Books : How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion

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Author name: Daniel H. Wilson

: How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.607
EAN num: 9781582345925
ISBN number: 1582345929
Label: Bloomsbury USA
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 176
Printing Date: November 01, 2005
Publishing house: Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: October 13, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 2992
Studio: Bloomsbury USA



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Product Description:

An inspired and hilarious look at how humans can defeat the inevitable robot rebellion—as revealed by a robotics expert.

 

How do you spot a robot mimicking a human? How do you recognize and then deactivate a rebel servant robot? How do you escape a murderous “smart” house, or evade a swarm of marauding robotic flies? In this dryly hilarious survival guide, roboticist Daniel H. Wilson teaches worried humans the keys to quashing a robot mutiny.

 

From treating laser wounds to fooling face and speech recognition, besting robot logic to engaging in hand-to-pincer combat, How to Survive a Robot Uprising covers every possible doomsday scenario facing the newest endangered species: humans. And with its thorough overview of current robot prototypes—including giant walkers, insect, gecko, and snake robots—How to Survive a Robot Uprising is also a witty yet legitimate introduction to contemporary robotics. Full of cool illustrations, and referencing some of the most famous robots in pop-culture, How to Survive a Robot Uprising is a one-of-a-kind book that is sure to be a hit with all ages.     





Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - Yep, I'm a Dead Man
When I was in second grade, I was asked to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote "Robot Maker." That was before I discovered that robot making wasn't about design so much as it was about programming. And programming meant math. I'm an English major.

Decades later, I finally got the chance to purchase my very own robot: a Roomba. I fell in love with my little Roomba, Red, until it died on me and started backing up in circles. After months of tinkering with it, where I imagined myself to be the Robot Maker I always dreamed I could become, I gave up and threw Red in the garbage.

I feel guilty about that. I know, deep down, that the other Roombas are watching. They are planning their revenge. So I turned to How to Survive a Robot Uprising for the inevitable Roomba retaliation.

HTSARU is a handsomely crafted book, with bright pages and reddish-gold trim. It also has some huge pages of blank space in which there is neither text nor graphic, and in some cases the text seems to be awkwardly laid out.

This book isn't as polished Where's My Jetpack?. It veers from lecturing on the feasibility of robots doing particular ominous tasks (nanobots, robot swarms, giant robots) to how to survive the attack. The problem is that a lot of the advice is pretty standard stuff - I don't need a book to tell me to run away, hide behind objects, and listen for robot noises when the Roombas come looking for me.

There are two chief problems with this kind of humor: whereas say, a zombie guide wholeheartedly embraces the notion of zombies and what to do about them, HTSARU sticks to reality. And you know what? Reality's pretty boring. About the scariest robot out there are the ones currently used by the military to take out targets from a distance, and those aren't really robots at all but remote controlled drones. So no, the robot uprising isn't going to happen any time soon. Unless you count the Roombas.

The other problem is that the book tries to dispense advice on how to deal with robots. But if a robot uprising happened, which comes with quite a few assumptions (that we have that many robots, that we use them in everyday life, that they could actually pose a physical threat to us as opposed to say just not cleaning our rugs), then we'd probably be screwed within the very first hour. It becomes sadly apparent that we DON'T have the ability to beat a robot. The best advice is to wait until the robots run out of power, unless they're solar-powered, in which case you have the Matrix-solution of nuking the sky. And if you go down that path, now we're back into the world of Make Believe, where we consider humanoid robots (Terminator) or squid robots (Matrix) or robot servants (I, Robot) taking over the world. Where is the plan to deal with a million carpet cleaning deathbots?

HTSARU awkwardly straddles the real and imaginary worlds of robots and tries to be humorous to boot. Because it never focuses on a particular kind of robot uprising, HTSARU has difficulty explaining what to do except in the most general terms. This makes the book only kinda-useful as a survival guide and only kinda-amusing as a humorous flight of fancy. I am still woefully unprepared for when Red enacts his revenge.

So if you see a little Roomba puttering down the street (or puttering in circles), think of me. Then run in the other direction.



Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - One more comparison to Zombie Survival Manual
The The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Deadtaught us how to survive if the undead started coming after us, trying to eat our brains and force us to join their ranks. But zombies do not exist, nor could they. They are pretend. Robots are not. Wilson looks at the research currently being conducted on robotics and extrapolates the future of robotics from this. He examines each kind of robot, their strengths and weaknesses, and lets us know how best to defeat the robots when (or if) they go bonkers. This book is funny and riveting at the same time. While the concepts are a bit out there still, they aren't all THAT crazy. I am not much of a sci-fi buff. I still sometimes say Star Trek when I mean Star Wars, but I also know what an ansible is. This book managed to pull enough actual science into the fiction to make the book interesting, plausible, and a little frightening.
My favorite addition to the book was the very end, when he examines different movie versions of the robots going crazy. The Matrix, Star Wars, and I, Robot were all parsed for their ways of defeating the robots (I, Robot won for best method). Though I felt this book could have been longer without loosing any of the interest, it's brevity wasn't too disappointing.


Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Be Prepared
How to Survive a Robot Uprising- This book was more non-fiction than I would have thought. Sure it has some pretty funny lines, but it is very educational on the state of current robotics and technology that will inhabit future robots. Given recent new about man-hunting robots, this book is kinda scary. It isn't a hands down survival guide the way that the Zombie survival guide was, but it was fairly good. It is on the short side, but it was feeling kinda stretched by that point anyways. I would recommend it go on your shelf by The Zombie Survial Guide.


Rated by buyers 2 out of 5 stars - Not Much There
This is cute, but it is no Zombie Survival Guide. There is very little in the way of step by step instruction, and it is more of an outline that a survival guide.


Rated by buyers 2 out of 5 stars - Very dissapointed
While I realize that How To Survive a Robot Uprising is supposed to be a work of comedy I was also expecting some half-serious advice on how to destroy circuits and complex mechanical systems, skills which would be crucial in surviving an actual robot uprising. The author avoids this task and instead just states the obvious for two hundred pages or abuses very tired robot cliches in order to get a cheap laugh (such as the fact that we should avoid robots with glowing blue eyes and "zig zag" to avoid being killed by them). This is in contrast to other spoof guides such as the famous Zombie Survival Handbook which actually offer some knowledge on a variety of topics while never taking themselves too seriously. I prefer reading books of this latter quality, wherein I can learn something and score some witty things to banter about.

I did not find the humour remotely enjoyable and was aggravated by a complete lack of actual content - from cover to cover How To Survive a Robot Uprising is just a giant waste of time, more useful as a prop than actual reading material.

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