Talking to Robots

Award-winning journalist David Ewing Duncan considers twenty-four visions of possible human-robot futures - incredible scenarios from Teddy Bots to Warrior Bots, and Politician Bots to Sex Bots -grounded in real technologies and possibilities and inspired by our imagination.

What robot and AI systems are being built and imagined right now? What do they say about us, their creators? Will they usher in a fantastic new future, or destroy us? What do some of our greatest thinkers, from physicist Brian Greene and futurist Kevin Kelly to inventor Dean Kamen, geneticist George Church, and filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, anticipate for our human-robot future? For even as robots and AI intrigue us and make us anxious about the future, our fascination with robots has always been about more than the potential of the technology - it's also about what robots tell us about being human.

From present-day Facebook and Amazon bots to near-future 'intimacy' bots and 'the robot that stole my job' bots, bestselling American popular science writer David Ewing Duncan's Talking to Robots is a wonderfully entertaining and insightful guide to possible future scenarios about robots, both real and imagined.

About the Author

David Ewing Duncan is the author of nine books, including the international bestseller Calendar, and writes for Wired, Discover, and the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of nine books, which have been translated into over twenty languages, including the international bestseller The Calendar, and Experimental Man. In 2003, he won the Magazine Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the founding director of the Center for Life Science Policy at UC Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco, California and Boston, Massachusetts.