Edison's Eve: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life
by Wood, Gaby
Edition statement:1st Published by : Anchor Books (New York) Physical details: xxviii, 304 pages 20x13 cm | PB ISBN:9781400031580. Year: 2023| Item type | Current location | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books
|
General Stacks | Non-fiction | 629.8 W873E 2023 (Browse shelf) | Available | 68864 |
Including Bibliography and Index
"Could an eighteenth-century mechanical duck really digest and excrete its food? Was "the Turk," a celebrated chess-playing and -winning machine fabricated in 1769, a dazzling piece of fakery, or could it actually think? Why was Thomas Edison obsessed with making a mechanical doll - a perfect woman, mass-produced? Can a twenty-first-century robot express human emotions of its own?" "Taking up themes long familiar from the realms of fairy tales and science fiction, Gaby Wood traces the hidden prehistory of a modern idea - the thinking, hoaxes, and inventions that presaged contemporary robotics and the current experiments with artificial intelligence. Informed by the author's scientific and historical research, Edison's Eve is also a brilliant literary, cultural, and philosophical examination of the motives that have driven human beings to pursue the creation of mechanical life, and the effects of that pursuit - both in its successes and in its failures - on our sense of what makes us human."--Jacket
There are no comments for this item.