Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs

By Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre

Book Overview

Concepts once purely fiction -- robots, cyborg parts, artificial intelligences -- are becoming part of everyday reality. Soon robots will be everywhere, performing surgery, exploring hazardous places, making rescues, fighting fires, handling heavy goods. After a decade or two, they will be as unremarkable as the computer screen is now in offices, airports or restaurants. Cyborgs will be less obvious. These additions to the human body are interior now, as rebuilt joints, elbows and hearts. Soon we will cross the line between repair and augmentation, probably first in sports medicine, then spreading to everyone who wants to make a body perform better, last longer, than it ordinarily could. Controversy will arise, but it will not stop the desire to live longer and be stronger than we are. This book treats the landscape of human self-change and robotic development as poles of the same general phenomenon.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765310821
• ISBN13: 9780765310828
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Forge Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 1.0" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Great Introduction

Having read about 6 books on the subject, I found this to me one of the most accessible and interesting treatments on the subject. Great introductory book with big ideas.

The Future's Future Companion Guide

When the future "that's closer than you think" gets just a little closer, this book will be the Crash Course Companion guide to go with it. It will have to be, since most other books on the same topic involve a textual style that requires a great deal of heavy lifting. This book, however, is divided in nice, quick and easy to read anecdotal chapters. Speculative? Yes. Of course. It's the future we're talking about here. This book looks past the visible horizon line, advising that just because we can't see it, doesn't mean we won't. In fact, the Copyright date is 2007. Two years has passed and I've seen many of the questions (Robot Laws) re-surfacing in Wired Magazine. The Future may not be here, but when it gets print in Wired, it's easy to believe that it's just 'round the corner, waiting to go "boo" the moment we step into its shadows.