Illah Reza Nourbakhsh Book order

Artificial Intelligence is having a new, outsized impact on our world, from politics and business to the economy. This book tackles AI using techniques from literary and cultural studies, formulating a new way of developing language and analyses for the impacts of AI on our humanity by combining the disciplines of the humanities with technical analysis from computer science in a single course reader. AI & Humanity is authentically cross-disciplinary, and this is necessarily the right way to equip all students and citizens today to make sense of how AI is changing the world, and how they each, individually, have a role in ensuring that we bend the future in the best possible direction, in an age of rapidly advancing computational technologies. This book is suitable as a textbook for undergraduate students and is flexibly appropriate for both younger students and for more advanced coursework. It has been proven two years in a row in Carnegie Mellon Grand Challenge courses that draw upon freshman students in both the College of Humanities and the School of Computer Science, earning accolades from the diverse student body. It is appropriate for all students, requiring no specialized skills or background as prerequisite. As a course textbook, AI & Humanity includes discussion questions, is chronologically laid out for a semester or trimester course, and includes rubrics and assignments spanning the whole class as examples for instructor customization. At the same time, this textbook is a reading guide. It contains deep literary and technical analysis, but includes reading assignments in a number of other texts, plays, movies artworks and documentaries. It develops a language across these reading sources, combining broad sourcework into a coherent understanding of the ways in which Artificial Intelligence is changing our humanity through a study of our own history of power negotiations; key words that derive cultural meaning; and futuring conceptualizations that provide commentary on our possible societal trajectories in movies and stories that are both contemporary and historical

A roboticist imagines life with robots that sell us products, drive our cars, even allow us to assume new physical form, and more. With robots, we are inventing a new species that is part material and part digital. The ambition of modern robotics goes beyond copying humans, beyond the effort to make walking, talking androids that are indistinguishable from people. Future robots will have superhuman abilities in both the physical and digital realms. They will be embedded in our physical spaces, with the ability to go where we cannot, and will have minds of their own, thanks to artificial intelligence. In Robot Futures, the roboticist Illah Reza Nourbakhsh considers how we will share our world with these creatures, and how our society could change as it incorporates a race of stronger, smarter beings. Nourbakhsh imagines a future that includes adbots offering interactive custom messaging; robotic flying toys that operate by means of “gaze tracking”; robot-enabled multimodal, multicontinental telepresence; and even a way that nanorobots could allow us to assume different physical forms. Nourbakhsh examines the underlying technology and the social consequences of each scenario. He also offers a counter-vision: a robotics designed to create civic and community empowerment. His book helps us understand why that is the robot future we should try to bring about.

Focusing on the integration of planning and execution, this book delves into methodologies for enhancing the autonomy of robots. It explores how interleaving these processes can improve decision-making and adaptability in dynamic environments. The text provides theoretical foundations alongside practical algorithms, making it suitable for researchers and practitioners in robotics. Case studies illustrate the application of these techniques in real-world scenarios, showcasing advancements in robotic intelligence and operational efficiency.