The Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines

Fjermedal, author of Magic Bullets, here offers a richly human picture of the lives and work of the brilliant, sometimes eccentric or self-amusedly arrogant robotics researchers at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon and elsewhere with whom he spent countless hours in preparing his book. This will be heady reading for science fiction buffs and readers interested in what futurists are up to in their labs and institutes. These ""tomorrow makers'' are not designing merely our future on this planet, but perhapsby unimaginable evolutionary processes beginning with the ``terraforming'' of Marsthat of the universe itself. Visionary stuff, to be sure. But from Fjermedal's description, a future (a near-future?) of robots so marvelously ``downloaded'' with the mechanism and motivations of the human braineven molecule-sized robotsseems staggeringly real. Promise or threat? Either way, the book's overtones take the breath away. First serial to Omni. (January 12)