Silicon Dreams: Information, Man, and Machine
This is a useful overview of information processing, written by the executive director of research at Bell Labs. The book discusses the media of information exchange: text, speech, and pictures. Lucky's focus is sometimes narrow, e.g., "Typing requires control of 60 tendons and 30 joints." For each medium, Lucky compares how persons exchange information, how computers do, and how computers have not yet matched human capabilities. The author is rooting for the more complete success of computers. While this is interesting, it is not as exciting conceptually as Hans Moravec's Mind Children: The Future of Robot & Human Intelligence (Harvard Univ. Pr., 1988), nor is it as readily appealing to the general reader as Arno Penzias's Ideas and Information (LJ 2/1/89).- Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., New YorkCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.