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.

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Praise for this book

“Professor and distinguished sf writer Benford adds another reflective title to his large and rapidly expanding oeuvre. Hearty and compelling, his new book elucidates some of the inherent problems humanity faces in communicating over the expanse of time. This slim book addresses environmental issues in order to change how we think about the human impact on Earth; the goal is to make us good stewards. Recommended for all public and academic libraries.” —Library Journal on Deep Time

“Combining the flair of a novelist with the cutting-edge science of a physicist, Gregory Benford tells a fascinating tale of one of the deepest questions human beings can ask: How do we communicate with our distant descendants or with extraterrestrials? I know of no book that combines these ingredients in such a hearty meal for the intellect.” —John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe, NM; author of Paradigms Lost and The Cambridge Quintet on Deep Time

“We have no evolutionary basis for thinking rationally about the distant future, and Gregory Benford's delightful book documents our feeble efforts to do so. We feel a sense of responsibility to and for a future far beyond our span, and it will not go away. Deep Time addresses the why and the how of truly deep issues, in a fun read. I know of no other book on this intriguing subject.” —Hal Lewis, Professor of Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara; author of Technological Risk on Deep Time




About the Author

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.


Title: Beyond Human : Living with Robots and Cyborgs
Author(s): Gregory Benford, Elisabeth Malartre
ISBN: 9781429936200
Copyright 2007
Release Date: September 18, 2007
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Countries: United States, Canada | Learn more about available countries
Language: English
Format: mobi,ePub | Learn More about our supported formats
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