. So then we got Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, B9 from Lost in Space, C3PO and R2D2 from Star Wars and many others. However, the place where robots took off was the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. Through comics called Manga and Cartoons called Anime, robots were presented along with the gamut of their behaviors in Japan to both children and adults.
The first industrial robot was the Unimate which was a contraction of two words. Japan led the world in robotics since Honda and other places invested so much money in the technology. Over the years, scientists and engineers have discovered things that robots can do and things that they can’t do. For example, children generally take their first steps around the first year of their lives. (I am assuming here since I don’t have kids and I am not an expert in childhood development.) Robots struggle to maintain their balance on two legs, making a bipedal robot an element purely in the imagination for right now. This is why robots generally employ wheels or multiple legs.
So this book was pretty good. It documents a lot of different robots and interviews with different people that have jobs in animatronics or making robots for movies and other things. It was originally printed in French and translated to English by Ken Kincaid. There are a lot of images showing different robots which makes it interesting and colorful.
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