No reader will want to miss out on Moravec's clairvoyant perception of tomorrow's universe. Like little ripples on the surface of a deep, turbulent pool, calculation and other kinds of procedural thought are possible only when the turbulence is quelled.
Humans achieve quiescence imperfectly by intense concentration.
Numbers are better manipulated as calculus stones or abacus beads than in human memory. By Hans Moravec Introduction by John Brockman Hans Moravec has been thinking about machines thinking since he was a child in the 1950s, building his first robot, a construct of tin cans, batteries, lights and a motor, at age ten. As an undergraduate he designed a computer to control fancier robots, and experimented with learning and automatic programming on commercial machines. During his master's work he built a small robot with whiskers and photoelectric eyes controlled by a minicomputer, and wrote a thesis on a computer language for artificial intelligence. He received a PhD from Stanford in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot, remote controlled by a large computer, that negotiated cluttered obstacle courses.