Mind Children, 2 excerpts

Hans Moravec’s Mind Children is dated at parts but it is as lyric, visionary, and deep as anything I’ve read. Here 2 excerpts I particularly enjoyed: one on robot bushes (forget many-armed Vishnu, this will be the avatar of the gods), the other on artificial life, spontaneous and deliberate (a great story of a virus put deep inside Unix by Ken Thompson himself and a subtle but intriguing example of spontaneous alife).

I’m experimenting with taking quick page snaps and bundling them into PDFs, so these are rather crude. No matter, it’s early days and I’ll get better at it. PDF/CBR is the new MP3!