Ken Goldberg's book review in Nature
BCNM's Ken Goldberg has had his book review "Robotics: Countering singularity sensationalism" published in Nature on October 14! The three books reviewed, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford, and Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy by David A. Mindell, probe the nexus of people and robots. You can read an excerpt below, and the entire article here.
"In the late nineteenth century, the United States was awash with the racist term 'yellow peril'. Fears spread that Chinese immigrants working in the country's mines and building its railways would seize more jobs from the citizenry. Today, there is a similar collective fear, this time about a 'singularity' in which artificial intelligence (AI) and robots surpass human abilities. In May 2014, for instance, physicists Stephen Hawking, Frank Wilczek and Max Tegmark, with computer scientist Stuart Russell, warned in the newspaper The Independent: “Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last”."