mike@everexn.com (Mike Higgins) (02/10/91)
"Mind Children" by Hans Moravec, Harvard U Press, 1988.
In sci.nanotech, and a few other places I hang out, this book has
been talked about quite a lot in recent years. I actually bought a copy
months ago but didn't have time to read it. I recently read "Great
Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition" by Ed Regis (press here for my
review of THAT book), and Moravec came up again and again. I decided I
HAD to dig it out and finally get the straight stuf from the source.
The warm-up is a bit of a disappointment: Moravec spends the first half of
his book telling us the history of computing. I recommend reading this half
anyway, since it includes some interesting tidbits of the history of
robot research: He started out working on the "Cart" robot at Stanford,
and is now the director of the Mobile Robot Lab of Carnegie Mellon University.
But after the computer history is done, Moravec doesn't stop! He continues
predicting the future of computers, robots, humans, and transhumans at an
ever increasing pace. The information content of the book per page increases
at an exponential rate after about page 80. Very exciting stuff! He does
belabor the potential of Virtual Reality a bit, and I'm not much of a fan
of that VR hype. FWOOSH! (Sound of early flame suppressant foam system kicking
in ;-) But he goes on to predict the real-life usefulness of robots in the
near future, and human-brain level of complexity in computers within 50 years.
He backs up his predictions with calculations of the complexity of the brain
and ways to measure the real "computing power" of a computer. There is math
in these justifications, but it is relegated to several appendixes, so the meat
of the text is free of equations. (Steven Hawking reports that "lay" sales of
a book decrease by one power of 2 for each equation you add to the text).
Moravec, like many of us, wants to live forever. He is working on the
engineering specifications of how we are going to do it. He even has solutions
to deal with minor inconveniences like the Big Crunch or the Heat Death. I
used to joke that when I said I wanted to live forever, I ment 1.0E14 years.
I've been humbled now by the BIG plans of Moravec and Dyson. (press here for
my review of "Infinity in all Directions" by Freeman Dyson).
And that's not all! In one of the appendices, Moravec proposes a
description of the Universe that explains the weirdness of Quantum Mechanics!
I have read several descriptions of the complementary nature of certain
measurements (momentum v.s. position) of particles, descriptions that compares
this behavior
to frequency space problems. (Like a narrow spike in the time domain being
a broad spectrum in frequency space and versa visa). Moravec comes at this
problem from the opposite direction and proposes that the Universe IS the
Fourier transform (or some other transform) of a wave-like phenomena...
Well, you just have to read this for yourself! It's only a few pages, and it
can shake the foundations of your physics! Actually, I have been reading
a lot of stuff lately ("The transactional interpretation of QM" by Cramer,
"Einstein vs Bohr" by Sachs ...) that suggests to me that 20th century physics
is in for a THIRD REVOLUTION in a single century!! (Unless it takes another
10 years). And all these people keep bringing up wave mechanics, continuous
matter theories, standing waves, Fourier transforms... Read these books so
you won't be surprised like everybody else! MARK MY WORDS! THE REVOLUTION IS
COMING! QM IS DEAD! THE UNIVERSE IS WAVES!
(I am not a Religious organization).
"Mind Children" is a very, very highly recomended read!
Mike Higgins
mike@everexn.com