Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

Written by John Markoff

Narrated by George Newbern

As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help us, or will they replace us?

In the past decade alone, Google introduced us to driverless cars, Apple debuted a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets, and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the internet. There is little doubt that robots are now an integral part of society, and cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that, in the coming years, these robots will soon act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immense computing power, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, at the birth of the intelligent machine: Will we control these systems, or will they control us?

In Machines of Loving Grace, New York Times reporter John Markoff, the first reporter to cover the World Wide Web, offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. Over the recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, reintroducing this difficult ethical quandary with newer and far weightier consequences. As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s, to the modern day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding tech corridor between Boston and New York, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work.

We are on the verge of a technological revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform the way our lives are organized. Developers must now draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine, or risk upsetting the delicate balance between them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Aug 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9780062404855

John Markoff

John Markoff has been a technology and science reporter at the New York Times since 1988. He was part of the team of Times reporters that won the 2013 Pul-itzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. He lives in San Francisco, California.

[Lauren Schnoebelen · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I feel like the author knew what he was talking about but at the same time he wasn't sure about anything. It seems like he identified the main topics that he wanted to discuss but after that he wasn't really sure where to go. There was no overarching story or even a time line to follow. The time periods kept jumping around all throughout the book and the closest to publishing date in this book came up in the middle of the second half (maybe sooner) and then jumped right back to somewhere in the 1980s. He also repeated himself a lot throughout the book as he transitoned from one topic to the next which made me feel like he didn't fully understand how the current sections connected with the others throughout the book.

I feel like I did learn something from this book but due to how it was written and formatted, it was too hard for me to properly follow along with all the major actors jumping from one coproration to another. It seemed almost like 20-25 mini biographes shoved into one book. Becasue of that, I don't think I gained as much from it as I could have. This was a major reason why I couldn't give this more than 3 stars.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

History of robotics, AI, and "intelligence augmentation" over the last 60 years or so. Markoff is a great reporter but this book felt more like a string of long NYT Magazine articles than a cohesive book. My preference would have been for a little less detail about the inventors involved and a little more thought about what it all means. But a good book anyway.

[liscarey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Computers of all size and shapes have become a seamless part of our everyday lives. We carry in our pockets more computing power than Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins took to the moon. Robots are still mostly less visible, still doing most of their work in factories, in space, and in other settings where humans don't add enough value to justify the risk of lives.

And whether we call them computers or robots, right now they're still just machines.

Yet the quest to develop artificial intelligence goes right back to the start of the computer age. We've reached the point where we can have something very like real conversations with Siri. Many of us have Roomba do our vacuuming. Elon Musk is determined to give us self-driving cars. Retail stores in Japan have robotic greeters. There is real work being done to develop robots who could act as aides to the elderly and the infirm. Such machines will need to have a level of judgement and understanding that computers don't yet have even a shadow of.

This book tells the history of the quest for artificial intelligence, and the tension and competition between AI (artificial intelligence, able to replace human beings in many settings) and IA (intelligent augmentation of human beings, expanding the abilities of humans). What are or will be the economic effects? The social effects? Will there be massive unemployment because robots are cheaper and can't sue for injuries? If robots are smart enough, will they have rights? Will the elderly in our aging population be more or less isolated if they get their routine, daily care from helpful little robots who have some, even if limited, autonomy and conversational ability?

In some ways, the most interesting part of the story is the conflict between AI and IA, and the people who moved from one camp to the other and why.

Overall, a fascinating history of the technology from an angle I hadn't given enough thought to before. Recommended.

I bought this book.

[dlmorrese · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The distinction between AI (Artificial Intelligence) and IA (Intelligence Augmentation) is not one I think I appreciated before reading this book. The first essentially focuses on machines doing things instead of people, and the second is about machines helping people do things. Apparently there is some animosity between proponents of each outlook. I always figured they were both aspects of the same thing, and I'm still not sure the distinction is a sharp as this book seems to imply. Still, an interesting read about the history of machine intelligence that avoids the kind of speculation you often get in books on this subject.