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Hardcover - 224 pages (January 1999)
Henry Holt & Company, Inc.; ISBN: 0805058745 ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.01 x 9.29 x 6.26
Amazon.com Sales Rank: 14
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Number of Reviews: 2

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The New York Times Book Review, Collin McGinn
Gershenfeld's breezily chatty book sometimes reads too much like an advertisement for the Media Lab at MIT, of which he is director.

Wired, Stewart Brand
More than a fascinating look into what's coming, the book provides unusual insight into how to do great research.... This book makes it clear that Gershenfeld and his researchers are having a great deal of fun. So will his readers.

From Kirkus Reviews , November 15, 1998
This book is the result of Gershenfelds years of research as director of the Physics and Media Group at MIT's famous Media Labit lets us peek at the remarkable new digitized world he foresees. He thinks our digital world is immature and cumbersome . Personal computers are already as outmoded as typewriters; even the Internet and Worldwide Web are just emerging from their juvenile phase. The present Digital Revolution features machines that merely entertain and dazzle when what we need is a digital world accessible to everyone and interactive on all occasions. Although some of Gershenfeld's projectssuch as a ``personal fabricator'' that works with digitized atoms, an electronic cello, or moveable and wearable computersmay seem exotic, all aim at enh ancing ordinary people's lives. Future digital books, for example, will be interactive, containing the best of traditional and digital worlds. ``Smart money will be able to be personalized and spent in many ways. Digitized educational opportunities will m ake many present teaching and learning practices obsolete. We must outgrow our two-dimensional digital world, Gershenfeld exhorts, and enter the multidimensional digitized world of sounds, sights, and even touch. The fact that a desktop needs a desk and a laptop needs a lap, he says, shows we are in the formative stages. New interface paradigms will allow children and adults to create, innovate, learn, and teach. But, he claims, the digital world must be in harmony with the natural world, and we can learn from biological models. Gershenfelds vision of a digitized future is a humanistic one, finally: the cyberworld should enhance the real world, not replace it, and should empower people, not machines, to solve problems. This can be done only in collaborati on with digital researchers, academics, and the scientific community, but input must also come from common folks. Gershenfeld continually advances the cutting edge of the Digital Revolution, while striving to humanize it. (16 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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James Forehand (F.I.T. Graduate Student) from Melbourne, FL , January 13, 1999
Read about Electronic Paper - the "Monitor" of the Future
A good book for discovering about the future directions of computer science and the things which will be coming our way some day soon from research done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Gershenfeld writes very good explanations for some very advanced research topics and their future uses. Covers a revolutionary invention known as electrophoretic paper for making an electronic book which looks exactly like a book but whose pages have the properties of a computer monitor.

barrie.gilbert@analog.com from Oregon, USA , December 20, 1998
Imaginative, iconoclastic, fun to read and often provocative
Neil provided me a draft copy of this book, which I read on the plane after a regular visit to the Media Lab, as a sponsor of the "Things That Think" program. It is pure Gershenfeld, always looking at everyday things from the persective of a futurist. Few experienced in the contemporary and strongly overlapping fields of microelectronics and AI need much convincing that we are only at the beginning of what will be a long and ever-unfolding history of commonplace things that think, in a way that may often be far more limited than human thinking but precisely because of this focus is valuable. Thus, the everyday calculator "knows" a lot more about mathematical algorithms than most of us (who can recall how to evaluate a simple square root?) but it's not very good at poetry.

Gershenfeld reminds us that computers have only just begun to intrude into a domain once the sole province of humans (more generally, the animal kingdom), namely the realm of perception, thought and cognition. Already, they are vastly better at remembering massive amounts of information than we, but have a long way to go before exhibting something like human intelligence. To some extent, this is by design: we have not yet had the courage to endow machines with free will, but that day must come.

This brief apology for a review is to propose a slightly different perspective than that of the other reviewers, who stress the digital nature of these thinking things. Many people, including myself, feel that the road to "true thinking" and more particularly, to machine consciousness, will be by a stronger utilization of techniques that are popularly regarded as obsolete, namely, those based strongly on analog signal processing. True neural networks are of this sort, and there are sound philosophical reasons for claiming that the "von Neumann" architecture of a digital computer can never be conscious. Knowing about the Media Lab work first hand, I can say that Dr. Gershenfeld is well aware that analog techniques are going to be a central theme of the Thinking Things that we will soon be taking for granted. This is not only true in the domain of cognition but most especially in perception, which is about the experiencing of one's environment. This is almost entirely an exercise in analog processing of signals, which is far from a dying art.

Submitted by Dr. Barrie Gilbert, Analog Devices Inc., Corporate sponsor of the THINGS THAT THINK pgogram

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