An authoritative vision of a world where technology allows us to enhance our humanity.
A leading roboticist looks forward to the next generation of a crucial technology.
The next step in social development will be the proliferation of robots, writes Rus, a MacArthur fellow and first female director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In her first book for a non-academic audience, co-authored by Mone, she lays out the current state of the technology and makes informed predictions about the future. There are already robots working in the background of our lives, from the millions in factories to clever machines performing sophisticated surgery. As Rus notes, the turning point will be when they are fully capable of taking over mundane, everyday tasks, freeing us to live richer lives. The robot trashcan that will take itself out when full sounds like a prosaic but very useful machine. Rus takes a tour around the companies working in this field, looking at pioneers examining exoskeletons to improve the mobility of elderly people as well as robots that could work in dangerous environments. She explains the various ways that robots learn and can be taught, and she is careful to address their limitations. Robots will never compete with the nuances, flexibility, and creativity of the human mind, writes the author, who notes that in fields such as medical diagnosis, the best results happen when humans and robots work together. Rus believes that the ultimate effects of the proliferation of robots will be positive, so long as it is controlled so that “the chip works in service of the heart.” The author clearly knows her field and offers many interesting ideas, but whether her exuberant optimism (“maybe I am a dreamer, an algorithm-infused utopian”) is justified is a question that can only be answered over time.
An authoritative vision of a world where technology allows us to enhance our humanity.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781324050230
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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