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title = "21st Century Robot: The Dr. Simon Egerton Stories - Brian David Johnson"
date = 2020-07-04
[taxonomies]
tags = ["books", "reviews", "david johnson", "robotics", "it", "2 stars",
"2020 challenge"]
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[GoodReads Summary](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16087659-21st-century-robot):
When companies develop a new technology, do they ask how it might affect the
people who will actually use it? That, more or less, sums up Brian David
Johnson's duties as Intel's futurist-in-residence. In this fascinating book,
Johnson provides a collection of science fiction prototyping stories that
attempt to answer the question.
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{{ stars(stars=2) }}
This is a hard book to read. Not due its writing style or large paragraphs of
something of the kind, but because you have no idea what what is real and what
is not.
There are some stories about the "21st Century Robot Foundation", which is a
foundation to give free, open source access to robot designs and code. Problem
is, some of those are interleaved with fiction stories that has a character of
the same name of someone in the foundation and then you never know if that's a
cool extended thingy, actual coincidence or just plain... laziness (although I
reckon that's a strong word for this).
There are some things that pissed me off. For example, saying "the robot brain
is the hardware and software, what we call artificial intelligence, or AI". AI
is way more than just hardware and software, you have to _train_ something to
make it an AI, or it is just a bunch of reactive code with not actual
"intelligence". Maybe it was dumbed down to reach the general population
instead of going with proper terms, but it just annoys people that _do_ know.
And talking about "apps to extend the robot personality" also seems a bit
far-fetched in how AI works.
So, maybe the idea is great and all, but ideas without backing facts are just
dreams. And for someone running a foundation, lacking the facts feels...
weird.