This book contains the author’s personal interpretation of the history of robotics and his speculations about the future of the field. It is well written and technically accurate, and its vision of the the future is provocative. One would not read this book to learn technical aspects of robotics, but I recommend it to anybody who cares to think about the future that the development of this technology might produce.

Morovec’s projection of the future is the most controversial part of the book. He provides some data to support it, but data can be interpreted in different ways. His vision of the future is not one that everybody will accept, but it is interesting and provocative, and it should stimulate discussion and help readers gain a deeper insight into important problems. After all, if robots are going to do what Moravec predicts, they will affect all of us, and it is a good idea for us to start thinking about them now.

The book contains six chapters and three appendices. The first chapter, “Mind in Motion,” is a personal story of early developments in robotics. This well-written and detailed overview contains lots of examples and provides a clean introduction.

In the second chapter, “Powering Up,” Morovec gets into neural models and compares the raw computational power of computers with the computational abilities of animals and people. He begins to offer his projections for the future in this chapter, and in the appendix “Measuring Computer Power” he describes the data used for these projections in more detail.

The third chapter, “Symbiosis,” describes the development of computers from the beginning of the computer age to the most recent advances. The projections about the future continue in this chapter; they are printed in italics, which helps the reader to distinguish the science from the science fiction.

Much of the fourth chapter, “Grandfather Clause,” looks like science fiction, as Moravec moves deeper into projections about the future. The most interesting notions he presents are robot bushes (obtained by applying recursion to robot design) and the idea of the transmigration of the brain into a machine.

The fifth chapter, “Wildlife,” talks about various forms of computer viruses and extraterrestrial intelligence, and the last chapter, “Breakout,” contains an interesting discussion of the game of life and covers the notion of computational complexity. Three appendices--“The Retina and the Computer,” “Measuring Computer Power,” and “The Limits of Computation”--provide additional technical data to support some of the author’s theories.