WHAT is it like to be in a place where you, and everyone around you, designs, thinks and dreams robots? Lee Gutkind, editor and founder of the journal Creative Nonfiction, does a good journalistic job on life and work in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, arguably the best robotics laboratory in the world. Here, the challenges robots face include exploring the surface of Mars and negotiating the pitfalls of a mine.
The book makes it clear that the words “human” and “think” in the title are mere anthropomorphisms, as distant from today’s robots as “stubbornness” is from the…
