Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
By John Markoff
3.5/5
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About this ebook
As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help us, or will they replace us?
In the past decade alone, Google introduced us to driverless cars, Apple debuted 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 internet. There is little doubt that robots are now an integral part of society, and cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that, in the coming years, these robots will soon act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immense computing power, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, at the birth of the intelligent machine: Will we control these systems, or will they control us?
In Machines of Loving Grace, New York Times reporter John Markoff, the first reporter to cover the World Wide Web, offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. Over the recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, reintroducing this difficult ethical quandary with newer and far weightier consequences. As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s, to the modern day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding tech corridor between Boston and New York, 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 verge of a technological revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform the way our lives are organized. Developers must now draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine, or risk upsetting the delicate balance between them.
John Markoff
John Markoff has been a technology and science reporter at the New York Times since 1988. He was part of the team of Times reporters that won the 2013 Pul-itzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. He lives in San Francisco, California.
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Reviews for Machines of Loving Grace
19 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The distinction between AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelligence Augmentation) is not one I think I appreciated before reading this book. The first essentially focuses on machines doing things instead of people, and the second is about machines helping people do things. Apparently there is some animosity between proponents of each outlook. I always figured they were both aspects of the same thing, and I'm still not sure the distinction is a sharp as this book seems to imply. Still, an interesting read about the history of machine intelligence that avoids the kind of speculation you often get in books on this subject.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5History of robotics, AI, and "intelligence augmentation" over the last 60 years or so. Markoff is a great reporter but this book felt more like a string of long NYT Magazine articles than a cohesive book. My preference would have been for a little less detail about the inventors involved and a little more thought about what it all means. But a good book anyway.