Technology Review has published a quartet of book reviews, including one that questions why the author chose to focus on a robot that’s clearly not the future of the industry.
Sarah A. Bell’s Vox ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines covers voice synthesis in the 20th century, and says much of the history of trying to reproduce human speech and expressions has involved reducing aspects of the human body to algorithms.
Robots and the People Who Love Them by Eve Herold makes lofty claims about human-robot relationships, including that they will be “indispensable” when they are clearly not yet at that level; Antonio A. Casilli’s Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation argues that robots are still very much dependent on human input to function; and Bryan Gardiner’s “The AI Delusion: How Mirror Ships, Murder Hornets, and a Journey to the Center of the Mind Prove the Future is Already Here” points out the failings of artificial intelligence.