Silico Sapiens

As glowing reports of the computer revolution and esoteric dispatches on robot development proliferate in newspapers and magazines, readers inevitably wonder how they will be affected. Deken (The Electronic Cottage) offers an answer in this brief, informative if utopian vision of the near future transformed by the robot. In a brisk, point-by-point outline, he provides background, definitions, theory and application. He sees a world populated by microbots (intelligent personal machines), midrobots (robot workers) and macrobots (which would reshape the world environment). The key to such a leap from the present day are advances in computers that would allow the robots to perceive the world without human input, to make autonomous decisions and to implement those choices independently. This is a tidy, helpful, if exceedingly optimistic survey. January