I am grateful to my dear wife Sandy for living well with my physical and mental absence while I wrote Digital People. Her acceptance, and her role as a patient and insightful sounding board and editor, helped enormously. My son Mike, trained in AI, was a valuable consultant. He also showed me the pop culture of robots through his band R.U.R. and its great T-shirt; and by tracking down the song “I am Electro” by Meat Beat Manifesto, inspired by the popular 1939 New Work World’s Fair robot Elektro.
The people and resources of Emory University make it a wonderful place for a writer. Robyn Fivush, Scott Lilienfeld, visitor Jeffrey Mullins, Darryl Neill, Leslie Taylor, and Elaine Walker gave generous help by reading the manuscript or lending their expertise. The Consciousness Seminar, led by Arri Eisen and Howard Kushner, provided useful background. Kate Bennett, David Schaar, Michael Gadbaw, and Lauren Gunderson helped with research.
Special thanks go to Philip Hammer and Charles Penniman of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute for demonstrating the “Draughtsman-Writer” automaton, and to Jim Randolph for sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of artificial beings in the media. Terry Gips and Isa Gordon helped me think about the book at its beginning, as did Phil
Schewe, who also read the manuscript. Others who helped include Peter Brown, Amy Bruckman, Kenji Ito, Massimo Piccardi, Jeffrey Reznick, Jeffrey Shoap, Graziella Tonfoni, and Eric Willadsen. My deep thanks also to the researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, Georgia Tech, JPL, the Sony Corporation and elsewhere, who gave me generous amounts of time in person or by telephone and e-mail.
My agent Michelle Tessler of Carlisle & Company has been stead-fastly enthusiastic about the pop culture of robots. At Joseph Henry Press, Jeffrey Robbins provided dedicated and incisive editing that greatly improved the book, and Maire Murphy provided helpful copy-editing.
None of these people is responsible in the least for any errors or misstatements that might appear in the book.
Having delved into the world of artificial beings, I’m ready to rejoin family and friends in the human world; but it won’t be long before we all number synthetic creatures among our friends.
Sidney Perkowitz
Atlanta, GA