A new book by a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute is poised to make waves behind the cloistered doors of the school’s famed robotics labs, and its rights have already been optioned for a Hollywood film.
It is not a sexy roman a clef or an investigative look at the school’s ties to the U.S. Defense Department, but rather a humorous guidebook for battling a robot takeover of Earth.
“Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy,” author Daniel H. Wilson warns in “How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion.”
What makes the book cool — and unlike some other survival books — is that Wilson is an actual roboticist, who got his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon last month. While his scenarios are outlandish — describing attacks by humanoid robots, some of them with creepy tails, some that can climb walls or swim — the research on how to build and attack the robot creatures is quite real.
That humorous but fact-based message is exactly what some CMU scientists are wary of, too. Scientists are mostly a pretty quiet bunch, used to working in seclusion on obscure stuff most of us don’t understand, so the last thing they want is a shock of publicity about, say, killer robots. Even fake killer robots.
By Timothy McNulty