My interview with Lee Gutkind, author of the new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, appears on Wired News today -- without a byline for some reason. Lee's book examines the subculture behind academic robotics. If that sounds boring it's not. As I write in the introduction, " He uncovers a surprising amount of action -- from the RoboCup, in which Sony Aibos modified by rival teams compete in soccer, to the barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile, where roboticists put a prototypical Mars rover named Zoë to the test."

Here's a snip:

Wired News: A number of people in your book don't sleep, don't bathe. Is there something about robotics that appeals to this personality type, or does the work itself take over?

Lee Gutkind: You can't just do this for eight or 16 hours and walk away. Even debugging a program will take a whole day. So I think it takes a patient but obsessive personality. Don't forget also, it's a very male-oriented culture. There's not a lot of joking, not a lot of flirting, because there's no one to joke and flirt with. You're flirting with your robot is what you're doing.

WN: Although the field is overwhelmingly male-dominated, in your book we do meet a number of highly accomplished female roboticists. How are women influencing robotics?

Gutkind: Just look at Manuela Veloso. It took a woman in a sea of men to get the men to start talking to one another. She gave them a game to play, and she triggered off their testosterone and set them in a competition that brought them together. Would they have come together in a room at MIT or the White House to share their code? No, but to play a game and beat the pants off somebody from Stanford, that's another matter entirely. Similarly, Nathalie Cabrol, the NASA representative, got the scientists and the roboticists to work together and get a robot to do science.

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