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Hello, world! I'm posting this as a public service announcement, because Lee Gutkind's new book -- Almost Human: Making Robots Think (W.W. Norton, March 19, 2007) -- deserves the widest possible readership. As Publishers Weekly notes, Gutkind "spent six years as a self-described 'fly on the wall' at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute." I only spent one year there myself, as director of communications or some such titular bogosity, but it was enough to know that what the author is saying in this report from the front lines is absolutely true. It's simply astounding what has been achieved in the field of advanced autonomous machine intelligence. Wow. Yeah.
But I would go even further to suggest that your iPod is almost a chipmunk, and your toaster oven is almost a racoon! Who can say what your car might turn into any day now. A horse? A rhinoceros? Just think: the possibilities are endless. 
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