When Daniela Rus tells people what she does for a living—designing artificially intelligent robots at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—“they generally have one of two reactions,” she writes. “Some get anxious and … want to know when the robots are taking over the world. The second group asks when their car will drive them to work.” (Her answers? “Never, and not for a long time, respectively.”)
Those two emotions, fear and eager wonder, course uneasily throughout Rus’s new book, (co-written with Gregory Mone). Parts of the book read like a fleshed-out PowerPoint presentation, full of listicle-style sections. Other parts, however, are far livelier, as Rus lays out all the incredible things
