Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs

Gregory Benford · Elisabeth Malartre

sen, 2007 · Sotuvchi: Forge Books

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Concepts once purely fiction -- robots, cyborg parts, artificial intelligences -- are becoming part of everyday reality. Soon robots will be everywhere, performing surgery, exploring hazardous places, making rescues, fighting fires, handling heavy goods. After a decade or two, they will be as unremarkable as the computer screen is now in offices, airports or restaurants.

Cyborgs will be less obvious. These additions to the human body are interior now, as rebuilt joints, elbows and hearts. Soon we will cross the line between repair and augmentation, probably first in sports medicine, then spreading to everyone who wants to make a body perform better, last longer, than it ordinarily could. Controversy will arise, but it will not stop the desire to live longer and be stronger than we are.

Gregory Benford and Elisabeth Malartre's Beyond Human treats the landscape of human self-change and robotic development as poles of the same general phenomenon.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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GREGORY BENFORD teaches at the University of California and lives in Irvine, California. Benford is a winner of the United Nations Medal for Literature, and the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. In1995 he received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. Benford conducts research in plasma turbulence theory and experimentation, and in astrophysics. He has published well over a hundred papers in fields of physics from condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas and mathematical physics, and several in biological conservation.

ELIZABETH MALARTRE is the pen name for a biologist and writer living in Laguna Beach. She is a multiple-award winning environmentalist with a 25-year career in land preservation. Her current research centers on the Pandora moth in the Eastern Sierra in California.