New book: “Robot Futures” by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

Robot Futures is a new book written by Dr. Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been teaching roboethics at the university for many years. According to Dr. Noel Sharkey, this book is “[a]n exhilarating dash into the future of robotics from a scholar with the enthusiasm of a bag of monkeys. It is gripping from the start with little sci-fi stories in each chapter punching home points backed up forcefully by factual reality. This is an entertaining tour de force that will appeal to anyone with an interest in robots.”

Mind you, I found out about the book just this morning, so I definitely haven’t read it yet. But I am very curious to find out more about Dr. Nourbakhsh’s view of our future with robots.

For one, Dr. Nourbakhsh teaches a roboethics course at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He even made a roboethics teaching material available to the public online (check it out here if you haven’t already). So I am very much looking forward to his insight into the topic of roboethics as he discusses the future.

The book is now safely sitting in my electronic library waiting to be read and highlighted and pondered over — very exciting!

For those of you interested in finding out more about the author and his connection to ethics of robotics, here’s a YouTube video of a very fun and story-filled lecture Dr. Nourbakhsh gave at Carnegie Mellon University. Also, be sure to check out his blog as well.  (Warning: you might end up bound to your chair to listen to his lecture for the next 40 minutes as soon as you hit play):

AJung Moon HRI researcher at McGill and publicity co-chair for the ICRA 2022 conference

AJung Moon HRI researcher at McGill and publicity co-chair for the ICRA 2022 conference